Russian Hackers Were ‘In a Position’ to Alter Florida Voter Rolls, Rubio Confirms

It was the day before the 2016 presidential election, and at the Volusia County elections office, near Florida’s Space Coast, workers were so busy that they had fallen behind on their correspondence.

Lisa Lewis, the supervisor of elections, stumbled on an important email sent to her and three others in the office, by then a week old, that appeared to be from VR Systems, the vendor that sells electronic voter list equipment to nearly every county in the state. “Please take a look at the instructions for our modernised products,” it said, using British spelling and offering an attachment. Something about the email seemed off.

“It was from Gmail,” Ms. Lewis said. “They don’t have Gmail.”

Ms. Lewis, it turned out, was right to be suspicious. Though it had VR Systems’ distinctive logo, with a red V and a blue R, the email contained a malicious Trojan virus, and it originated not from the elections vendor but from the Russian military intelligence unit known as the G.R.U. The email had been sent to 120 elections email accounts across Florida.

Also buried in Ms. Lewis’s inbox was a warning from VR’s chief operating officer, flagging the dangerous spearphishing attempt and warning all his customers not to click on it.

But, it now appears, someone did.

Slipped into the long-anticipated special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last week was a single sentence that caused a stir throughout the state and raised new questions about the vulnerability of the nation’s electoral systems.

Although the spearphishing attempt in Florida had first been brought to light nearly two years ago when The Intercept cited a secret National Security Agency report, state officials said they were certain no elections computers had been compromised. The Mueller report turned that assertion on its head. “The F.B.I.,” it said, “believes that this operation enabled the G.R.U. to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government.”

In an interview on Friday, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took it one step further, saying that Russian hackers not only accessed a Florida voting system, but were “in a position” to change voter roll data.

The report has sent Florida officials scurrying once again for specifics. Which county? Could there have been more than one?

“They won’t tell us which county it was. Are you kidding me?” an exasperated Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, said at a news conference in Miami on Thursday. “Why would you have not said something immediately?”