The narrative is changing as the facts come out.
Via Charleston Post and Courier:
The nearly 150,000 unsuccessful attempts to gain access to South Carolina’s voting system on Election Day last year do not indicate there were that many “hackers” trying to get access, officials said Monday.
Many of the attempts were people trying to find their voting precinct and had difficulty navigating into the system, officials said.
Still, there were some bad actors trying to get in as well — both from inside the U.S. and abroad, according to the agency tasked with running the state’s elections.
The State Election Commission has repeatedly said there is no evidence that attempts to penetrate South Carolina’s system were successful, and that none of the attempts originated in Russia. [Emphasis added] But a weekend Wall Street Journal report and other examinations of the 2016 election indicate questions continue to linger on how safe the individual state systems are nationwide.
According to a letter filed with the South Carolina Legislature’s House Legislative Oversight Committee this spring, there were 149,832 attempts to get through the state Election Commission’s firewall for the state’s voter registration system on Election Day, Nov. 8, 2016.
Executive Director Marci Andino stressed that while the amount of attempts seem high, the number doesn’t tell the whole story.
Part of the attempted entries could have been mistypes from people trying to find their own voting precinct that day, she said. The system classifies issues such as accessing scvotes.org through Windows XP or incorrectly entering information when looking for a polling place as a “rejected attempt.”
“Firewalls filter Internet traffic and block everything that is not specifically allowed,” she said. “The failed attempts show the firewall is working to protect the voter registration database from unauthorized access.”