ARGUMENT: ELECTION SECURITYInterference-Free Elections? How Quaint!

There are three major elections taking place in 2024: in Taiwan, the United States, and Russia. So, what are the chances that we’ll see cyber-enabled disruption campaigns targeting each of these polls? Tom Uren writes in Lawfare that in the case of the upcoming U.S. election, it seems inevitable.

Urn adds:

Election interference techniques take many forms. At the “lowest” level are information operations on social media that spread disinformation and propaganda. In the context of an election, these types of operations tend to get lost in the noise.

At the “highest” level of severity, there is the possibility of direct interference in the electoral process: messing with the actual votes. In theory, this could shape the outcome of an election, and even unsuccessful attempts undermine the perceived legitimacy of election outcomes.

Somewhere in the middle are tactics such as hack-and-leak operations that were used by Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These had an impact on that election because the mainstream media picked them up and amplified them.

….

Gavin Wilde, a Russia and information warfare expert at the Carnegie Endowment, told Seriously Risky Business he thought cyber-enabled interference in the 2024 U.S. election was “inevitable.” He said Russia would view that kind of interference “less as transgressing a norm than as rigid adherence to one.”

Wilde stated that although electoral system manipulation would be very difficult to pull off successfully in the U.S. due to the highly federated nature of its elections, the potential negative impact on the public’s confidence in election outcomes resulting from this type of interference—be it attempted or successful—was very high. He said this threat required an “all hands on deck” approach from national and election security officials.

Wilde also considered hack-and-leak and online influence operations to be “almost a certainty.” Here, he thought solutions lay not so much in foreign and security policy but instead needed to be more domestically focused. These types of operations were sometimes a “convenient distraction from conversations we need to have about the responsibility of journalists, the role of opaque money in politics, the quality of our elites, the responsiveness of government to the concerns of ordinary citizens, etc.”

Wilde also mentioned Executive Order 13848, a Trump-era directive that attempted to define ahead of time how the administration would respond to specific threats against election integrity. If clear thresholds were set out beforehand, government officials might be better equipped to respond to interference.

If those triggers are not preestablished, officials face the unenviable task of responding to cyber-enabled interference during the heat of an election campaign.

In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, the Obama administration was aware of Russian efforts to influence the election in favor of Trump but did not call them out publicly. At the time, President Obama said publicizing Russia’s efforts would have created “just one more political scrum” and would “raise more questions about the integrity of the election.”

What about tit-for-tat American interference in next year’s Russian election? Wilde doesn’t think it makes any sense.

“In addition to being extremely provocative, escalatory, and hypocritical—any attempt to meddle in their sham electoral process is fruitless any way you slice it. Putin isn’t a candidate at this point. He’s a system. Neither information ops nor hacks can alter such a resilient system.”