Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams says the state's voting system has not been targeted by Russian hackers.
"We're confident no elections anywhere in this state were altered in any fashion. And we're confident that the voter registration system was not altered in any fashion as well," he said.
Williams was responding to a national story that alleged Russia may have hacked into states' election systems. After working with the Dept. of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Guard to secure the Colorado voting system, said he stood by the state's results.
The National Association of Secretaries of State challenged the story, published by Bloomberg. Here's part of the NASS statement issued Tuesday:
Our policy at NASS has been to help correct misinformation from spreading, which we will continue to do. However, since the piece contains convoluted claims from anonymous sources, we are only able to say that we are not able to assess the credibility or the accuracy of the piece and we have no additional information from DHS or any intelligence agency to support its claims at this time.
As you may recall, the policy of our intelligence community is to notify so-called “victim” entities in the event of a foreign-led cyberattack. If your state systems have been targeted in such a way that response is warranted, the chief state election official is supposed to be notified.
An additional word of caution in responding: Some of the language in the Bloomberg piece suggests that the sources used were not necessarily intelligence officials. It also appears to conflate a cyber “attack” with a “breach” and it has vague claims that are difficult for NASS to address. For example, we have no way of knowing what it means exactly that hackers “hit systems in a total of 39 states.” We don’t know what “hit” means, or even which “systems” are being referenced by the claim.
Williams said Colorado's vote tallying system is not connected to the Internet. Voter registration is connected, but the state's security system did not detect any attempts to break into Colorado's website from hackers believed to be connected to Russia.
Previously: It Would Be Really Hard To 'Rig' Colorado's Election System. Here's Why
