U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson said Monday that she’s heard rumors that Broward is the county where the election system was hacked by Russians during the 2016 presidential election.
Speaking at a congressional hearing in Fort Lauderdale on voting rights and election administration, Wilson said “it’s been rumored that the county is Broward.”
During the hearing, and later in a brief interview, Wilson said she didn’t have specific evidence. “Nobody has proven that yet,” she said.
Steve Vancore, spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections Peter Antonacci, said it wasn’t Broward.
“She is wrong,” Vancore said via text message. “To be clear, Broward was not the county referenced in the Mueller report … No bad emails ever made it through and the system worked exactly as it should.”
The what-county-is-it question arose last month when the redacted report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, was released.
“The elephant in the room is Russia,” Wilson said Monday before bringing up the Broward rumor. Wilson, a Miami Democrat, represents part of South Broward.
Mueller’s report said the FBI concluded that efforts to infiltrate Florida election offices’ computer system was successful and the intruders were able to “gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”
The report didn’t answer critical questions about just what was accessed, and where. State and local elections officials have said they have no evidence that Florida elections systems were infiltrated by the Russians.
The Mueller report said that the GRU, the Russian Military intelligence agency, attempted to gain access to election systems by sending phishing emails to accounts used by county officials in Florida. An attachment “permitted the GRU to access the infected computer.”
Many counties received phishing emails purporting to come from VR Systems, a vendor used by most county elections departments in Florida.
Phishing emails went to Brenda Snipes, who was Broward supervisor of elections in 2016 and resigned last year, to Snipes’ assistant, and to a general email inbox, Vancore said.
He said the emails “were intercepted and quarantined and the attachment [tagged as a virus] never made it through.”
Antonacci was appointed to replace Snipes after last year’s election.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he would meet with the FBI to try to learn more. Wilson said she hopes the governor finds out which county was involved. The FBI, she said, is “the only one who knows which county it was.”
aman@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4550 or Twitter @browardpolitics