New cybersecurity measure

OKANOGAN – Election officials in all of the state’s 39 counties will, for the first time, be able to issue and track ballots for processing in real time in the upcoming August primary thanks to a new statewide voter registration system called VoteWA.

The new program is part of the state’s effort to install extra layers of protection against the threat of a cybersecurity breach of the election system.

“Washington has launched an important tool to combat cyber threats,” said Secretary of State Kim Wyman in a July 15 open letter to legislators and county election officials. “As a state we cannot combat the national cyber threat to our election system with aging technology.”

VoteWA was created by BPro, a Pierre, S.D, election software company, with the help of more than 80 election and internet technology (IT) professionals from the counties and state as a collaborative solution to a complex and urgent problem, Wyman said.

“Since its launch VoteWA has enabled us to fortify the cybersecurity of our state and county elections to a level simply not possible with our current systems,” said Wyman. “We have added multiple layers of firewalls, monitoring, and threat detection software to protect election servers from intrusion.”

VoteWA contains the state’s voter registration database used by the counties to manage information for 4.3 million registered voters. It adds a geographic information system layer for each voter address that will allow election officials to send the correct ballot to each voter. VoteWA has also added multi-factor authentication and pre-authorized computers to allow only approved users to access VoteWA.

“The collaborative development of the VoteWA system is on-scope, on-time, and on-budget, which facilitates implementation of the bills recently passed by the Legislature,” Wyman said.