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Hacking Hit More Election Systems Than Previously Known

Two more U.S. election-services providers were reportedly hacked before 2016 voting.

The hacking of U.S. electoral systems during the 2016 election was more extensive than previously disclosed, The New York Times reported Friday. In addition to VR Systems, which provided the software to North Carolina for electronic check-ins, two other providers of critical election services were reportedly hacked before 2016 voting. Though intelligence officials said in January that Russian hacking did not alter the final vote count, their assurances did not account for the security of back-end election systems. So far, local, state and federal agencies have reportedly done little to assess the possible effect on voting in the 21 known states whose election systems were breached. “We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”