The expansion of voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic makes it all the more important that election officials secure voter registration databases from hacking, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official.
The greater amount of absentee voting and mail-in ballots “shifts the risk towards voter registration data security,” Matt Masterson, senior adviser at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Wednesday during a virtual conference.
People voting by mail generally won’t have access to the same provisional-balloting process that those voting in person can use if they’ve been left off of voter rolls due to an administrative error. That makes the integrity of voter registration data all the more important in the era of COVID-19, Masterson said.
The novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 120,000 people in the U.S., has forced many states to postpone presidential primaries and ramp up voting-by-mail options. Forty-six states currently offer all of their voters some form of by-mail voting, according to the nonprofit Open Source Election Technology Institute (OSET).
“COVID has changed the game for election officials across this country,” Masterson said at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con for Public Sector Conference, produced by FedScoop and CyberScoop. “2020 was always going to be a challenging year for them with the preparations they were making to secure their systems — just the high intensity ..
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