It’s always alarming when we find out hackers got into our state’s election system. It was even more alarming when we realized those hackers were likely connected to Iran.
The hack took place late last month. Hackers infiltrated the Arizona Secretary of State’s website and switched out photos of candidates with those of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
But what Stephen Richer says could have turned into an opportunity to improve our state’s election system, instead turned into a political football.
Richer used to run elections in Maricopa County. He is our former county recorder. Now he is a contributing columnist for the Arizona Republic’s opinion pages. He joined The Show along with editorial page editor Elvia Díaz to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: All right Stephen, I want you to kick us off here with a little bit about what happened. How did this hack kind of get co-opted by politics as you describe it?
STEPHEN RICHER: I think unfortunately thanks to social media. The irony here is that I think it was handled pretty well in that the Secretary of State’s office identified the issue. It quickly shut down those pages. It quickly worked with the Arizona Department of Homeland Security to identify the threat. And then on July 1, it sent out a press release notifying the public, notifying members of the media of exactly what happened.
So it wasn’t that big of a deal until two weeks later, Tyler Bowyer of Turning Point USA — an alt-right, Trump adjacent youth political group — decided to send out a tweet that suggested that it was a big cover up and that this was a big deal and that Arizona’s elections were unsafe. And then based off of that, a bunch of people began piling on, and then it just devolved into normal politics and ugliness.
GILGER: Right. But as you say, there was no actual threat to voter registration records here.
RICHER: So what had been targeted was just an informational website, and it couldn’t have any impact on any ballots, which are, of course, paper ballots and are unhackable in Arizona. And it didn’t have any impact on the voter registration database, which is housed on a very different system from that which houses the informational website.
GILGER: Right, right. And I want to nail that point home for one more question, because you point this out in the piece, and I think it’s an important fact about paper ballots, which people complain about, but they cannot be hacked.
RICHER: That’s part of the beauty of paper ballots. There’s lots of downsides to them, but all the security community loves paper ballots because they create an auditable paper trail that absolutely cannot be hacked. You can’t hack paper.
GILGER: Elvia, let me turn to you and ask you about the political turn that this all took. Does this surprise you, given the last couple years, maybe more, that we’ve had when it comes to elections in our state?
ELVIA DÍAZ: No, it’s a political opportunity for the alt right, and that’s why it doesn’t surprise me at all. For one, I am happy that you asked that question about the paper ballot. I loved how Stephen, he wrote “paper ballot” almost in every line here in the column. And I love the way to overcommunicate, and I think that’s the message here.
Again, it looks like the secretary of state did everything right: Inform the public, send out a press release to reporters. But then we have a whole section of the population that just doesn’t trust the election because there are certain people that have made it their personal life and career and fortunes trying to sell the point, the distrust about the elections. And so they take every opportunity, whether it is truth or not, to try to erode further distrust in the election system. And so this is one of the things that happened here.
So no, it doesn’t surprise me whatsoever. So the lessons here for me are to overcommunicate — although again, the secretary of state apparently did communicate as they should have, but not enough.
GILGER: Stephen, you talk about how this could have been used as an opportunity. What would you have rather seen happen? How could this have been useful to the state?
RICHER: We could have revisited how much information should be shared, with whom and when. We could have used it as an opportunity to further strengthen the connections between the federal Department of Homeland Security, the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, Arizona state-based cyber systems, cyber security programs; and we could have used it as an opportunity to talk about why our elections are built to withstand something like a targeted attack at a website from a foreign adversary — in this case, Iran.
Instead, like all things political or adjacent to politics, it turned into an opportunity to score points, use histrionics and hopefully get some follows on social media. And what really makes me sad about this isn’t even as much the attack on elections, it’s just that that is the type of behavior that seems to be rewarded in today’s politics, rather than the quiet efforts to make a system better — as was apparently done by multiple Republican state legislators who met, earlier in the month, prior to Bowyer’s tweet, with the secretary to try and understand the situation and brainstorm solutions.
GILGER: Elvia, what does all of this do to the continuing erosion of trust in our elections?
DÍAZ: It tells me that still we have a lot to do. We have been talking about elections for years here in Maricopa County, and Stephen has done a fantastic job — did a great job communicating and again, overcommunicating. But still, I don’t think the public understands how elections work after all these many years of talking about it.
For instance, the first thing that I saw everywhere was that the secretary of state website has been hacked, as if there was only one page. And Stephen made it very clear in the column here that there are different servers, different pages, different places where you store the election information.
And we oversimplify things — and by “we” meaning the journalists as well, and the people that are trying to capitalize on this. So yeah, the public still doesn’t understand how elections are really run.
GILGER: That’s interesting. Stephen, let me ask you lastly before I let you go: Are there real problems in our state’s election security that we should be talking about that we’re not?
RICHER: I think as long as we have people who want to destabilize American democracy, then we will have real threats. There will be actors like Iran who will try to target websites that are connected to the internet, because that’s a portal through which they can enter, and they might try to do stuff like take down websites that tell you where you can go to vote. And that’s a very real threat.
But I think the greater threat to American elections and Arizona elections right now is unfortunately homegrown, from actors who, as Elvia says, have a financial interest in continuing to sow seeds of widespread doubt in our election system and could potentially lead to people just not believing in our elections and therefore not believing that the people who are in office have real authority.
