President Donald Trump on Friday promised an intense, “whole-of-government” focus on securing the nation’s elections from cyberattacks — but a POLITICO survey of states finds ample reasons to worry about both this year’s midterms and 2020.

Only 14 states plus Washington, D.C., say they plan to replace their voting machines in time for the next presidential election using their shares of the $380 million in election technology funding that Congress approved in March, according to POLITICO’s survey of election agencies nationwide.


At least seven other states have paid for new voting equipment with other money. But 21 states either have decided not to upgrade their machines or are unsure of their plans — with some saying they would need much more federal aid to swap out their equipment.

POLITICO has previously reported that states expected to have few security upgrades in place before November, when voters will decide whether to keep Trump’s Republican allies in charge of Congress. Of the 42 states that described aspects of their plans to POLITICO, none indicated they would have new voting machines purchased with federal funding in place this year.

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The findings alarmed election security experts, even as Trump chaired a National Security Council meeting Friday to review his administration’s efforts to fend off the expected return of the Russian hackers who meddled in 2016. That meeting covered cyber threats to elections from “malign foreign actors,” federal assistance to states and “actions to investigate, prosecute, and hold accountable” election meddlers, according to the White House.

“The President has made it clear that his Administration will not tolerate foreign interference in our elections from any nation state or other malicious actors,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “The Trump Administration will continue to provide the support necessary to the owners of elections systems — State and local governments — to secure their elections.”

But security experts have long warned that voting machines represent an often-overlooked vulnerability for American democracy, especially the paperless touchscreen devices that 30 states rely on either totally or partially. Those experts said the $380 million that Congress provided this year is barely enough to train election workers and fix the voter registration databases that were a top target for hackers in 2016 — and nowhere near enough to replace insecure voting machines.

“Congress urgently needs to work with the states and figure out how to get this dilapidated technology out of polling places before 2020,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor and voting security expert at the University of Michigan.

State election officials say they can do only so much with the money they have. And in many states, the decisions about buying voting equipment rest with county election supervisors trying to stretch meager budgets.

“North Carolina does not believe spreading this money thinly over 100 counties to help them purchase new voting equipment would be an effective use of these one-time dollars,” Patrick Gannon, spokesman for the state’s board of elections, told POLITICO in a statement. North Carolina still relies partly on paperless voting machines, although a state law will require all counties to use either paper ballots or machines that produce paper records after 2019.

In Texas, replacing electronic voting machines in the state’s three largest counties could cost up to $50 million, more than twice the money Congress provided, said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office.

But the state has been working on upgrades since 2016, he said. “Nearly 50 Texas counties have purchased new voting equipment, at least 11 of which have switched from [paperless machines] to systems that have some form of a paper trail,” Taylor said.

Texas has 254 counties, however.

Other states, like Missouri, will let localities decide how to use the federal money. “If they wish to replace voting machines with the funds provided, they may do that, but the funding provided is not sufficient to do that on a large scale,” Maura Browning, a spokeswoman for Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, told POLITICO in a statement.

Meanwhile, the House voted this month to slash federal election aid to the states in their budget proposals for the 2019 fiscal year, after Republican leaders noted that states haven’t yet used up this year’s $380 million. And even some lawmakers sympathetic to the states’ plight aren’t offering many prospects for quick relief from Congress.

States have “always said they needed more than that initial tranche of money, so I'm hoping we can do more,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee. But she said her “major priority” is the Secure Elections Act, a bipartisan bill designed to improve coordination among federal and state agencies when it comes to sharing information about potential threats to election systems.

Klobuchar, the bill’s chief Democratic co-sponsor, told POLITICO this week that the committee plans to mark up the measure when Congress returns from its August recess.

Investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election have never alleged that hackers altered any votes, instead pointing to a wide-ranging plot that included spreading fake news on social media and pilfering emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. But special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s latest indictment accused Russian hackers of infiltrating a Florida-based company that supplies software for voting machines across the country. And cybersecurity experts have demonstrated an ability to breach at least some versions of the machines, sometimes in minutes.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he would at least like to see his own state — one of five that exclusively use paperless electronic voting machines — do more to provide for paper backups that could help detect tampering after the fact.

“I hope they would make sure they’ve got a redundant system, because we’re gonna need one,” Graham said.

The deadline for states and territories to submit details for commission funding was July 16. A spokeswoman for the federal Election Assistance Commission, which is administering the funds, said the plans would be posted online in mid-August.

New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana all rely on machines without paper backups, according to Verified Voting, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes the use of secure election equipment. Of those states, all but New Jersey have indicated they plan to replace machines or add paper backups to improve security.

At least seven states — California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Texas and Virginia — told POLITICO they recently completed or are working on election equipment upgrades with other sources of money.

“I’d like to see more states replacing systems before 2020,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But if they don’t have enough money” and must choose among upgrading registration systems, buying new voting machines and training personnel, “it may well be that spending on something other than new machines is the right call.”

In Pennsylvania, where 49 of the 67 counties exclusively use paperless voting machines, the state election office said it would give its federal funds to the counties so they could buy new systems with paper backups. But counties don’t have to select those new systems until the end of 2019, on the eve of presidential primary season. “Some of them might make those purchases this year,” said spokeswoman Wanda Murren, “but we are not aware of any that have done so at this point.”

Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, the new president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, recently said both Congress and Trump need to do more. He urged Congress to create a regular election security grant program, and he said he hasn’t seen much leadership on the issue from the president, who has denounced the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

"Unfortunately, the person at the top has not been supportive and has sent mixed messages, and that makes it difficult on us as secretaries,” Condos said in a July 20 interview on C-SPAN.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a voting security researcher who is chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, backed the idea of offering regular grants for election security, telling POLITICO that states’ spending decisions this year “might be very different if election officials knew they'd be getting at least this much each fiscal year.”

Given the paucity of available funds, Hall said he was generally “satisfied” with how states were spending them. “It's time to shore up defenses,” he said, “not procure whole new systems.”

Not everyone agrees that it should be Congress’ job to subsidize voting security improvements.

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, the chief Republican co-sponsor of the Secure Elections Act, said he didn’t “want to add additional funding until we know how the previous funding was spent” — which won’t happen until the EAC releases an audit next year. “We don’t know if they’re spending it for security or for other issues at this point,” Lankford told POLITICO.

Halderman, the voting security expert at the University of Michigan, said the inconsistent progress “demonstrates why we need consistent minimum security standards that states can meet or beat.” Experts generally consider the existing voluntary guidelines to be insufficient, and even those standards only cover voting systems, not other election technology.

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), whose state exclusively uses paperless machines, said Congress should have “exerted some real oversight” over the election upgrade process to ensure more uniform security considerations across the country.

Halderman agreed that more leadership is needed.

Local election offices are “suddenly on the front lines of international conflict,” Halderman said. “We need to accelerate the pace of this progress and ensure that the slowest-moving states don't leave gaping holes in our national election cybersecurity posture.”

Brianna Milord, Maria Curi, Lauren Aratani, Martin Matishak and Tim Starks contributed to this report.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to reflect information provided after publication by the Minnesota office of the secretary of state. CORRECTION: An earlier version also misstated Missouri’s plans for election upgrades.