County says El Paso voting rolls secure, monitored for fraudulent activity

With the election just less than three weeks away, there’s been a lot of focus on increasing voter turnout.

Systems are being tested, machines are being set up, and procedures are being reviewed ahead of Election Day November 8th.

In parts of the country, like Indiana and Florida, attention has shifted to issues with voter rolls.

ABC-7 spoke with El Paso County election officials who say they are working to make sure polling stations are secure and the voting process is not compromised.

Officials said El Paso voter rolls are kept local, as opposed to sending them out to a central statewide database. New registrations in the county are compared to Texas Department of Public Safety or Social Security Administration records to make sure they are legitimate.

With the exception of vendors who manage the county’s secure offline database, information from newly-registered voters can only be accessed from secure connections within the elections office.

The county’s system tracks every actions from every account authorized to access information in the database. El Paso County Elections Administrator Lisa Wise said the county and its database system vendor have been checking to make sure the database remains secure.

“We had a meeting yesterday with just some cyber-experts,” Wise said, “What to look for, if you see something like this, if you see any sort of bizarre IP addresses on the network kind of trying to login unsuccessfully or trying different ways.”

El Paso County has seen an increase in registered voters since the last election. There are currently 427,000 registered voters in El Paso County, up from around 394,000 in 2012.