Defending Democracy: The #PROTECT2024 Chapter in Election Infrastructure Security
When the Founding Fathers signed the U.S. Constitution in 1787, they envisioned a free and fair democratic process that would set the United States of America apart from the monarchies that dominated the globe. By giving voice to its citizens, American democracy embodied our Nation’s independence, strength, and commitment to charting a new path, determined by the will of the American people.
Over the past 238 years, this sacred electoral process has been tested time and again by foreign adversaries, wars, natural disasters, and disruptive technologies. And our democracy has not only prevailed, but, inspiringly, it has strengthened and evolved. As a Nation, we have embraced that all American citizens—regardless of race or gender—have the right to vote; and, we have adopted technology that enhances the accessibility, accuracy, efficiency, and security of the electoral process. This is our Nation’s unwavering commitment to form a more perfect Union.
The foundation of this process is our state and local election officials, the public servants standing on the frontlines of democracy. They have been trusted to deliver free and fair elections since the dawn of the republic. And with each passing election cycle, the threat landscape has grown exponentially more complex. In the wake of Russian efforts to influence and interfere with our democratic process in 2016, Americans became much more aware that the thing that makes our country so great, our democracy, is also a prime target for adversaries seeking to undermine America on a global stage. It was through this lens, that we realized that asking state and local election officials to take on nation-states like Russia, China, Iran, and an entire ecosystem of cybercriminal gangs on their own gave our adversaries an advantage.
This recognition led the federal government to designate election infrastructure as national critical infrastructure in 2017. This designation empowered and enabled the federal government to work with election officials and election vendors to strengthen the security and resilience of election infrastructure. Today, CISA serves as the lead for the federal government’s election infrastructure security efforts. We coordinate the efforts of the federal interagency and help election officials and vendors understand the threat environment, access critical resources, and defend against threats to election infrastructure.
As we entered the 2024 election cycle, we faced the most challenging threat environment to date. Domestically, dozens of election offices received mail containing suspicious white powder, some laced with fentanyl, a potentially lethal drug. Election officials of both parties were swatted at their homes, putting themselves, their families and first responders in danger. In the lead up to November, there were multiple instances of ballot drop boxes being damaged or destroyed by incendiary devices; ransomware actors targeted election vendors and state and local election offices; and cybercriminals conducted distributed denial of service attacks targeting election related organizations and websites.
We also observed the most aggressive use of foreign malign influence campaigns in an election cycle, largely led by Russia and Iran. While our foreign adversaries leveraged different tactics, they shared the same two goals: undermining the American people’s confidence in the security of the democratic process and sowing partisan division in American society. In the run up to Election Day we observed multiple Russian influence campaigns leveraging staged videos alleging attacks on the security and integrity of election infrastructure and processes in what some forecasted to be the most closely contested states.
Despite these challenges, state and local election officials courageously met the moment and performed SUPERBLY. They delivered the most secure and resilient election in our Nation’s history.
We at CISA were honored to help them secure our democratic process.
Throughout the 2024 election cycle, CISA worked with election officials of both parties in every state and territory across the country to provide more physical and cyber security services to more jurisdictions than ever before.
Recognizing election officials have different needs and demanding schedules, we knew we needed to scale our efforts to ensure maximum access to our resources and tools. We introduced our #PROTECT2024 campaign—a suite of products, services, and trainings for the election security community to help them more easily and effectively prioritize the security and resilience of election infrastructure while simultaneously administering elections. Our #PROTECT2024 webpage served as a central hub for CISA’s election security threat information, product releases, and public notifications.
In the field, CISA had already established a significant local presence across the country with existing staff like our cybersecurity advisors and physical security advisors, but we knew that election infrastructure had very specialized security requirements that required unique expertise and dedicated support. To meet this need, we built on our existing field presence, adding an election security advisor to each of our 10 regions. This incredible team of public servants and executive leaders brought over 210 years of election administration and election technology experience to the CISA team. Their leadership helped drive our expanded support across the country in unprecedented ways.
Working side-by-side with election officials, we recognized that physical security at election offices was a real concern. To help meet this need, we cross-trained over 100 of our security inspectors to conduct physical security assessments on election infrastructure. This increase in capacity enabled us to deliver nearly 1,300 physical security assessments of election facilities during the 2024 election cycle—an unprecedented number for the Agency. This work helped ensure the physical safety of election officials and the physical security of Americans as they exercised their right to vote.
We also worked hard with election security stakeholders to move cybersecurity forward. For the 2024 election cycle, we conducted over 700 cyber assessments for election infrastructure stakeholders and provided weekly internet facing cyber vulnerability assessments to nearly 1,000 election stakeholders.
While everyone worked tirelessly to enhance security measures, we also knew things were still going to happen, especially given the complexity of the threat environment, and incident response preparation would be crucial. We focused heavily on delivering trainings and exercises that addressed the full spectrum of threats and practiced realistic incident response. During the 2024 election cycle, CISA conducted 200 tabletop training exercises with the election security community. This included our seventh annual Tabletop the Vote exercise, co-hosted by CISA and the National Association of State Election Directors and National Association of Secretaries of State. This exercise included more than 1,250 participants from dozens of states and territories and a wide range of federal government partners. We also delivered over 500 trainings reaching tens of thousands of election officials and their state, local and federal partners.
Perhaps most importantly, CISA, alongside our federal government partners, also took important steps to counter efforts by our foreign adversaries to undermine trust and confidence in the American democratic process. CISA developed publicly available security guidance for election officials that addressed tactics and techniques employed in foreign adversary influence operations. Many of these materials were developed in partnership with our FBI and intelligence community partners. We wanted election infrastructure stakeholders to be more aware and better postured to identify and respond when these incidents happened. Because we knew they were coming. And we were right. A major part of this effort were the five joint public notifications issued by CISA, FBI and ODNI identifying specific information campaigns by Russia and Iran focused on undermining the security and integrity of our election process. We did this to raise the awareness of the American public, the target of these influence operations, to help people understand what they were seeing and who was responsible. We pointed Americans to their state and local election officials, who lead the administration of elections, as the authoritative sources for accurate election security-related information.
This election cycle again made clear that our democracy remains a target of our foreign adversaries. As a federal government, we are committed to defending election infrastructure against all threats, including those posed by foreign influence operations. The American people should not have to face these threats on their own and our foreign adversaries should never have the advantage.
Election security is national security.
We at CISA are proud to support the election heroes who serve on the frontlines of our democracy. As CISA’s Senior Executive overseeing our election security mission, I witnessed incredible collaboration across the security ecosystem during this past election cycle. Thousands of dedicated Americans showed patriotism with their unrelenting dedication to the mission. I am forever grateful to have worked alongside them.
It is because of the tireless efforts of the election community, we can affirm that we do not have evidence of any malicious activity that had any material impact on the security or integrity of the 2024 general election outcome. Election officials ran the most secure and resilient election yet in our Nation’s history. Their collective efforts to secure the 2024 elections proved, once again, that Americans can have unwavering confidence that the outcome of the election reflects without a doubt the will of the American people. And it is not because the process does not face threats, but because of the incredible actions taken across federal, state, and local government to counter those threats and ensure the security and integrity of American democracy.
In a few days, CISA and other agencies will prepare for a peaceful transfer of power to a new administration. While the 2024 election is over, the election security mission is not. The threat landscape confronting our democracy will continue to evolve in ways we can’t even begin to imagine today. So just as our nation has done since its inception, we will adapt and fiercely protect our democratic process. Elections are political, election security is not.