When Americans head to the polls in November, things will go wrong and mistakes will happen, but that doesn’t mean the elections won’t be secure, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Wednesday.
CISA Director Jen Easterly said US elections are incredibly complex, with an estimated 150 million voters expected to head to the polls on November 5. Problems are bound to happen, whether that’s a poll worker forgetting their keys, a major storm or a cyberattack.
But while these issues will cause disruption, they will not affect the security and integrity of the voting and counting process, despite claims by America’s foreign adversaries seeking to undermine it, she said.
“We should expect it, we should prepare for it, and the American people should not tolerate it,” Easterly said. “It is the responsibility of all of us to protect our democracy.”
Easterly made the comments during the opening keynote panel of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, an annual event that draws thousands of hackers and security professionals from around the world.
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Election security has been a hot topic in the past two presidential elections, with the 2016 election making headlines with allegations that a foreign government, such as Russia, could “hack” the election, silently changing the outcome or the winner, or making changes so obviously unlikely that they would undermine confidence in the system.
But little evidence of fraudulent interference was found, and over the next four years many states strengthened their systems and replaced the kinds of voting technology that experts had feared.
There were concerns about possible hacking ahead of the 2020 election, but authorities found no evidence of widespread election fraud. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security AgencyThe U.S. Marshals Service, the federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats, declared the 2020 election to be the “most secure election” in American history.
But former President Donald Trump continued to insist that there was no fraud. To this day, Trump and many of his supporters continue to falsely claim, without any evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen.
Easterly and other panelists, including Hans de Vries, the European Union Cybersecurity Agency’s chief cybersecurity and operations officer, and Felicity Oswald, who heads the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Centre, did not mention Trump during the event, instead focusing on threats from external nation states.
Easterly said whether the U.S. is attacked by technological means or disinformation campaigns, state and local election officials are prepared: They are, she said, by nature, highly equipped to handle any crisis they face.
And CISA has been doing its part to help them: Since the current election cycle began, Easterly said, her agency has conducted hundreds of physical and cybersecurity assessments, tabletop exercises and training events with state and local officials, all aimed at mitigating the risks posed by all kinds of potential attacks.
For those who are still concerned about the security of their elections, Easterly encourages them to contact their local election officials for more information, or even better, sign up to be a poll worker and see the voting process firsthand.
And if what you’re hearing about the election doesn’t match what local election officials are saying, “it’s probably just noise,” she said.
