State and Local Election Integrity Depends on Security-Challenged Firms

It was the kind of security lapse that gives election officials nightmares. In 2017, a private contractor left data on Chicago’s 1.8 million registered voters including addresses, birth dates and partial Social Security numbers publicly exposed for months on an Amazon cloud server. Later, at a tense hearing, Chicago’s Board of Elections dressed down the top three executives of Election Systems & Software, the nation’s dominant supplier of election equipment and services. The three shifted uneasily on folding chairs as board members grilled them about what went wrong. ES&S CEO Tom Burt apologized and repeatedly stressed that there were no evidence hackers downloaded the data.