On Nov. 6, 2016, the Sunday before the presidential election that sent Donald Trump to the White House, a worker in the elections office in Durham County, North Carolina, encountered a problem.
There appeared to be an issue with a crucial bit of software that handled the county’s list of eligible voters. To prepare for Election Day, staff members needed to load the voter data from a county computer onto 227 USB flash drives, which would then be inserted into laptops that precinct workers would use to check in voters. The laptops would serve as electronic poll books, cross-checking each voter as he or she arrived at the polls.
The problem was, it was taking eight to 10 times longer than normal for the software to copy the data to the flash drives, an unusually long time that was jeopardizing efforts to get ready for the election. When the problem persisted into Monday, just one day before the election, the county worker contacted VR Systems, the Florida company that made the software used on the county’s computer and on the poll book laptops. Apparently unable to resolve the issue by phone or email, one of the company’s employees accessed the county’s computer remotely to troubleshoot. It’s not clear whether the glitch got resolved — Durham County would not answer questions from POLITICO about the issue—but the laptops were ready to use when voting started Tuesday morning.
Almost immediately, though, a number of them exhibited problems. Some crashed or froze. Others indicated that voters had already voted when they hadn’t. Others displayed an alert saying voters had to show ID before they could vote, even though a recent court case in North Carolina had made that unnecessary.
State officials immediately ordered Durham County to abandon the laptops in favor of paper printouts of the voter list to check in voters. But the switch caused extensive delays at some precincts, leading an unknown number of frustrated voters to leave without casting ballots.
To this day, no one knows definitively what happened with Durham’s poll books. And one important fact about the incident still worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier.
VR Systems has long insisted that none of its employees fell for the Russian phishing scam and that none of its systems were hacked. As for the Durham poll books, the county commissioned an investigation into the problems with its laptops and determined that the issues there were probably due to errors by poll workers and election staff.
But significant questions remain about what happened in Durham and just how close the Russians actually came to hacking the 2016 election. North Carolina state election officials say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive, and they cannot say with certainty that the problems were due to human error. Indeed, there’s no indication the investigators looked for malware or even contemplated the possibility of foul play. And VR Systems bases its assertion that it was not hacked on a forensic investigation of its computers that was done by a third-party security firm nearly a year after the Russian phishing campaign — plenty of time for any Russian hackers to have erased their tracks in the meantime. There are also questions about the thoroughness of that investigation. VR Systems spoke to POLITICO about the investigation but wouldn’t answer detailed questions about it or provide a copy of the forensic report that it says proves it wasn’t hacked.
