PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Rhode Island is spending $3 million in federal funds to secure and modernize its elections systems.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission released a report Tuesday showing how states plan to spend $380 million allocated by Congress last spring to strengthen voting systems amid ongoing threats from Russia and others.
All but a fraction of the money has already been sent to the states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. The largest chunk - roughly 36 percent - is being spent to improve cybersecurity in 41 states and territories.
Of the $3 million allocated to Rhode Island, about half is going toward upgrading the central voter registration system to enhance security and guard against efforts to penetrate the voter database.
States have been scrambling to increase their cyber defenses since it was revealed that Russian hackers targeted election systems in 2016. There’s no indication Rhode Island was targeted, according to Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea’s office.
Rhode Island plans to spend nearly a third of its funds before the 2018 elections. Gorbea has said she feels the voting systems are secure going into November because the state has been investing over time and stepped up its efforts over the last three years. But she said it’ll cost millions more to guard against hacking and other cyberattacks in the future.
Gorbea, the chief elections official in Rhode Island, met last week in Providence with the state’s two U.S. senators to discuss strengthening election security.
“It’s ongoing, that’s the challenge,” she said after the event. “I think there’s going to be some big needs upfront to bring the cities and towns, the Board of Elections’ systems up to speed. And once you do that, the hardware, the software, then you can go down to a more manageable, ongoing support level.”
More than $700,000 of the federal funding has been budgeted for enhancing cyber security, which will spent on monitoring any activity with the voter registration system, analyzing security alerts and buying new software. A total of $100,000 of the $700,000 will be awarded to municipalities before November to improve the security of their systems. Gorbea expects the municipalities to need significantly more.
The state is using the rest of the money to adopt a new audit system highly recommended by federal authorities, as well as to buy new voting equipment and make other improvements to elections systems. State law calls for fully implementing the new audit system in 2020, but the elections board is authorized to conduct the audits beginning this year.
Rhode Island is responsible for committing $150,000 toward the efforts, a 5 percent match.
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