Things will go wrong and mistakes will be made when Americans go to the polls in November, but that doesn’t mean the election is unsafe, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Wednesday.
According to Jen Easterly, executive director of CISA, the U.S. election is incredibly complex. An estimated 150 million voters are expected to go to the polls on Nov. 5. And it’s inevitable that there will be problems, whether it’s a poll worker who forgets her key, a major storm, or even a cyberattack.
While these problems will be disruptive, they will not affect the security and integrity of the voting process, despite what U.S. foreign adversaries will claim in their attempts to undermine the process, she said.
“We have to expect that, we have to prepare for it, and Americans should not allow that,” Easterly said. “It’s really up to all of us to preserve democracy.”
Easterly made the comments during the opening keynote panel of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. The annual event brings together thousands of hackers and other security professionals from around the world.
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Election security has been a major issue in the past two presidential elections. During the 2016 election, there was much talk about the possibility that a foreign government, such as Russia, could “hack” the election, either changing the results and winners without anyone knowing, or making them so unlikely that confidence in the system would be destroyed.
However, little evidence of interference was found. In the four years since, many states have improved their systems and replaced voting technology that experts have been concerned about.
There were concerns about possible hacking ahead of the 2020 election, but officials found no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. Chris Krebs, then director of the Agency for Cyber Security and Infrastructure SecurityThe federal agency charged with protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats has declared the 2020 election the “most secure election” in U.S. history.
But that didn’t stop former President Donald Trump from claiming otherwise. To this day, he and many of his supporters continue to falsely claim that the 2020 election was rigged, despite the lack of evidence.
Easterly and the other panelists, including Hans de Vries, Chief Cybersecurity and Operations Officer at the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and Felicity Oswald, who heads the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre, did not mention Trump during the event. Instead, they focused on external threats posed by nation states.
Whether the U.S. is attacked through technological means or disinformation operations, Easterly said state and local election officials will be ready. By their very nature, she said, they are uniquely capable of handling any crisis they encounter.
And CISA has done its part to help. Since the start of the current election cycle, Easterly says, her agency has conducted hundreds of physical and cybersecurity assessments, tabletop exercises and training events with state and local officials, all with the goal of reducing the risk of any potential attack.
If you have any questions about election security, Easterly recommends contacting your local election officials for more information. Or, better yet, sign up to be a poll worker and see the process for yourself.
And if what you hear about an election doesn’t match what local election officials are telling you, “it’s probably just noise,” she said.
