While I was working on the Russia investigation, new potential leads to look into would come to me at the oddest moments, when I was cooking breakfast for my daughters or driving my car. It was during an oddly meditative, sleep-deprived moment while I was walking up the stairs to my office when a clue came to me.

A former US official who had seen some of the underlying intelligence told me that there were “massive alarms” going off about the scope of Russian attempts to breach voter databases in the final weeks of the election.1 US investigators had also believed that systems in key battleground states, including Wisconsin and Florida, particularly, were in danger. At the time they thought that some voter registration data may have been “exfiltrated” but that investigators weren't certain. Furthermore, US officials were reluctant to talk about the breaches out of concern that doing so would reveal methodology, essentially doing the Russian hackers’ work for them.

I walked up to my office and closed the door. I went to my desk, opened my personal computer, and found the folder with the detailed notes on the election. Wisconsin was not yet on the list of states that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had officially revealed as having voter databases that were scanned and probed by Russian hackers.

On election night I had gone to bed before Wisconsin's votes came in, but I knew it was a battleground state. That morning I woke up with the knowledge that Trump had won, and went to my laptop to watch his victory speech and Clinton's concession. It was an odd morning for me, as it was for most people. I walked the hotel carpet as if I had just woken up on an alien planet, one with a different air density that I wasn't sure how to take in.

Again, for me it wasn't the fact that Trump was elected. Rather, his election made it clear to me that vulnerabilities had been exposed by the Russian government's influence campaign. Based on the information I had and the information that was coming in from other reporters and the intelligence community, it was almost as if we had been invaded.

I scrolled through my notes on Wisconsin. It had come down to the wire in that state with President Trump winning by just 22,748 votes.2 It was a fairly thin margin of victory in a state that cast a total of about three million votes. Wisconsin ended up being one of the states that decided who would be the next president. In 2012 President Obama won the state by almost seven percentage points.³ In a state that hadn't voted Republican since Reagan, it was an unlikely win.⁴

About ten months after the 2016 election, the DHS contacted twenty-one states, telling them that their internet-connected networks were the target of Russian hackers “seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure.”⁵ Wisconsin was on that list along with Ohio, Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Iowa, Maryland, and Washington State. Arizona and Illinois were confirmed targets about a year earlier. The DHS insisted that there was no evidence Russian hackers were able to change any votes. That notion was backed up by Judd Choate of the US National Association of State Election Directors, who said that “there remains no evidence that the Russians altered one vote or changed one registration.”⁶ In the months after the election I spoke with an Obama-era DHS official who told me candidly that when they were questioned about whether Russian interference had impacted the vote total they responded with carefully worded statements. The honest answer to that question is that they didn't know. But publicly they kept saying they had “no evidence the actual voting process was interfered with on Election Day.”⁷

The effort by the Obama administration to really come to grips with the extent of the Russian intrusion was frustratingly slow. The Trump administration then compounded the problem and seemed incapable of unifying a plan to counter Russian intrusions throughout 2016, 2017, and into 2018.8 This was largely because President Trump wouldn't acknowledge the issue. He was still calling the story a hoax, purportedly part of some mastermind scheme devised by sore losers after Clinton lost.⁹

Simultaneously, the president and his campaign were under scrutiny by the special counsel that was appointed in May 2017 to investigate whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.¹⁰ Trump often angrily dismissed the accusations and couldn't seem to separate his own interests from those of the country.

It was easy to conflate the two issues. Most Americans couldn't separate the controversy swirling around the White House from the clear and present danger facing our democracy.

In a hearing on Capitol Hill, an official with the DHS confirmed publicly what officials had been saying privately, which was that twenty-one states were targeted by Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 campaign.¹¹

I remember the first time when word started leaking out that officials were worried Russian hackers were targeting voter databases and that the DHS was trying to notify states and help election officials determine whether they had been targeted. At the time it seemed to me as if Homeland Security officials were caught off guard and the response was slow and inadequate considering that the country was just weeks away from the election. The Russians’ surprise attack had largely gone unnoticed.

Dr. Sam Liles, acting director of the Cyber Division of the DHS, testified in a hearing that Homeland Security officials had no indication that any adversaries, including the Russian government, had been planning activities that would change the outcome of the election. He said the activity by Russian hackers suggested “simple scanning,” an act he compared to someone “walking down the street to see if you are home.”¹² But future testimony revealed that the Russians had actually broken into some of those “homes” and “manipulated data” where they could.¹³ In the same hearing, Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner of Virginia called the Russian cyberattacks on election systems a watershed moment in political history. “This was one of the most significant events any of us on this dais will be asked to address in our careers,” he said in his opening remarks to the audience and his fellow senators. “Only with a robust and comprehensive response will we be able to protect our democratic process from even more drastic intrusions in the future.”14

The consensus was that the Russians would be back in 2018 and then in 2020 as well. The reality was they hadn't left. Most people in the intelligence community figured Russian malware was still lurking in computer systems.

As we learn more about the scope of Russian interference and the delayed and tepid response by the United States, confidence in the election system will likely erode. In 2016, according to a Gallup poll, which was compiled just two weeks before the November 8 election, only 35 percent or about one-third of Americans were “very confident” that their vote would be counted accurately.¹⁵ That poll should trouble anyone who believes in democracy and the values of the Founding Fathers.

Before we know it, the 2018 midterm elections will be upon us. The 2020 presidential election will soon follow. Since 2016, election systems in all fifty states have had to conduct serious examinations of their operations. It has been a time-consuming and costly mission. And at the end of the day it's unclear whether it will be enough to stop the ongoing intrusions by Russian hacking units. Still, what election systems have had to do is unprecedented. As journalists we thought what we were seeing after the “hanging-chad” election in 2000 (involving Florida's voting problems) was earth-shattering. This is a much bigger undertaking because it involves all fifty states. Getting it right this time is more important than ever.