Details: Since German reunification in 1990, the CDU has led the state of Saxony while the SPD has reigned in Brandenburg. Each party eked out a victory in its respective stronghold, of 32% and 26%, thanks to strong retail politicking by local candidates.

• Yes, but: The AfD came in a close second, with almost a third of the vote in Saxony and close to a quarter in Brandenburg.

Where it stands: The AfD's ascendance is bringing together unexpected political bedfellows.

• Brandenburg and Saxony will likely cobble together 3-party governments, as is now the case in nearly a third of Germany’s federal states.
• When Merkel's government comes to an end in 2021, Berlin might have to make room for 3 parties in the next Cabinet.

Between the lines: The AfD was on the wane until the 2015 migration crisis paved its way into the federal Parliament in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote. It has hit a ceiling of 14% nationwide, but Sunday’s strong results show the AfD to be a major party in the former East.

• Most AfD voters view the party as a channel for protest. Pre-election polls show that 59% of voters in Brandenburg and 66% in Saxony feel like second-class citizens.
• The AfD has not only pulled in CDU and SPD voters but also mobilized non-voters. Close to 40% of this weekend's AfD voters stayed home 5 years ago.
• The LEFT party, tied to the former communists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), used to be the protest party for disaffected voters in the East, but lost approximately 8 percentage points in each state.

Sudha David-Wilp is a senior transatlantic fellow and deputy director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office.

• Ransomware typically locks users out of their own files until they pay a ransom. Across an election office's network, those files could range in sensitivity from trivial vacation schedules to essential voter data.

Background: DHS has been aiding local officials since 2016, trying to prevent a repeat of that year's election interference campaigns.

• Voting machines often dominate the public conversations around election security. But DHS and localities have to take a much more holistic view of security. Russia did not attack voting machines in 2016, but it did conduct reconnaissance on accessing and altering voter registration databases.

The big question: Accessing and altering data is technically all that most ransomware does, and the criminals behind ransomware are at least notionally less sophisticated than the militaries and spies that states are gearing up to protect against. So why is ransomware still a problem for elections?

• Many states have made defending against motivated, strategic actors their election security priority. But ransomware is deployed by opportunistic criminals, and fighting it can be more akin to fighting a force of chaos.

When Russia probed voter databases in 2016, it approached them through the easiest access point — vulnerabilities in web applications that connect to the database. So states concentrated on shoring up defenses around the web applications and databases, said Dylan Owen, senior manager for cyber services at Raytheon.

• But less critical systems that access the secure database may not be as well protected.
• Elections officials might be left with the time-consuming task of restoring dozens of office systems in their entirety in a ransomware attack. That could impair their ability to provide services, even if the ransomware never reaches the voter database.
• "This is more about defending the [systems] that connect to those databases, in my mind," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, an election security expert serving as chief technologist of the Center for Democracy & Technology, speculated in an email.

What they're saying: Homeland Security describes both the databases and the systems retrieving data as potential concerns.

• "Voter registration databases could be an attractive target for these attacks," said Christopher Krebs, who directs the cyber-focused wing of DHS, in a written statement. "A successful ransomware attack at a critical point before an election could limit access to information and has the potential to undermine public confidence in the election itself."

States have made strides in protecting voter databases, but not all states are entirely there yet.

• "In a utopian world, that’s how the process would work," said Brian Varner, a researcher at Symantec who recently discovered at least one instance where the utopia never came to fruition.
• Varner presented research at the DEF CON conference about a state that inadequately separated its elections computers and databases from other state systems. Hackers who infected one of those other systems could hypothetically work their way back to the election systems.