Word of successful hacks into the online voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois prompted Toni Pippins-Poole to pick up the phone.
The Dallas County Elections Administrator said she immediately called her head of information technology to confirm their online voter registration system had not been compromised.
“It’s a wake up call. I think it’s a wake up call to everyone,” Pippins-Poole said about the apparent foreign intrusion that resulted in Arizona shutting down its statewide voter registration system for nearly a week.
According to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian hackers were behind the attempts to breach state voter registration databases.
The breaches included the theft of data from as many as 200,000 voter records in Illinois, officials said.
The incidents led the FBI to send a "flash alert" earlier this month to election officials nationwide, asking them to be on the lookout for any similar cyber intrusions.
Much of what will happen on Election Day in Texas is not online, including the voting machines, the ballots and the counting of the votes.
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“From the generation of the ballot by our office to the tabulation of votes at our centralized counting center, security measures are in place to ensure no unauthorized individual has access to the system,” Tarrant County Elections Administrator Frank Phillips noted in a statement. “In addition, the voting devices and tabulation computers are NEVER connected to an external network (including the Internet), so there is no opportunity for someone to access the system remotely and alter computer code or election results.”
