Voters at the Lake County Board of Elections in Painesville in 2020.

PAINESVILLE, Ohio — Two Lake County officials sought sensitive information about voting and tabulations machines shortly before and after an attempted data breach that happened inside the county commissioner’s office on the day of a special election, according to interviews and emails.

The county board of elections rebuffed the attempts by Recorder Becky Lynch and Clerk of Courts Faith Andrews because state and federal laws tightly restrict who can access information about the machines, which, if disseminated could pose a security risk for safe elections.

Lynch, in an email to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, however, claims she found the manuals online and sent them to members of the county’s automatic data processing board. She said Andrews sought the information at a time when the board of elections began the process of buying new voting machines.

“That sparked the requests for more information and the manuals to the machine, all among the many headlines of voter fraud at the time,” Lynch’s email said.

The requests happened at a time when Republicans at local levels across the country began pushing for information on voting machines to try and find proof that fraud contributed to former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election in what has become known as the “Stop the Steal” movement.

Dozens of court challenges and investigations turned up no evidence of any widespread fraud in the election. Criminal investigations into data breaches and attempted data breaches in other parts of the country have been launched and appear similar to the one in Lake County.

Lynch, in a follow-up email to a reporter, forwarded the manuals and said she later found them by conducting an internet search using the voting machine model numbers.

Lake County Board of Elections Director Ross McDonald had said he and the board of elections attorneys determined that Andrews and Lynch should not have received the manuals and denied their requests.

“What really mattered to us is that this is a very sensitive document, and it’s a security record, which is exempt from public records laws in Ohio,” McDonald said. “There’s a lot of potential to give people insight into administrator-level information that only election officials should know.”

McDonald said there are several levels of elections security that likely would thwart a potential attempt at hacking. Still, he said, “It’s a risk that shouldn’t be there.”

Andrews did not return multiple messages seeking comment.

On May 4, 2021, the day of a special election, someone using Lake County Commissioner John Hamercheck’s security card swiped into the building, logged onto the county’s server with a non-county laptop in Hamercheck’s office and recorded county computer data, officials previously said. The attempted hack never reached the board of elections servers and only amounted to showing wireless printers linking up with each other, officials previously said.

Screenshots of what was accessed ended up displayed at a cyber symposium that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a Trump supporter, had promised would demonstrate election fraud.

Lindell posted a video message on social media Wednesday that said the FBI seized his phone and asked him questions about an elections data breach scheme in Mesa County, Colorado, in which authorities have charged local elections clerk Tina Peters and a deputy clerk with breaching the county’s voting system technology.

The information stolen from Mesa County — a hard drive copy of proprietary software developed by Dominion Voting Systems that is used across the country — ended up featured in Lindell’s symposium, alongside the benign information taken from the Lake County commissioner’s office.

Both Peters and Hamercheck had spoken with Lindell associate Doug Frank, a former Cincinnati-area teacher who worked with local officials across the country, prior to the symposium, according to The Washington Post. Frank on Wednesday wrote on Telegram that the FBI also seized his phone.

Hamercheck previously denied any involvement in the incident. A spokeswoman for the Lake County commissioners referred a reporter to county prosecutors. Assistant Lake County Prosecutor David Hackman declined comment.

Ohio Attorney General spokesman Steve Irwin said the investigation remains on-going, as did Ohio Secretary of State spokesman Rob Nichols. An FBI spokeswoman, Vicki Anderson, confirmed the existence of the investigation to The Washington Post in August 2021. When asked about the status of the case this week, the agency’s new spokeswoman, Susan Licate, said she couldn’t confirm or deny the investigation existed.

Elections officials have said attempts to gain access to voting machine information could undermine the confidence in secure elections and, in cases across the country where information has been turned over, could render voting machines and tabulators vulnerable to hackers.

McDonald, Lake County’s director of its board of elections, said he has never had requests for voting manuals in the last seven years. He said he doesn’t believe Lynch or Andrews did anything nefarious, though they may have been motivated by rampant unsubstantiated rumors of fraud that permeated the country since the 2020 presidential election, he said.

“I think they just wanted the manuals because there was a lot of talk in circles regarding the 2020 election that they believe that there was a lot of fraud that occurred,” McDonald said.

Lynch has posted on social media about 2020 election fraud and re-posted statements from Trump about how the election was stolen.

In April 2021, shortly before the breach, Lynch asked the board of elections for the manuals for the county’s voting machines and tabulators, both for the machines they used at the time and the new ones the county was considering buying. It eventually bought the machines. McDonald said he denied the request and never heard back from Lynch.

Lynch, a member of the county’s data board, later tried to route the purchase of the machines through the data board. McDonald said that was improper, and Lynch’s request was denied.

The day after the attempted breach, Andrews emailed McDonald and said she had previously asked for the manuals for machines being used at the time and during the 2020 presidential election, along with the manuals for the new machines.

“Still don’t have those,” Andrews wrote. “I need to see copies as soon as possible please.”

McDonald sent her the poll workers’ manual the same day and sought an opinion from Lake County prosecutors on the machines’ manuals. Andrews immediately responded, saying: “I don’t see any indication on this manual anywhere that it was produced by the manufacturer of the machine… ES&S. I need the manual produced by ES&S for their machine…operations manual and those that would contain specifications for the voting machine itself as well as the tabulator.”

She followed up five days later, after hearing that McDonald asked the prosecutor’s office for legal advice.

“You had to ascertain whether another elected official for the County of Lake, an officer of the Court, could view the manuals for the existing voting machines. Wowser…that’s intense,” she wrote.

Assistant Lake County Prosecutor Michael DeLeone responded two weeks after Andrews’ initial request and denied it, citing Ohio law that bars the dissemination of the manuals.

“In hindsight, I’m not sure we really thought about it too much,” McDonald said. “Maybe if we knew about the attempted data breach in real time, we would have looked at it differently.”

Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your California Privacy Rights (User Agreement updated 1/1/21. Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement updated 7/1/2022).

© 2022 Advance Local Media LLC. All rights reserved (About Us). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local.

Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site.