The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency responsible for securing critical infrastructure including elections, created a “rumor control” surrounding the 2020 election, which led to ire from Trump and caused CISA’s leadership to either be fired or resign.Ĭurrent CISA Director Jen Easterly said last week that despite the controversy, the page would remain up for future elections as a way to debunk misleading claims. In response to mounting concerns around election security, officials have jumped into action. Among the claims repeated by Trump and his defenders are allegations against Dominion Voting Systems that the company considers slanderous - and has filed billion-dollar lawsuits over. Polls have shown that a majority of GOP voters believe Biden won through fraud, despite no evidence to support it. Republican concerns about election integrity led to the recent controversial months-long audit of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which confirmed President Biden’s win, but has inspired similar audits in other states. “We know how to secure our infrastructure and protect it from hacking, but we don’t know how to protect people from hacking, and that is absolutely one of the biggest concerns we are looking at looking ahead,” Howard, who currently serves as senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said. Howard told The Hill Friday that while election security had come “light years” since then, she was increasingly worried about the public’s perception. Liz Howard served as deputy commissioner of elections in Virginia in 2016 and helped oversee the decertification of voting machines that did not have a paper record following that election. “Our systems are secure, but it’s older technology, and we need to stay ahead of our adversaries by upgrading to the latest cyber technology, and that is the latest election community consensus, that is why we adopted 2.0,” Palmer said Friday.īut with Trump and his allies clinging to false claims of widespread voter fraud in last November’s election, the improvements might do little to increase public confidence. Political parties were not exempt from the efforts, with the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee falling victim to Russian GRU intelligence hacking efforts in 2016 that involved stealing and releasing thousands of documents.įollowing revelations in reports issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee and from former special counsel Robert Mueller, efforts to shore up election security became a priority.Ĭongress allocated more than $800 million to states between 20 to enhance technology, shore up cybersecurity and cope with changes to elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic, including moving to more paper-based and absentee voting.ĮAC commissioners in February unanimously approved the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines 2.0 to overhaul and improve voting equipment standards, with Hicks noting the guidelines were being “implemented as we speak.” A Facebook official later testified to Congress that more than 126 million people may have seen Internet Research Agency content ahead of the 2016 elections. The Russian Internet Research Agency also used sites such as Facebook and Twitter to spread disinformation to sway the election toward Trump. In the months leading up to November, Russian government hackers targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states, successfully accessing voter registration systems in two of them, though no votes were changed. “I believe that the biggest vulnerability is disinformation, that these machines are not functioning in the way that they were intended,” Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Commissioner Thomas Hicks, who was nominated by former President Obama, said Thursday during a virtual event hosted by Freedom House, the Bush Institute, Issue One and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.ĮAC Chairman Donald Palmer, nominated by former President Trump, agreed with Hicks, telling The Hill Friday that “our systems are secure, and they have been tested and are secure, and the misinformation about those systems, that hurts voter confidence.”Ĭoncerns over misleading claims undermining elections are nothing new, but gained widespread public attention after 2016. Since the 2016 vote, Congress has allocated millions of dollars to states in an attempt to shore up cybersecurity and replace outdated, vulnerable voting machines, but even as improvements are made, faith in the system is being eroded. elections isn’t Russian hacking or domestic voter fraud but disinformation and misinformation increasingly undermining the public’s perception of voting security. Officials say the biggest threat facing U.S.
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