PEKIN, Ill. — Just in time for election season, the Tazewell County Clerk’s Office has received nearly $6,000 in grant money.
Through two Federal CyberNavigator Grants, the office got north of $4,000 to purchase five new computers for the Election Division, and over $1,500 to reimburse county information technology staff for time put into making CyberNavigator upgrades.
County Clerk John Ackerman said his office has received a generous amount of funding over the past year.
“A year ago, when we first got into the program, we were allocated $29,428. Right now, we’re sitting at over $80,000 in grant funding we’ve received,” he said.
Ackerman explained why new computers were needed.
“We’d been operating on Windows 7, and Microsoft stopped doing security updates for that in January [2020],” he said.
“In order to get to Windows 10, we needed new computers, and while we were scheduled for this upgrade in the next year or two, this grant allowed us to purchase the computers now and not have to use taxpayers’ dollars to pay for them.”
Ackerman said while he knew the funding was available, he didn’t have the grant money earmarked in the fiscal year’s budget.
The CyberNavigator Program purports to help election authorities defend against cyber breaches and detect and recover from cyber attacks.
