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National security experts warn of ongoing foreign interference in 2024 election

OLI SCARFF / AFP/Getty Images

National security experts warn of ongoing foreign interference in 2024 election

As Pennsylvanians head to the polls, national security experts say they are confident in the ballot system but warn that foreign actors are trying to undermine voters’ confidence in Tuesday’s election.

Jen Easterly, director of the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), stressed that “election infrastructure has never been more secure” during a recent press conference.

“No matter who you vote for, you can have confidence that your vote will be counted as cast,” she said.

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This is due in part to the government’s massive changes in election security that followed Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, she said. A bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had authorized a wide-ranging effort to sabotage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign in favor of Donald Trump. 

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Today, election infrastructure is benefiting from cybersecurity protections and pre-election testing of equipment to ensure accuracy, said Ms. Easterly.

Voting machines are not connected to the internet, and every state has a different election infrastructure — an intentionally decentralized system that makes it harder for bad actors to cause widespread problems, she said.

“It's not possible for a malicious actor to hack into voting equipment to have a material impact on the outcome of the presidential election, certainly not without being detected,” she said.

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Ms. Easterly added that there is a high probability that something unforeseeable will happen that disrupts the election process, like a power outage or a bomb threat, but local officials have prepared for all kinds of incidents with a litany of contingency plans.

“They are ready. They are prepared to meet this moment,” she said.

Voting methods have changed dramatically as new problems have emerged. At the turn of the century, many Americans voted using paper cards and punched out a hole next to their preferred candidate. This was a major factor in the controversial 2000 presidential election recount in Florida when some voters failed to fully “punch out” a hole and submitted confusing ballots with what were coined “hanging chads.”

The government phased in fully digital voting machines thereafter in an attempt to solve the problem of faulty paper ballots, said Jake Braun, the executive director of the University of Chicago’s Cyber Policy Initiative, who previously served as principal deputy national cyber director under President Joe Biden.

Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was a “wake-up call” for the government, said Ms. Easterly. Shortly before President Barack Obama left office in January 2017, the Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure as a “Critical Infrastructure Subsector.” This allowed the federal government the ability to divert cybersecurity resources to state and local-level election officials who wanted them. 

The Biden-Harris administration has continued to mitigate the risk of foreign interference by pushing for paper copies of as many ballots as possible, said Mr. Braun. Ninety-three percent of voters cast ballots with paper records in 2020, and that figure could be as high as 98% this year, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute. 

Since 2016, Pennsylvania has decommissioned voting machines that did not provide paper records. This year, depending on the location, voters can either fill out a paper ballot that election workers feed into a machine for scanning, or they can use a touchscreen that prints out a paper ballot. 

“The move to analog has been a big shift and is incredibly important in terms of fighting against mis- and disinformation,” said Mr. Braun. “Twitter [now X] and the cesspool of social media can say whatever they want, but we can go back and hand-count these ballots, and that is total transparency.”

That’s not to say that foreign interference isn’t still a threat. The government is focused on a “Big Three” of world powers that are attempting to cause chaos: Russia, China, and Iran, said Cait Conley, the senior adviser to Ms. Easterly.

Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, or MTAC, is collaborating with the government and has released several reports analyzing Kremlin-backed Russian troll farms that are distributing doctored videos in an attempt to sabotage the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris. 

The government is having a hard time countering Russian disinformation in particular because of the “Venn diagram” of similarities between former President Trump’s rhetoric and Kremlin propaganda, said Ben Rhodes, a national security analyst who served as U.S. deputy national security adviser under Mr. Obama.

“Russia’s objectives broadly overlap with Trump’s: The kind of conspiracy theories that they’re spreading, the kinds of campaigns that they run against Kamala Harris,” he said. “It’s almost like an in-kind campaign contribution.”

Bad actors have recently created a litany of “spoof” websites pretending to be media outlets like The Washington Post or Fox News that are filled with fraudulent bylines, claims of voter fraud, noncitizen voting and deceased people voting, said Ms. Conley. An Iranian group is employing this method to pump AI-assisted fake news to voters on both sides of the aisle, MTAC reported in August. 

“What’s most important to recognize here is the advanced nature of these tactics — the fact that these adversaries are using things like generative AI to make these efforts even more compelling. But also they’re going through extra work to try to hide their hand, using public relations or commercial firms to push these narratives, paying influencers — witting or unwitting — to push these narratives,” Ms. Conley said.

At least three other operations in Iran are sending phishing emails to campaign staffers and targeting swing states to collect intelligence, MTAC reported. One of these groups has ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the State Department designated as a terrorist organization in 2019.

“We are seeing a sort of continuation of nation-states targeting campaigns and candidates and throwing a lot of things at the wall to try and see what's going to stick,” said Ginny Badanes, the general manager of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward initiative.

Many Americans have difficulty identifying disinformation, especially in the era of artificial intelligence, which could have implications in the final days before the election and beyond, said Mr. Rhodes.

Last month, a video circulating on X showed what appeared to be ballots for Trump being ripped up in Bucks County that turned out to be a Russian fake. These kinds of doctored videos — including another Russian dupe showing alleged voter fraud by Haitian immigrants in Georgia — are mixing into news feeds of genuine ballot-burning incidents in Oregon and Washington, said Mr. Rhodes.

“The most effective thing Russia does is not create its own narratives. It watches for things that are happening in the U.S. or in U.S. information networks, and it tries to kind of pour gasoline on it,” he said. “So if they see that people are being unsettled by images of burning ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest, they'll come in and try to amplify that with their own content.”

CISA expects foreign influence operations to continue well after Election Day as votes are counted, said Ms. Conley. Foreign disinformation could lead to domestic threats as well, as some Americans could resort to violence to fight back against what they understand to be widespread cheating in a tight election, said Mr. Braun.

“Our adversaries’ main goal is to diminish the power of the United States on the global stage, and the best way to do that is have us tear ourselves apart from within,” he said.

First Published: November 2, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: November 4, 2024, 6:41 p.m.

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