Election hacking is a hot button topic across the country and Missouri’s top election official says security is a top priority in the Show-Me-State.
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft says his online systems are the subject of outside scans daily and that by tens of thousands of attempts. He says the need for heightened security covers both voter fraud and the hacking of election equipment.
“Those could be legitimate attempts to get in our network, but we don’t know. So if we don’t know we have to treat them as if they’re all malevolent, as if they’re all things that we have to fight off. So we, we may have 100,000 a day,” says Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.
Ashcroft points to efforts to better protect election infrastructure, including a $7 million federal grant funding some of those efforts. He says Missouri is one of the first to take advantage of that upgrade.
