Homeland Security (sic) messing with voting system

Washington Examiner - The top election official in Maine says the Department of Homeland Security needs to stay out of the election business.

"Homeland Security drives me nuts," Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told the Washington Examiner.

Dunlap's opinion is a preview of what Congress is expected to hear next week, when it moves away from the question of whether top Trump administration officials colluded with Russia, and starts looking at how to secure America's voting systems from foreign attacks.

In the last days of the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a controversial directive that classified voting systems as "critical infrastructure," which gave the DHS some regulatory power over those systems. Johnson is sure to face questions about that decision, and DHS activities in the run up to the 2016 vote, in a hearing next week at the House Intelligence Committee.

But not everyone at the state level is happy with how DHS has handled this new responsibility. Last week, a classified document from the NSA was leaked and published by The Intercept, which appeared to show that there were broader attacks from Russian military intelligence on local election systems than originally thought.

Dunlap said DHS never bothered to tell anyone.

"When this leak happened, I know a lot of secretaries [of state] were alarmed, I was alarmed by it," Dunlap told the Washington Examiner. "But what was alarming was not the idea that you've suffered a cyber attack — that's the reality in the digital world. But the thing that was alarming was they hadn't told anybody. And really had no plans to tell anybody."