Over 30,000 Mississippians get stories like this delivered to their inboxes for free.
Sign up for The Today, our daily newsletter, and continue to read this story.
JACKSON – Between April 23 and May 23, there were about 3,000 unsuccessful attempts to hack into Mississippi’s elections data system.
But that is not unusual, Secretary of State Debert Hosemann said. Such attempts are ongoing, though, he said hacking efforts increased slightly — by about 1,000 per month — during the 2016 elections.
He said the efforts to access information stored in Mississippi’s statewide Elections Management System come from all over the world.
“They only have to be successful once,” Hosemann said. “I have to be successful 3,000 times per month.”
The efforts to hack into the system, Hosemann said, are most likely to try to obtain personal information, such as the last four digits of the Social Security numbers of Mississippi’s registered voters for possible financial gain, not to alter election results.
The voting machines are not online so it would literally take someone stealing the machine to alter results. The state’s 82 counties are responsible for gathering and counting their own election results.
“Nobody can get into our system except the people who work here,” said Forrest County Circuit Clerk Gwen Wilks, explaining that the system is not online.
The certified results from each of the 82 counties are sent to the Secretary of State’s office within 10 days of the election.
Hosemann said it also would be difficult to hack into the state system and alter voter registration lists. The voter registration information is online because it is constantly changing and being updated.
In the coming months, the counties can apply for a portion of $4.5 million in federal funds to purchase new voting machines or make other updates to their election systems.
The grants will be awarded through the Secretary of State’s office based on the number of registered voters in the county.
The Secretary of State’s office received authority from the Legislature to use $224,000 in existing funds to draw down the federal funds and will use those matching funds, as well as possibly a small amount of federal funds, to update its cybersecurity.
The Secretary of State’s office hopes to award all the grants to the counties this summer.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.