| A partisan election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz., is turning into a lesson in how not to manage cybersecurity and elections. The review began under a cloud. The GOP-controlled state Senate launched it despite the objections of top county officials and hired Cyber Ninjas to conduct it — a company with no election audit experience and whose CEO Doug Logan has echoed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Since then, the audit has been beset by unforced security errors including laptops with election information being left unattended and WiFi routers connecting to laptops that contain vital election information. Ballots themselves were also left unattended in poorly secured storage facilities and ballot images are being taken with cameras that seemingly haven't undergone security vetting or been certified by a government body. "In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I've never seen one this mismanaged," Jennifer Morrell, a partner at the Elections Group consulting firm and a former local election official in Colorado, wrote in a Post op-ed.  Maricopa County ballots are examined and recounted by contractors working for the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas. (Matt York/Pool/AP) | The coup de grace came when Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) warned the county that it should replace nearly 400 ballot tabulators at a cost of millions of dollars because it couldn't verify that Cyber Ninjas hadn't tampered with them in a way that would make them more vulnerable to hacking — or left them unattended while someone else did so. "The lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them," Hobbs wrote to county leaders. Maricopa County leaders, who are contemplating suing the state Senate and the auditors, said they will not use any equipment that isn't verified to be secure. The county board of supervisors is also majority Republican. The slapdash approach to the audit stands in stark contrast to how nonpartisan election audits are typically conducted. "If post-election audits are performed and completed correctly, they are taken seriously; they are a big deal, and they must be done with great precision and public transparency — not 'flying by the seat of your pants,' " Edward Perez, global director of technology development at OSET Institute, a nonprofit election technology organization, wrote in a blog post. He compared the Cyber Ninjas auditors to bankers who fail at the basic task of ensuring the security of all the currency in the bank.  Maricopa County ballots are examined by contractors working for Cyber Ninjas. (Matt York/Pool/AP) | The rookie errors are especially egregious if you consider the last four years. There's been a nationwide effort to improve election cybersecurity protections following Russian interference in the 2016 contest. Those efforts included buying new, more secure voting machines with auditable paper trails and fielding a massive network of Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity sensors in election offices across the nation. When all was said and done, top law enforcement and cybersecurity officials called the 2020 contest the most secure election in history. Despite those improvements, however, voter confidence in election security was battered in 2020 — largely because of false claims by former president Donald Trump and his supporters that the election was stolen. The Maricopa audit could undermine voter confidence further — even if auditors don't find any evidence of fraud. "A group with no expertise, improvising procedures as it goes, is sowing doubt about the result of a well-run election," Morrell wrote. "This is not an audit, and I don't see how this can have a good outcome."  Maricopa County ballots are reviewed at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. (Matt York/Pool/AP) | But the Maricopa model will probably be repeated elsewhere. A Georgia state judge ordered heavily Democratic Fulton County to allow local voters to review all 147,000 mail-in ballots cast in the county in 2020 amid allegations counterfeit ballots were accepted, Amy Gardner reports. The order came after two statewide audits and a hand recount found no evidence of widespread fraud in the state, which Joe Biden narrowly carried. And Fulton County is just one of many communities where local voters and Trump supporters are pushing for additional audits. Such efforts are underway in Michigan and New Hampshire, among other states, Amy reports. "What's happening in Arizona is potentially a mortal attack on the firewall that protects impartial election administration from political influence and disinformation," Perez wrote. "This model could spread to other states, and it must not. When weaponized doubt undermines faith in elections forever, it will be 'game over' for representative democracy." | Share The Cybersecurity 202 |  |  |  | | | 
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