Election Threats Include Disinformation, Foreign Interference and Cyber Attacks
Election security is a national issue and a local responsibility. In the face of threats and deniers, election management has become hazardous and expensive. You could call it the price of democracy.
Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade authored a commentary calling for significant, continuing investments in election infrastructure. “Despite challenges, local election offices uphold their sacred duty of administering elections and work on the front lines protecting our democracy. But we shouldn’t expect them to continue to do this vital role without proper resources and support.”
Griffin-Valade estimates it will require an investment of $767 million over the next decade in Oregon to update vote-counting machines, pay for election operations and protect against cyberthreats.
“With every election, officials face increasingly complex threats, both physical and cyber. Oregon’s county clerks are struggling with staffing, retention and recruitment in the midst of a toxic political environment,” she wrote. “The Department of Homeland Security has designated election infrastructure as a critical sector that could be vulnerable to a range of threats, including interference from foreign governments.”
The price tag for election security nationally could exceed $53 billion over the next 10 years, Griffin-Valade says. “Unfortunately, the federal government has not consistently nor sufficiently funded election departments across the nation.” She noted President Biden’s budget included a request for $5 billion in Help America Vote Act security grants over the next decade.
“With every election, officials face increasingly
complex threats, both physical and cyber.”
Election Denialism
Disputed elections in America are not new. However, election denialism based on alleged fraud has been elevated thanks to Donald Trump who questioned the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidential victory in 2012, claimed Ted Cruz stole the 2016 Iowa caucus victory and insisted his 2020 presidential election “victory” was stolen.
In the 2024 election, Trump has made election denialism a central feature of his campaign, pledging retribution for alleged election fraud and making his candidate endorsements contingent on agreeing with his election fraud allegations. Trump has declined to commit in advance he will accept the election outcome this fall.
Attorneys for Trump failed in court to substantiate a variety of election fraud claims following the 2020 election. Trump’s attorney general said claims of massive voter fraud in 2020 were unfounded. Two former Georgia election workers were awarded $148 million in damages from Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for false claims he made about them that resulted in racist threats and harassment.
Election deniers often link voting machines with election fraud. False claims made by Trump supporters that were often repeated on newscasts led Dominion Voting Systems to file a defamation lawsuit against Fox News. During a trial, the conservative broadcast network agreed to a $787 million out-of-court settlement with Dominion. One America News reached a separate settlement and Fox faces a second major defamation lawsuit.
Foreign Interference in Elections
National security officials believe foreign interference in U.S. elections is a threat. False-flag social media accounts with political content have been linked to malign foreign sources. They are not always easy to identify as foreign attempts to influence election outcomes.
The bigger threat, security experts say, is from cyber-hacking. Recent reports indicate U.S. adversaries have scanned state election websites and copied available voter data. David Salvo and Rachael Dean Wilson, co-Managing Directors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote a commentary appearing in Defense One:
“Nation-state actors use a variety of tools and tactics to influence our elections. They wage information-manipulation and online-influence campaigns; conduct cyber intrusions and attacks; put dirty money in our system; and contact candidates, campaigns and diaspora communities either directly or through cutouts. The advent of generative artificial intelligence enables bad actors to conduct information campaigns and cyberattacks at unprecedented scale and volume.”
Calling these challenges “serious, but not insurmountable”, Salvo and Wilson said. “There are promising technologies that can help officials, media, and the public alike better differentiate between authentic and manipulated content.” They also urged more Americans to volunteer as election workers.
Bad actors include hackers seeking ransoms by hijacking voter databases. Nearly 50 percent of election officials anticipate cyber incidents will increase in the 2024 election. More than 50 percent feared the greatest threat would be disinformation campaigns, followed by phishing attacks that target election officials and staff and hacking attempts of voting procedures.
Vote-By-Mail
Vote-by-mail has been criticized as susceptible to fraud, though much of the suspicion is based on a faulty understanding of how vote-by-mail elections are conducted in states like Oregon. Suspicion was amplified when more states allowed early voting by mail during the pandemic. When mail-in ballots tended to favor Joe Biden and overcame early-night Trump leads, the former president cried foul.
Oregon became the first state to use vote-by-mail for federal, state and local elections as a result of voter-approved Ballot Measure 60 in 1998. The first test of vote-by-mail in local elections occurred in the 1980s.
The county clerk who pioneered the idea said it would be a cheaper way to run elections. The popularity of voting at home rather than standing in line at a voting station has increased voter turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, Oregon voter turnout was 78.5 percent, the highest state turnout rate in the nation. In the 2022 mid-term election, Oregon turnout was almost 67 percent.
Use of paper ballots is regarded as one of the biggest deterrents to election fraud. The ballots are counted by electronic machines not connected to the internet. Audits can compare computer tabulations with hand-counted tallies of paper ballots. Before a submitted ballot is counted, election workers verify the voter signature with the one on record in the elections office.
The Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office found from 2000-2019 there were approximately 61 million ballots cast. Of those, 38 criminal convictions of voter fraud were obtained, amounting to a .00006% rate.
To combat cyber-attacks, the Secretary of State says, “We practice Defense in Depth with administrative, technical and managerial security controls. Layers of security controls provide several ways of monitoring and responding to malicious access attempts to our systems. Any successful access to our system has been reviewed by multiple security checks and verifications. We routinely perform threat analysis and risk assessments. Assessments are conducted by internal staff as well as contracted third parties. As a result, we continue to improve security processes and protections to maintain secure, private, and accurate election infrastructure.”
Oregon, along with other jurisdictions that conducts elections nationwide, uses electronic detection systems to monitor patterns of malicious activity and employ “cyber-hygiene” to stiffen defenses against cyber-threats.
Attacking Election Security
The attacks on election security may have less to do with fraud than attempting to discourage people from voting and undermining trust in election outcomes. The goal may be less to help a particular candidate than to plant seeds of doubt about voting and democracy.
Paul Weyrich, cofounder of right-leaning The Heritage Foundation, said in a 1980 speech, “I don’t want everybody to vote … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
During the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, the Republican National Committee undertook “ballot security” and “voter integrity” campaigns to reduce alleged voter fraud. The campaigns focused on minority communities with large Democratic majorities and included using off-duty police officers near polling places, distributing leaflets suggesting voters could be prosecuted and made unsupported challenges of registered voters. Federal courts concluded the techniques were designed to frighten minority voters from voting.
New angles appeared in Wisconsin’s primary election this week as voters approved two election-related ballot measures that amend the state’s constitution. The first one bans election officials from accessing private grants. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan provided funding for election worker protective gear and contactless voting. The second measure says “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections and referendums”. Voting rights advocates expressed concern a strict interpretation of the provision could limit the use of election volunteers and technology professionals.
