Williams told people attending this month's Boulder County Republican Breakfast meeting in Longmont that people will sometimes hear warnings or concerns "that the election is rigged or the tabulation is rigged."
The FBI warned state officials in August to boost their election security against cyberattacks in light of evidence that hackers had gotten into two states' online voter-registration systems. The FBI didn't identify the states, but the Associated Press reported that they involved hack-related shutdowns reported by Arizona and Illinois election websites.
In September, AP and the online news site Politico reported that the Department of Homeland Security knew of hacking probes of 20 or more states' voter-registration systems.
Williams, however, assured fellow Republicans at Wednesday's breakfast that each Colorado county's in-house computers for processing and counting their voters' ballots are decentralized and are not connected to other counties' systems via the internet — and that they therefore cannot be hacked by outsiders.
Colorado's centralized statewide online voter registration system is on the internet, but even if that were breached, it wouldn't affect election outcomes because it's not linked to the individual counties' ballot processing equipment, said Williams, the state's top elections official.
After the breakfast meeting, Williams said in an interview that Colorado's voter-registration system and the steps in place to detect and block probers are considered one of the best of its kind in the nation. He said that unlike the hacking that allegedly was made to Arizona's and Illinois' online voter registration websites, "we have not been penetrated."
Williams and many of Colorado's county clerks have said their decentralized vote-tabulation systems are secure, video monitored and tested before and after each election.
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Hillary Hall said in a Wednesday afternoon email that "we take the security and integrity of the voting system and processes very seriously here in Boulder County."
Hall, a Democrat, said that includes "extensive quality assurance validation" for the creation and printing of ballots, ensuring that the U.S. Postal Service confirms that it's processed the number of ballots given them to deliver by mail.
There's also assurances that there's been "a clear chain of custody record for every ballot box collection point" for voters who drop off their completed ballots at various locations rather than mailing them back, Hall said.
She said Boulder County's ballot-box tracking system "has numerous safeguards in place" and that "all mail ballot envelopes and voted ballots from in-person voting are processed at our secure facility, which is being videotaped 24 hours a day, where we have multiple safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of the process and ensure your vote counts."
Said Hall: "From the way a signature is verified to the way a secrecy sleeve is separated from your mailing envelope ensuring voter anonymity, each step is managed in an extremely secure and detailed manner. Then, after the ballots are scanned, the recorded votes are stored in a secure and videotaped location until they are ready for tabulation in our voting system on Election Day."
"It's important to note that these are standalone computer systems not part of any network outside of the building and not connected to the internet," she added.
©2016 the Daily Times-Call (Longmont, Colo.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
