LANSING – A recent article in a national online magazine singled out two Michigan counties — Kalamazoo and Roscommon — as being vulnerable to hacking of their election equipment.

The August article in Vice cited studies by election security experts that detected when cellular modems — built into some election machines to help them quickly transmit unofficial results on Election Night — had been left connected to the Internet longer than they should have been.

The article, though lacking specifics about what was detected in the Michigan counties cited, suggested the problem could be more widespread. It pointed to the potential for hackers to use the modem connections to breach firewalls between voting equipment and other election machinery to install malware and mess with election results.

In an interview with the Free Press, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said she took the report seriously but does not believe the integrity of Michigan's election equipment has been compromised, either in the two counties cited in the article, or anywhere else.

Benson, a Democrat who took office Jan. 1, said she has responded to the article through talks with the voting machine vendor serving the two counties, Election Systems & Software, and by seeking revisions to the company's contract with the state to ensure enhanced security provisions and better notification requirements in the event of any problems.

In Roscommon County, Clerk Michelle Stevenson said she had not heard about the Vice article until a Free Press reporter told her about it Thursday. She said the county's cellular modems were connected the night of this year's Aug. 6 election — which was close to the date the Vice article appeared — and for one week prior to the election, while "public accuracy testing" was conducted with local clerks who report to the county.

The cellular modems are normally only connected to the Internet for a few seconds at a time, on Election Night, to transmit unofficial results from various precincts and polling stations. Stevenson said said she did not know whether leaving them connected for a week would leave them vulnerable to hackers.

In Kalamazoo County, Clerk Timothy Snow did not respond to phone messages left Wednesday and Thursday.

The Free Press spoke to Benson about the Vice article and other election security issues. Here's an edited version:

How have you followed up on the issues raised in the Vice article?

"We've met with ES&S, which is the vendor who worked in the counties that were noted in the article. They work in seven counties in total (two other voting machine manufacturers, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, serve Michigan's remaining counties).

"We are specifically negotiating in our contract ... which we do approve, heightened security provisions and expectations that they must meet and communicate with us if there are any breaches.

"Yes, we've followed up on the insinuations in the Vice article, which were kind of broadly stated. ... But I think beyond that, we're also mindful of being very fact-based and clear with voters that especially in a state like ours, where we have hand-marked paper ballots, we have the ability to verify the results of elections. A modem only transmits unofficial results, so when we get the official results, we always have a backup for evaluating that."

The Vice article said that although there is a firewall with the ES&S equipment, if you can get past the firewall after connecting through the modem, you could get into the back-end election systems and install malware that could change not just the unofficial results, but the official results.

"Well, I think that if it was possible, we would still be able to protect against that because we have paper ballots. And the audits of the machines, depending on the extensiveness of the audit, can actually compare the paper ballot results to the machine results. To me, that's the most important fail-safe that we have and why Michigan has been in a better position than other states.

More:Michigan to get its first-ever election security specialist as 2020 vote nears

More:Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to address long lines, broken kiosks

More:Experts: Cellular modems make Michigan elections vulnerable

One thing we are adding for 2020 is risk-limiting audits, which are the most statistically reliable methods of evaluating the results themselves, which we believe will both address voter concerns but also detect any challenges that will enable us to assure the reported results of the election are an accurate reflection of the paper ballots that are cast. So we've been piloting those risk-limiting audits for the last year and hope to be able to take them statewide next year.

Since you took office, what specific steps have you taken to enhance election security?

"At the state level, at the forefront we have created this election security task force and it is co-chaired by Alex Halderman, a professor at U-M who is a national expert on cybersecurity, and David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation & Research. We also have the former secretary of state of Colorado, Wayne Williams, who has really overseen a lot of election security upgrades in Colorado when he was secretary of state, as well as representatives of the Department of Homeland Security.

"My first step was really to ... bring all these experts together to advise us so that we're not reinventing the wheel, but we're instead positioned to implement the best practices. ... They're issuing a report to me this year on what we should do to prepare for 2020.

"The second thing we did was begin the process — we've just hired the department's first-ever election security specialist, someone whose full-time job is to gather the information and security provisions to detect threats and deter adversaries. They've just come on board, they're starting Monday — Ashiya Brown. She has a background in cybersecurity and technology in particular. It will be her full-time job to attend the conferences, be part of all those conversations, and make sure we are bringing the ideas here to Michigan and also to support our local efforts.

"And the third thing we did was join ERIC (the Electronic Registration Information Center). That positioned us with the majority of the states who joined that to ensure our voter registration databases are secure and that we're up-to-date in sharing data when someone re-registers in another state and all sorts of things to keep our voter registration lists as clean as possible."

What else are you doing?

To enhance voter confidence, "we're talking about where voters get information about their rights, where to vote, the campaigns themselves, and information about candidates. In general, it's about encouraging and instilling in voters this recognition of the need to be proactive in how you get information as opposed to being reactive. Thinking critically, going to reliable sources. There's a lot of responsibility that voters need to take to ensure that efforts to confuse them are stymied.

"We're providing information to campaigns, working with the Department of Homeland Security (on) how they can protect themselves against security threats — hacking, data breaches, and the like. We're looking to very holistically better train campaigns to comply with campaign finance laws, but this is a part of that as well, to better protect themselves and secure themselves.

"The fourth is local election administrators, local clerks. In my view, all of these areas are high vulnerability.

What can you do at the local level?

"We're going to do two things. One, implement security instructions to our local election officials on how to make sure they are better trained, across the board, to detect threats, to report them, to deter them, to secure the databases, to train poll workers to handle machines properly and just all the nitty-gritty details of the local level that combine to vulnerabilities and potential for ne'er-do-wells to impact the system in a negative way.

"We will be issuing additional security guidelines that we expect local administrators to follow to secure their machines, to secure their ballot boxes, to secure how they transmit information for their voter registration access. We're unique in Michigan in that our elections are so decentralized and even in scenarios where something does happen at the local level, we are both exploring what authority we have to hold folks accountable, but beginning from the standpoint of just trying to protect against challenges and threats."

Purely from your perspective as someone who is responsible for the entire state, would it be advantageous to have more uniformity and more central control?

"Uniformity and accountability is what I've seen in other states. In Ohio, for example, there is accountability if somehow there is a failure of some sort that violates the law at the local level. Having some accountability to another level is critical. Now, in a democracy, local officials are accountable to the voters. So that's great, there is that check but we are an outlier in regards to that. In other states, the secretary of state as chief election officer has more authority to hold bad actors accountable."

Do you believe the Russians before the 2016 election tried to get into our voter database in Michigan?

"I have not seen any evidence of anyone hacking our voter registration database ... or attempting to. We have not been informed. The short answer is no. We have constant communications with the Department of Homeland Security and the vendors of our machines with the expressed expectation that if they learn of anything, they share it with us. We are putting that in our contracts when it comes to vendors. I'm finding that that communication is a key, that if there is an attempt, if there is an alleged attempt, that we know about it. And in the past, it seems that line of communication has not always been there.

"We certainly want to know if and when anything has happened prior to my taking office, but to me this is also about preparing for the potential for anything to happen in the future."

Contact Paul Egan: 517-372-8660 or pegan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @paulegan4. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter.