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At 2:47 p.m. in Colorado this afternoon, election officals reported all voter systems statewide had shut down. Specifically, the registration databases weren’t working, which are used to confirm and verify voter data.
Breaking: announcement just made at Denver Elections Office that all state systems are down. #9news #election2016 pic.twitter.com/Opt1c7iR4a
— Jessica Oh (@Jessica9NEWS) November 8, 2016
Election officials now say that the system has been restored, about 30 minutes after the failure.
MEDIA: Unfortunately, our system goes down now and then. It today and we regret that but am told it is back up. #copolitics
— Lynn Bartels (@lynn_bartels) November 8, 2016
Colorado is considered to be a major swing state this election and therefore at high risk of being hacked.
And state voter registration systems are particularly vulnerable. This August, both Illinois and Arizona learned that their voter registration databases were hacked, which prompted the Department of Homeland Security to offer states help in shoring up their electronic election systems.
In Indiana last month, a security researcher demonstrated how vulnerable Indiana’s electronic voter registration system is, too. He was able to quickly break into the state’s database and edit people’s voter information.
At the moment, voter registration databases aren’t considered to be “critical infrastructure” by the Department of Homeland Security and thus aren’t prioritized for federal protection. But this September, Representative Hank Johnson, D-Ga., introduced a new bill, the Election Infrastructure and Security Promotion Act of 2016, which would reclassify state voting systems as critical infrastructure to fall under the safekeeping of Homeland Security.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
