California election officials are guarding their voting machines and registration lists against Russian hackers -- although no one has spotted any.
"I operate under the assumption that hacking is actually happening and California is a target," Secretary of State Alex Padilla says.
"This year, there's a big focus on several congressional races that could determine the House majority. The stakes in California have national implications."
But would the Russians actually try to change election outcomes?
"I have no doubt that if they could, they would," says Padilla, a Democrat who's heavily favored to win re-election in November.
Hacking into California's voting system and altering votes, however, is considered by most experts to be practically impossible. That's because voting machines aren't hooked up to the internet. State law forbids it. A hacker might attack one machine but couldn't reach into the entire vote-collecting system.
"We invited the Department of Homeland Security to try to hack into our system," says Joe Holland, Santa Barbara County's recorder-assessor and president of the state association of election officials. "They stayed five days and couldn't do it."
Voter registration lists are different, however.
"People are registered online. Records are connected to the internet. And hackers could break into those," says Matt Bishop, a UC Davis computer science professor. "They could create chaos by disenfranchising voters."
Los Angeles County Voter Registrar Dean Logan says: "There's also an ongoing myth that we don't count mail ballots unless it's a close contest. We always count all ballots."
National security officials revealed last year that Russian hackers tried to break into 21 states' election systems in 2016.
California apparently wasn't one, despite an initial report by the Department of Homeland Security. The agency later corrected itself and said Russian hackers had actually "scanned" the state Department of Technology's network, not the Secretary of State's.
"Our notification [from Homeland Security] was not only a year late," Padilla complained at the time. "It also turned out to be bad information."
In Sacramento, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature recently appropriated $134 million to upgrade county voting systems and defend them against hackers.
Padilla criticized the Republican-led Congress for rejecting a $250 million appropriation that would have helped states protect their voting systems.
"Intelligence officials have been crystal clear: Our democracy is, and will continue to be, under attack by Russia and others," he said in a statement.
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