Cereal production in Niger has fallen by 40% owing to extreme weather, leaving 2.6 million people in a state of acute hunger, while the desertification of crop and pasture land in Burkina Faso.

Where did this come from?

While much remains unknown about the investigations, one of the most pressing questions is what these breaches could mean for the security of voting machines in the midterm elections, less than two months away.

Election security experts say the breaches by themselves have not necessarily increased threats to the November voting. Election officials already assume hostile foreign governments might have sensitive data, so they take precautions to protect their voting systems.

The more immediate concern is the possibility that rogue election workers, including those sympathetic to the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, might use their access to election equipment and the knowledge gained through the breaches to launch attacks from within. Such attacks could be used to give their candidates or party an advantage or to introduce system problems that would sow further distrust in election results.

In some of the suspected security breaches, authorities are investigating whether local officials provided unauthorized access to people who copied software and hard drive data, and in several cases shared it publicly.

After the Georgia breach, a group of election security experts said the unauthorized copying and sharing of election data from rural Coffee County presented “serious threats” to the November election. They urged the state election board to replace the touchscreen devices used throughout the state and use only hand-marked paper ballots.

Harri Hursti, a leading expert in voting security, is concerned about another possibility: Access to the voting equipment data or software could be used to develop a realistic-looking video in which someone falsely claims to have manipulated a voting system, he said.

Such a video posted online or to social media on or after election day could create chaos for election officials and prompt voters to challenge the accuracy of the results.