Trump-fueled election 'audits' are posing a new kind of national security threat: NYT

Election security has been threatened by possible foreign interference by Russia and Iran, and then Donald Trump's baseless fraud claims, but GOP state and county officials have been working for months to discredit the 2020 results -- which could allow bad actors to tamper with the next vote, reported the New York Times.

"There are some serious security risks," said University of Michigan computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who studies election security. "Especially given the constellation of actors who are receiving such access."

Election officials in Arizona have moved to replace voting machines in Maricopa County, where conservative political operatives and others have gained extensive access to those devices during their lengthy review of Trump's election loss, and Pennsylvania's secretary of state decertified equipment in Fulton County after local officials allowed a private company to conduct a similar review.

"The issue with the equipment is that the chain of custody was lost," said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who plans to decertify Maricopa County's voting equipment. "The chain of custody ensures that only authorized people have access to it, so that that vulnerability can't be exploited."

Passwords for Mesa County, Colorado, voting equipment somehow leaked out onto the right-wing Gateway Pundit website after county clerk Tina Peters and a staff member secretly recorded a routine maintenance procedure, and Democratic secretary of state Jena Griswold is investigating and will not allow Peters to oversee November's elections.

"It is a serious security breach," Griswold said. "This is election officials, trusted to safeguard democracy, turning into an internal security breach."

GOP officials and conservative operatives in other states, including Wisconsin, are planning similar reviews, and election security experts are concerned they could be used to tamper with future elections.

"The main concern is having someone unqualified come in and introduce risk, introduce something or some malware into a system," said Christopher Krebs, former head of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. "You have someone that accesses these things, has no idea what to do, and once you've reached that point, it's incredibly difficult to kind of roll back the certification of the machine."

Griswold is also increasingly concerned about an "insider security issue" from Republican officials who "leaning into the big lie" that Trump's election loss was due to fraud, and she said those threats must be quickly addressed.

"I think it's incredibly time-sensitive that elections are set up to guard both from external and internal threats," Griswold said.