Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill announced late last week she has hired an expert who will defend against foreign interference in the November elections.

At a press conference with U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D) Merrill said the state’s voting data is not likely to be hacked, but added she is concerned about the “hundreds of millions of dollars” being spent on disinformation campaigns that seek to suppress the vote, reported CT Mirror.

“Murphy said the Russians are the most active when it comes to voter disinformation campaigns,” CT Mirror reported.

The secretary of state said she will be using some of the $5.4 million the state received in federal funding to protect election security to expand mail-in voting, and ensure the safety of in-person voting as well as the integrity of the ballot counting process.

Backed by Gov. Ned Lamont (D), prior to the primary election in August, Merrill sent out 1.2 million unsolicited absentee ballot applications to all Democrats and Republicans listed as active voters in the state.

Approximately 100,000 of the absentee ballots sent, however, were returned to Merrill’s office as undeliverable, a portion which she said represented only eight percent of applications and is far below the 15 percent the National Association of Secretaries of State describes as ordinary for such mailings.

According to CT Mirror, Gabe Rosenberg, spokesman for Merrill’s office, said the election disinformation expert was hired on a contract basis “to identify mis- and disinformation related to Connecticut elections, reporting and correcting it in real-time, and identifying any other information threats in the planning stage.”

Merrill said by hiring the elections analyst she was hoping to head off any suggestion that Connecticut’s voting system is not secure and that any Connecticut voter could cast a ballot twice.

Marc E. Fitch of Yankee Institute wrote last week that, for the state’s primary election in August, the town of Old Lyme received about 900 absentee ballots, but 700 of them were “either not signed or dated properly or were missing the outer envelope which ensures a chain of custody from the voter to the town clerk and then to the registrar as a means of protecting against voter fraud.”

Fitch continued:

A quick email from Old Lyme Town Clerk Vicki Urbowicz to Ted Bromley, Director of Elections for the Office of the Secretary of State, asked if ballots with no outer envelopes were to be counted and if the registrar could accept only her date stamp and initials on the inner envelope.

Bromley confirmed that they were to be counted anyway. “Don’t need times today. Initials are OK,” Bromley wrote back.

“I was blown away, as a registrar,” said Cathy Carter, registrar for Old Lyme. “We were told it doesn’t matter if it wasn’t signed or dated by the town clerk, we were told to count them anyway.”

In July, Connecticut Republicans launched a Citizen Voter Fraud Task Force, seeking to end “decades of irresponsible Democrat leadership” that has led to a “voting system full of irregularities and bad data,” state GOP chairman J.R. Romano said.

As Breitbart News reported, Democrat vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that the Russians could interfere with the general election and cause the Democrats to lose their bid for the White House.

“The Department of Homeland Security bulletin said that Russia is trying to amplify claims that mail-in voting will lead to widespread voting fraud and undermine the public’s trust in the upcoming election,” host Dana Bash asked. “Are you worried that Russian interference could cost you the election?”

Harris responded that, “theoretically,” that could happen, and added:

I am clear that Russia interfered in the election of the president of the United States in 2016. I serve on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We have published detailed reports about exactly what we believe happened. And I do believe that there will be foreign interference in the 2020 election and that Russia will be at the front of the line.

“We have classic voter suppression, we have what happened in 2016, which is foreign interference,” she added. “We have a president who is trying to convince the American people not to believe in the integrity of our election system and compromise their belief that their vote might actually count.”