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SALT LAKE CITY — After issuing a warning earlier this month about the possibility that Russian computer hackers could disrupt the U.S. presidential election, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, said it's no surprise an attempt appears to have been made.
"It's hardly a prophecy. It was just common sense," Stewart told the Deseret News Tuesday. "We just knew they were going to do this. There is no opportunity that they won't take."
U.S. intelligence officials have told NBC News that hackers based in Russia were behind two recent attempts to breach voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois that included the theft of as many as 200,000 voter records in Illinois.
The breaches prompted the FBI to issue a flash alert on Aug. 18 to state elections officials around the country detailing the techniques used to target voting systems and urging that precautions be taken, the Associated Press reported.
That's also when Stewart raised concerns about Russian hackers having an impact on the upcoming election, describing Russia as "incredibly active with cyberattacks" and citing the recent compromise of Democratic National Committee computers.
Stewart, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, had just returned from a fact-finding trip to Russia and said he feared there could be an effort to create chaos and uncertainty about the presidential election results.
"I don't think they care at all who the next president is. They just want to break down the institution. They want to break down the trust of the American people," the congressman said Tuesday.
He said elections systems need to be declared critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security so Washington can play a stronger role in protecting them.
"It needs more of a federal effort," Stewart said, even though he generally opposes more federal involvement in the states. "I promise you, every single state is a target."
Utah's top elections official is well aware of the situation
"It's a threat that everyone is taking seriously," Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox said. Cox, whose office oversees elections in Utah, said the state has worked for years to ensure "election results are protected from any hackers, foreign or domestic."
That includes not connecting voting machines to the internet, so they "only can be hacked one at a time, which isn't really worth anybody's time," he said, noting that more than 200 million attempts are made daily to breach the state's computers.
"It's just a phenomenal number, so it's something we understand," Cox said, calling for elections to be guarded on a national level to protect the public from losing confidence in the voting process.
"Anytime someone undermines the system itself, that leads to de-stability and the idea that the system is rigged," he said. "Our job is to make sure people can have full confidence in what's happening in the state."
State Elections Director Mark Thomas said Utah's systems have been scanned, and workers found no suspicious activity and have blocked the addresses the FBI said were used to hack into the Arizona and Illinois systems.
Thomas said a 2012 breach of state computers that compromised health information stored for nearly 800,000 Utahns boosted security measures and "really required the state of the Utah to get at the forefront of this and be proactive."
Stewart said whether there is time to secure the nation's entire elections system before November "is a great question. I would hope so." He said Congress needs to push election security as a priority.
James Comey, the director of the FBI, said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington Tuesday that the agency is working "very hard to understand" whether a foreign government is behind the hacking.
Comey said the FBI takes very seriously any effort that could be seen as an attempt "to influence the conduct of affairs in our country, whether that's an election or something else," according to a Bloomberg News report.
Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has asked Comey in a letter to investigate his concern that Russian President Vladimir Putin's "goal is tampering with the election," the New York Times reported.
Reid said connections between current and former advisers to Republican Donald Trump and Russian leaders should be enough to merit an investigation, according to the report.
"Trump and his people keep saying the election is rigged," Reid said in the article. "Why is he saying that? Because people are telling him the election can be messed with."
Contributing: Ladd Egan
