Less staff, even less trust: Some states say they can't rely on Trump's DHS for election security

When Arizona discovered in June that its website for politicians to file as candidates had been hacked, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes did something that would have been unthinkable in the past two presidential administrations: He kept the feds in the dark

When Arizona discovered in June that its website for politicians to file as candidates had been hacked, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes did something that would have been unthinkable in the past two presidential administrations: He kept the feds in the dark.

Hackers had replaced past candidates’ photos with that of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Such website defacements are relatively common and are often crimes of opportunity, where hackers spot a flaw they can exploit and use it to draw attention to their cause without doing serious damage. Arizona took the portal offline and remedied the issue.

Still, an attack by pro-Iranian hackers is something to note, the kind of thing that secretaries of state and cybersecurity experts share in order to keep colleagues aware of ongoing threats. But in this political climate, Fontes decided it was best to handle on his own.

“The political theater that we’ve seen out of the Department of Homeland Security, I don’t want that anywhere near my security operations,” he said. “I don’t want that anywhere near my Threat Assessment operations. I don’t want that anywhere near my technicians or the folks who are actually doing the hard work keeping us and our system safe.”

Fontes’ decision highlights a major concern around cybersecurity cooperation and election security in the second Trump administration. Cuts to the federal government’s election security work and the politicization of Homeland Security have left some state election heads unsure of how they would work with the federal government if they are hacked. Experts say that a lack of communication could lead to more and worse hacks surrounding elections.