Elections Security Officials Head to Capitol Hill Amid Warnings of Russian Meddling

WASHINGTON — A day after urging elections officials to shore up their systems before midterm voting, the Senate Intelligence Committee planned to call top federal and state elections security officials to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to explain how they are trying to protect ballots from being hacked.

It is already proving to be an exceedingly difficult challenge. U.S. intelligence agencies are still grappling with how to neutralize Russian disinformation campaigns more than a year after concluding that Moscow sought to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. And federal and state officials are struggling to close obvious gaps in the country’s election infrastructure, such as requiring the use of voting machines that leave a trail of paper ballots and more secure logins to voting databases.

Such practical matters were the focus of a set of recommendations that the Senate committee released Tuesday and were to be a central subject at Wednesday’s hearing. The main witnesses scheduled to appear were Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, and Jeh Johnson, who served in the post under President Barack Obama during the 2016 election.

Other scheduled witnesses included representatives from the National Association of Secretaries of State, whose members oversee state election systems, and cyber security officials from the Homeland Security Department.

The recommendations released by committee Tuesday — the first such disclosure in its year-old investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling — covered much of what experts and intelligence officials have been urging elections authorities to do for months.

The panel also pressed the Trump administration to make it clear that any attacks on a U.S. election would be viewed as a hostile act.

Since the 2016 election, federal officials have concluded that Russian hackers targeted election systems in 21 states and breached at least one, in Illinois, although they did not manage to change any votes.

U.S. intelligence officials have warned that Russia considered its campaign to sow social and political divisions in 2016 as a success, and is already meddling in the midterm elections. A central tool of the campaign — fake social media accounts to spread propaganda and disinformation — continues to be used unabated, the officials said.