Anthony Ferrante had just arrived for work at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, when the first attack hit. Around 7 a.m., internet service went out across the United States and parts of Europe. Reddit, Netflix, and The New York Times website wouldn’t load. Ferrante couldn’t check Twitter for updates because that was down too. “No one knew what it was,” he says. “It was definitely chaotic.”

It was Friday, October 21st, 2016. In two weeks, Americans would pick a new president. When Ferrante, a director in the White House’s cybersecurity team, realized the internet had gone dark across the country, he feared the worst. Ferrante thought he was witnessing a dry run for an attack on the election.

A native of Portland, Maine, with pale Nordic features and a sharp widow’s peak, Ferrante hacked his first computer when he was 10 and studied computer science at Fordham... when the September 11th attacks happened. He quit corporate America, joined the FBI, and specialized in tracking terrorists on the internet; in his first case at the bureau, he helped foil the terrorist plot to blow up the PATH train tunnel between New York and New Jersey. Over the next decade, he rose to become one of the FBI’s top cyber-security agents and helped write President Obama’s directive that created the first chain of command in the event of a major cyberattack on U.S. soil.

...Four years ago, for an embarrassingly modest price, Russia pulled off one of the more audacious acts of election interference in modern history. The Internet Research Agency, the team of Kremlin-backed online propagandists, spent $15 million to $20 million and wreaked havoc on the psyche of the American voter... Russian intelligence agents carried out the digital version of Watergate, infiltrating the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, stealing tens of thousands of emails, and weaponizing them in the days and weeks before the election.

Russian-based hackers tested election websites in all 50 states for weak spots, like burglars casing a would-be target. “The Russians were testing whether our windows were open, rattling our doors to see whether they were locked, and found the windows and doors wide open,” says Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “The fact that they didn’t interject themselves more dramatically into our election was, I think, almost luck.”

We’ve made progress since the last election — but we’re much less secure than we should be. To use Sen. Warner’s analogy, the windows and doors are no longer wide open, but the burglars are more sophisticated, and there are a lot more of them than there were four years ago.

They may try to break into our voting systems; they may push online propaganda to merely create the impression of an attack as a way to undermine our faith in the electoral process. “The target is the minds of the American people,” says Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council. “In some ways, we’re less vulnerable than we were in 2016. In other ways, it’s more.”

Nearly every expert agrees on this: The worst-case scenario, the one we need to prepare for, is a situation that causes Americans to question the bedrock of our democracy — free and fair elections. If such a catastrophe occurred and the integrity of a national election came into doubt, Michael Daniel, the former cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House who now runs the Cyber Threat Alliance, isn’t sure the country would ever be the same.

Experts who study election systems in the U.S. say many flaws remain. Some counties and states still use outdated voting equipment and insecure election software: At the 2018 DEFCON hacker conference, an 11-year-old hacked into a copycat version of Florida’s state election website and changed vote totals in less than 10 minutes.

Only three states conduct mandatory, scientifically rigorous post-election audits to ensure the final vote count is accurate. “We’re still in a situation going into 2020 where there are significant gaps left in the security of election infrastructure,” says J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer science professor who studies voting equipment. “Until we ensure that all of the doors are locked, there will be ample opportunity for foreign adversaries to disrupt or, in the worst-case scenario, change the outcome of close elections.”