Some state officials say the Russian attacks that made news in 2016 were misconstrued, and perhaps exaggerated, because federal officials failed to say quickly and clearly what was going on. Of the 21 states that were targeted by the Russians then, only one — Illinois — suffered a known breach of an election-related database, and that breach was contained. Most of the other states appear to have experienced little more than digital probing for weak spots in their computer defenses, a routine occurrence.

“My state was one of the 21 states that they tried to get into,” Kim Wyman, the Republican secretary of state in Washington, said in an interview. “There were a couple of I.P. addresses where we saw activity that wasn’t normal. We blocked them, and we found out later that they were Russian. So our system worked: They sort of went around the house, checked the doors and couldn’t get in.

“On our system, tens of thousands of those attempts are made daily. Some of those attempts are by Russians. But we also have criminals, and kids who just want to prove they can get into a system.”

The 27-member coordinating council was created in part to keep state and local election officials apprised of new threats. But at the secretaries of states’ meeting in Washington, some state election officials said that had yet to happen.

Ms. Wyman said she found out only last week that Homeland Security experts had met weeks ago with her state’s chief information officer to discuss security issues, including some involving elections systems. “What I’m hearing from my colleagues around the country is that this is not unique,” she said. “My job is to instill confidence in the public that our elections are secure, that they can have full faith that their vote was counted accurately and wasn’t hacked. And if I don’t have all the information, it’s very hard to combat that.”

In California, a federal explanation of Russia’s targeting of state election systems “was a year late, and was not exactly accurate,” said Mr. Padilla, the secretary of state there. As it turned out, he said, the state computer systems the Russian hackers had scanned were not related to election networks.

Progress on setting up new lines of federal-state communication has been similarly glacial, Mr. Padilla said. “It took until November for the government coordinating council to be created and formalized,” he said. “This week was meeting No. 2. For the last year, there’s been a lot of frustration about the lack of frequency or even the quality of information.”

Mr. Padilla said he was hopeful that the commitment to new openness that federal officials offered would produce improvements. “Time will tell,” he said. “But depending on the state, the primary is maybe a handful of weeks away, or a couple of months away.”