PerspectiveOfficials Just Had Their Last Chance to Road Test Elections Before 2020
From a security perspective, Tuesday’s odd-year election went off without a hitch: Officials didn’t spot any major disruptions from hacking or disinformation campaigns. But Joseph Marks writes that the fight to protect the 2020 contest is only ramping up. And officials were quick to warn that it will be a far juicier target for foreign actors.
From a security perspective, Tuesday’s odd-year election went off without a hitch: Officials didn’t spot any major disruptions from hacking or disinformation campaigns.
Joseph Marks writes in the Washington Post that the fight to protect the 2020 contest is only ramping up. And officials were quick to warn that it will be a far juicier target for foreign actors.
“Our adversaries want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment and affect government policies. Russia, China, Iran, and other foreign malicious actors all will seek to interfere in the voting process or influence voter perceptions,” officials including FBI Director Christopher Wray, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone and DHS’s top cybersecurity official Chris Krebs warned in a joint statement.
They pledged that “the U.S. government will defend our democracy and maintain transparency with the American public about our efforts.”
Marks writes:
Still, [Tuesday’s] election was effectively the last significant chance to road test its latest security advances before next year’s big day. And the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division brought all its resources to bear on the swath of local, legislative and gubernatorial races.
That included a war room where officials from DHS, the FBI, state election leaders, political parties and tech and social media companies parsed digital threats to election systems and a virtual “situational awareness room” where they shared that information with about 200 state and local election officials across the country.
DHS also pulled in data from relatively new sensors attached to the networks of election administration offices in places holding major contests, which are designed to flag any abnormal activity. And state and local officials ran cybersecurity rapid response plans they’d developed since Russia’s 2016 election interference operation.
Counties in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Texas, meanwhile, piloted the new and more secure voting machines they purchased in the wake of 2016 with help from $380 million appropriated by Congress.
