House passes Secretary Hobbs’ election security bill, sending it to Governor Inslee

An elec­tion secu­ri­ty bill request­ed by Wash­ing­ton Sec­re­tary of State Steve Hobbs has com­plet­ed its jour­ney through the leg­isla­tive process and will now be pre­sent­ed to Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee for his sig­na­ture fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful floor vote in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives this evening.

By a vote of 58 to 37, the House vot­ed to adopt Sen­ate Bill 5843, prime spon­sored by Sen­a­tor Joe Nguyen (D‑34th Leg­isla­tive Dis­trict: Seat­tle, Vashon Island). The bill would improve elec­tions secu­ri­ty in the fol­low­ing ways, as assessed by the Leg­is­la­ture’s non­par­ti­san staff:

• Requires every coun­ty to install and main­tain an intru­sion detec­tion sys­tem to mon­i­tor their net­work and to dis­close cer­tain mali­cious activ­i­ty or breach­es of secu­ri­ty of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy systems.
• Autho­rizes the Sec­re­tary of State to cer­ti­fy the results of an elec­tion if a coun­ty can­vass­ing board refus­es to cer­ti­fy the results of the elec­tion with­out cause.
• Estab­lish­es vio­la­tions and penal­ties relat­ed to elec­tion inter­fer­ence, includ­ing pro­hib­it­ed inter­fer­ence by elec­tion observers, destruc­tion of vot­ed bal­lots and cer­tain elec­tion sup­plies and mate­ri­als, inter­fer­ence with the oper­a­tion of a vot­ing cen­ter, and unau­tho­rized access to elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion loca­tions and systems.

The need for the first pro­vi­sion men­tioned above was trig­gered by the refusal of sev­er­al coun­ties con­trolled by right wing coun­ty com­mis­sions to keep in place what are known as “Albert sen­sors” — essen­tial tools for detect­ing intru­sions in elec­tions sys­tems. Here’s some back­ground from The Spokesman-Review:

A week before Elec­tion Day, state elec­tions offi­cials say they haven’t been able to per­suade three Wash­ing­ton coun­ties to install a secu­ri­ty device that mon­i­tors coun­ty net­work traf­fic for threats.

Almost every coun­ty in the Ever­green State uses an inter­net secu­ri­ty sys­tem called an Albert sen­sor, an arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent tool that mon­i­tors net­work traf­fic for sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Office of the Sec­re­tary of State, 36 out of 39 coun­ties had an oper­at­ing Albert sen­sor installed as of Tues­day. Grant, Fer­ry and Lin­coln coun­ties do not, the agency reported.

Under state law, coun­ties have legal author­i­ty to make deci­sions about their own inter­net secu­ri­ty. That job most often falls into the hands of coun­ty com­mis­sion­ers. State Sec­re­tary Steve Hobbs has repeat­ed­ly expressed con­cern about the coun­ties he says have ignored state and fed­er­al advice to install Albert sensors.

Hobbs told The Spokesman-Review in an inter­view that con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and dis­in­for­ma­tion began to cir­cu­late around the state about the secu­ri­ty devices in 2021. Albert sen­sors are the Home­land Secu­ri­ty stan­dard, the sec­re­tary added.

“Most states have Albert sen­sors,” Hobbs said. “The Sec­re­tary of State’s Office prefers the Albert sen­sor to alter­nate security.”

Hobbs told the Spokesman­’s Ellen Den­nis that he was pre­pared to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to require Grant, Fer­ry, and Lin­coln coun­ties to comply:

“It’s get­ting to the point now where I might have to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion for min­i­mum stan­dards of secu­ri­ty,” Hobbs said. “… I know it’s polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy on their part to be able to say, ‘We’ve got some­thing, and it’s not the Albert sen­sor.’ Because right now mis­in­for­ma­tion is direct­ed at the Albert sensor.”

True to his word, Hobbs fol­lowed up and worked with Sen­a­tor Nguyen to intro­duce SB 5843, which was cospon­sored by Repub­li­can Matt Boehnke.

Impor­tant­ly, the bill now explic­it­ly makes it a felony to “pro­vide unau­tho­rized access to a per­son or enti­ty to phys­i­cal loca­tions or elec­tron­ic or phys­i­cal access to elec­tion soft­ware or hard­ware used in any ele­ment of con­duct of an elec­tion.” Giv­en the behav­ior we saw in the wake of the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion from elec­tion deniers and their enablers around the coun­try, this is a wel­come safe­guard, and it will take effect in time for this year’s pres­i­den­tial election.

The roll call in the House was as follows:

Roll Call
SB 5843
Elec­tion secu­ri­ty breaches
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/27/2024

Yeas: 58; Nays: 37; Excused: 3

Vot­ing Yea: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Alvara­do, Bate­man, Berg, Bergquist, Berry, Bronoske, Callan, Chap­man, Chopp, Cortes, Davis, Doglio, Don­aghy, Duerr, Enten­man, Fari­var, Fey, Fitzgib­bon, Fos­se, Good­man, Gregerson, Hack­ney, Klo­ba, Leav­itt, Lekanoff, Macri, Mena, Mor­gan, Nance, Orms­by, Ortiz-Self, Orwall, Paul, Peter­son, Pol­let, Ramel, Ramos, Reed, Reeves, Ric­cel­li, Rule, Ryu, San­tos, Senn, Shavers, Sim­mons, Slat­ter, Springer, Stearns, Stonier, Street, Tay­lor, Thai, Tharinger, Tim­mons, Walen, Wylie, Jinkins

Vot­ing Nay: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Abbarno, Barkis, Barnard, Caldier, Cham­bers, Cheney, Chris­t­ian, Con­nors, Cou­ture, Dent, Dye, Eslick, Goehn­er, Gra­ham, Grif­fey, Har­ris, Hutchins, Jacob­sen, Klick­er, Kretz, Low, May­cum­ber, McClin­tock, McEn­tire, Mos­bruck­er, Orcutt, Robert­son, Rude, San­dlin, Schmick, Schmidt, Steele, Stokes­bary, Walsh, Waters, Wilcox, Ybarra

Excused: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Chan­dler, Cor­ry, Volz

Repub­li­cans stuck togeth­er in oppo­si­tion to bill, result­ing in its pas­sage along par­ty lines (three Repub­li­cans missed the vote). In the Sen­ate, the bill received a mere three nay votes, as you can see from the Feb­ru­ary 2nd roll call:

Roll Call
SB 5843
Elec­tion secu­ri­ty breaches
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/2/2024

Yeas: 46; Nays: 3

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Boehnke, Braun, Cleve­land, Con­way, Dhin­gra, Dozi­er, For­tu­na­to, Frame, Gildon, Hansen, Hasegawa, Hawkins, Holy, Hunt, Kauff­man, Keis­er, King, Kud­er­er, Liias, Lovelett, Lovick, MacEwen, McCune, Mul­let, Muz­za­ll, Nguyen, Nobles, Ped­er­sen, Ran­dall, Rivers, Robin­son, Sal­daña, Salomon, Shew­make, Stan­ford, Tor­res, Trudeau, Valdez, Van De Wege, Wag­oner, War­nick, Well­man, Wil­son, C., Wil­son, J., Wil­son, L.

Vot­ing Nay: Sen­a­tors Pad­den, Schoesler, Short

House Repub­li­cans made sev­er­al efforts to amend the bill, which were rejected.

One amend­ment would have pro­vid­ed that intru­sion detec­tion sys­tem providers
could be held liable for any mali­cious activ­i­ty direct­ly attrib­ut­able to the intru­sion detec­tion sys­tem. Anoth­er would have bizarrely required that an intru­sion detec­tion sys­tem not oper­ate behind the fire­wall of a coun­ty auditor.

Thank­ful­ly, the var­i­ous schemes to weak­en the bill went nowhere. Now we’re on the verge of hav­ing some impor­tant new safe­guards added to our state elec­tions code at a crit­i­cal junc­ture. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Sec­re­tary of State Steve Hobbs, Sen­a­tor Nguyen, and all who worked on this time­ly legislation.