State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Most counties’ election sites still lack .gov and HTTPS, McAfee says

StateScoop: A vast majority of websites operated by county election administrators around the United States lack key security features that would help users verify that the sites they’re viewing truly belong to their local officials, according to research published Thursday by the cybersecurity firm McAfee.

Following a review of sites run by county boards of elections in all 50 states, the company found that barely 20% have moved their websites to the federally administered .gov top-level domain, while 45% don’t employ the encrypted HTTPS protocol that preloads sites in browsers to prevent users from being redirected by third-party organizations or malicious actors.

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