Earlier this week I wrote about the recent news that hackers may have gained access to election administration systems in at least one Florida county in 2016: see How to avoid an election meltdown in 2020: Improve voter registration database security and monitoring.

Now in the news are reports that may have been two Florida counties where hackers may have gained access to county election administration system in 2016 (see the NYT story, for example, “Russians Hacked Voter Systems in 2 Florida Counties. But Which Ones?”). This has set off a guessing game — which Florida county election administration systems might have been breached in 2016, and what where the consequences?

I’d like to return attention, though, to what I think is the most important issue here. It’s not whether one or two county systems were breached in 2016, the most important thing is to make sure that as we go into the 2020 election cycle, that security and auditing systems are in place to detect any malicious or accidental manipulations of voter registration databases. It’s now May 2019, and we have plenty of time to evaluate the current security protocols for these critical databases in every state, to improve those protocols where necessary, and to put in place database auditing and monitoring tools like those we have been working on in our Monitoring the Elections project.

Now’s the time to act — while we still can improve the security of voter registration systems, and establish auditing procedures to detect any efforts to manipulate the critical information in those systems.