Boone County Election Systems Clear of PHP Flaw, Clerk Says

Boone County’s election equipment has nothing to do with the software bug making national headlines, according to County Clerk Brianna Lennon — but with Election Day three weeks off, she says a different kind of threat is the one actually worth watching.

Is Boone County’s Election System at Risk From the PHP Bug?

A newly disclosed set of vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that runs a huge share of the web, has software teams nationwide scrambling to patch systems this month. Lennon says Boone County isn’t one of them: she’s gotten confirmation from the county’s voting-system vendor, the county’s own IT department and the Missouri Secretary of State’s office that “we do not have anything operating with PHP,” she told the Columbia Missourian.

Boone County’s voting machines themselves aren’t connected to the internet at all, Lennon said. Some county websites and other systems are online, but she said those run on redundant systems, with much of the county’s election security still resting on non-digital backups — paper records and manual checks that don’t depend on any software patch. Her bigger worry isn’t a technical breach, she said, but anything that chips away at public confidence in the result.

What Else Should Boone, Howard and Cooper Voters Watch For Before Nov. 3?

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center issued its own warning Oct. 15, flagging a handful of midterm-election scams making the rounds nationally, according to the bureau’s public service announcement. Scammers are borrowing real candidates’ names, photos and logos to solicit campaign donations or sell merchandise that never ships; others pitch a fake “investment pool” that promises to pay back more than a victim puts in if a candidate wins; and some send texts or emails claiming a recipient isn’t registered to vote, linking to a fake registration page built to harvest personal information. The FBI also warns that AI-generated audio and video are making all of it more convincing.

The bureau’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, cited in the same release, put Missourians’ cybercrime losses at $233.9 million for the year, with residents 60 and older accounting for $91.6 million of that. The practical fix costs nothing: look up a campaign committee’s exact name at FEC.gov before giving money, and check your own registration directly at vote.gov rather than through a link in a text or email.

Early voting in Boone, Howard and Cooper counties runs through 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2 — see our guide to where, when and what to bring. For the two contested local races on this year’s ballot, see where the candidates stand.