As Iowa Democrats worked to piece together the jumbled results of Monday’s caucus there, federal and state officials in Oregon said they’re ready to tackle any election security issues that come up this year.
While they didn’t identify any new specific new threats – and the state’s election director specifically said he hadn’t seen an increase in security risks – officials with the Oregon Secretary of State, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. Attorney’s Office called a press conference in the state Capitol simply to communicate they were working to ensure this year’s elections go smoothly.
“There was some polling a couple weeks ago that said, I think, 43% of the public doesn’t think election administrators are doing anything to secure the elections,” state Elections Director Steve Trout said. “That’s the farthest thing from the truth.”
Billy Williams, the U.S. attorney for Oregon, discusses election security at the Capitol on Feb. 4, 2020.
Dirk VanderHart/OPB
Oregon, the first state in the country to conduct all of its elections by mail, has long preened in the security that the system’s paper ballots provide. Trout said Tuesday that the physical security surrounding Oregon voting works well. “We do a great job at that,” he said.
What’s new, according to Renn Cannon, the FBI’s special agent in charge for Oregon, is “the growing sophistication of the threats” to elections around the country.
“Ransomware attacks, business email compromise, cyber hacking – those are becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated,” he said. “The days of an email that has obvious misspellings and a ridiculous premise, that’s not what happens these days.”
Paired with attempts to crack election security, officials are hoping to help combat disinformation campaigns that attempt to sway voter opinions, or dissuade them from voting at all. Such efforts, sometimes conducted by foreign entities, emerged in force during the 2016 presidential elections.
To help raise awareness of those issues, the Secretary of State’s Office and federal agencies are conducting an election security event for campaigns and elected officials in Salem on Wednesday evening.
“There are limits to what we can do,” said Bill Williams, the U.S. Attorney for Oregon. “Combating influence operations requires a whole community approach that relies on coordinated action by federal, state and local government agencies, the private sector and an active informed and engaged public. That last component is one of the most important.”
Though it was in the works since last week, the press event took place as Iowa officials are scrambling to finalize results from the state's first-in-the-nation Democratic caucus Monday night. Reports have suggested that delays in tallying the outcome are in part due to an app Democratic officials used to collect precinct results.
Trout hesitated to pass judgment on that situation, but suggested Oregon’s decades of vote-by-mail experience would not allow an Iowa-like debacle. (Iowa’s party-controlled caucus system is far different from Oregon’s government-run primaries.)
“Our vote-by-mail system provides a lot of security advantages,” Trout said. “We’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, and there are a lot fewer places where someone could get in and target our elections.”
While Oregon's elections are seen as relatively secure, compared to risks in other states, it does allow voters living oversees to submit ballots via fax or email, a provision that has been criticized in the past.
