ADP to Help Elections Board Beef Up Cyber Security, Emergency Response
The Geauga County Board of Elections had an important reason to be open Aug. 7 — to collect petitions for candidates and issues on the deadline set by the secretary of state.
The Geauga County Board of Elections had an important reason to be open Aug. 7 — to collect petitions for candidates and issues on the deadline set by the secretary of state.
But that Wednesday, hours after a powerful storm ripped through the county and knocked power out to thousands of customers, workers at the BOE offices on Center Street in Chardon found a generator assigned to their department had gone missing, leaving them without lights or power.
Dennis Pavella, chair of the board, said county officials worked with the elections board and their staff to get backup generators in place on time. Pavella said the collection of petitions would have taken place somehow.
“If we have to sit at the front door with a card table and two chairs, we will be there,” Pavella said he told a colleague.
Pavella credited Glen Vernick — director of the county’s maintenance department — with immediately addressing the situation and stringing along portable generators until the correct generator could be returned to the elections board. But, the storm raised some issues that must be addressed before the Nov. 5 general election is held, especially since the board will not yet have moved into new space in the county administrative building on Ravenwood Drive before the election.
The board heard from Frank Antenucci, chief deputy administrator of the county Department of Information Technology, during their meeting Aug. 15 about some of the ways the county is working to ensure their physical and cyber security.
In addition to portable electric generators, Antenucci said the IT department is working with the elections board to provide a backup cellular connection to provide support when internet service may also be down.
“We did use those in some other places in the county and they did work,” he said. “We did find out during the storms with some of the towers being really hammered on the west side — Chester, Russell, those areas — that cell was real spotty and not working very well there, but in the center of the county, we didn’t have any issues.”
Antenucci added the goal is for the county’s emergency responders, including the Geauga County Sheriff’s Office and county Department of Emergency Services, to have a unified communications system with the BOE in time for the election, even if power or cell coverage is lost in the area.
Michelle Lane, director of the elections board, said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a webinar for elections officials they should plan to use a wireless priority service.
Antenucci explained the service puts a select number of emergency response cellular lines ahead of civilian calls when cell towers are affected by storms or other outage issues.
He also said the county’s IT team has been “absolutely inundated” with reports from cybersecurity agencies about active risks to county boards of election.
“There’s just a significant amount of threat actors out there,” he said. “They’re very much focused on county boards of elections. I know that seems difficult for people to understand, but a lot of these nation states and then non-state actors are very focused on the county boards of election.”
It’s not because they want to pick a side, as much as they are looking to expose vulnerabilities, he said.
The IT team is working not just to make sure the county “survives” the election, but to be a model for the rest of the state, he added.
“That’s the goal,” he said.
