This article is from Governing.com by Tod Newcombe:

State and local governments can improve confidence in the information posted on their website by encrypting them and shifting to .gov domains, reports Ben Miller, Government Technology’s* business editor. While anyone can obtain a website using .com, .net, or .org, from vendors like GoDaddy.com, acquiring a .gov website requires the buyer to submit evidence they are purchasing the domain name on behalf a state or local government entity, according to cybersecurity firm McAfee.

Yet, in a survey of 13 states that will be battlegrounds in the 2020 elections, McAfee found that just 54 percent of counties had an encrypted front webpage, 17 percent had an official website ending in .gov and only 10 percent had a website that was both encrypted and .gov.

While scammers have targeted citizens pretending to be government websites, McAfee said it has seen “no evidence of malicious actors spoofing county websites to misinform voters.” Yet the barriers for staging a political misinformation campaign are low.

Read the full article here.