Secretary of the State Denise Merrill says Connecticut is using a $5 million grant from the federal Election Assistance Commission to strengthen cybersecurity ahead of November’s general election.
Merrill says $1 million of the federal grant will be used to purchase new optical scan tabulation machines.
“These are the machines that we currently vote on. And as everyone knows, part of our security in Connecticut is that we have paper ballots. So that means we have a backup. But these tabulation machines were purchased 15 or 20 years ago. And so we want to make sure that if they are starting to wear out that we have a replacement.”
Merrill says the rest of the money would be used to train local elections officials and upgrade other election software and hardware and to support the University of Connecticut’s Center for Voting Technology Research.
Merrill says Connecticut was one of several states targeted by Russian government hackers in the 2016 elections. She says the attacks were unsuccessful.
