RALEIGH --  A months-long federal assessment of voter check-in computers used in the 2016 election in Durham County found no evidence of malware or unauthorized access to the county’s systems.

On Election Day, November 8, 2016, Durham County Board of Elections staff reported that the electronic pollbook laptops used to check voters in at polling places presented inaccurate data to poll workers in a small number of precincts. The inaccuracies included erroneously identifying voters as having already voted, identifying registered voters as unregistered, and prompting poll workers to ask voters to present an ID when IDs were not required to vote at that time. As a result, the State Board office required Durham County to use paper pollbooks when checking in voters. Voting ultimately resumed.

The analysis by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Hunt and Incident Response Team (HIRT) was requested by the State Board of Elections and Durham County Board of Elections. Its findings support what state and county elections officials concluded during their own analyses – that a cybersecurity breach was not to blame for problems with the voter check-in process on November 8, 2016.

CISA analyzed 24 laptops loaded with the electronic pollbook software EViD, which is used to check in voters at polling places. CISA also analyzed 21 USB drives used to load voter registration data onto laptops used by poll workers, as well as forensic images of the desktop computer used by Durham County Board of Elections employees who downloaded voter registration data from state servers and loaded it onto the USB activators.

“HIRT did not positively identify any threat actors or malware on the (Durham County Board of Elections) systems provided for analysis,” according to a DHS report of its analysis. “Additionally, HIRT did not identify remote access to the systems under analysis during the election timeframe.”