Happy Election Day!
Voters across the country are headed to the polls today to decide a series of races that will test the national political landscape. With just one year until the 2022 midterms, many states are already preparing as the 2020/2021 election season brought fear and doubt into many voters’ minds.
On one hand, the US handled physical voting attacks very well; on the other, the handling of information and mindsets against false narratives was handled very poorly.
At an event held by Harvard Kennedy School last week, former Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director, Chris Krebs, discussed many of the challenges in gaining and retaining voters’ trust after a year misinformation and suspicion, as well as strengthening our physical voting infrastructure. “We spent three and a half years working on threat modeling, trying to figure out every possible disruption that could be launched against the election,” Krebs said. ”We were thinking through, ‘You know, it's not the technical attacks that are keeping us up at night, because we think we've got a pretty resilient system with good indicators’ … It came down to the perception hack that we were most worried about.”
And in 2022, the stakes are high, with the midterms deciding who will assume 84 percent of state legislative seats.
Krebs also touched on just how fear can spread. Just as disrupted trust during the election lead to continued issues, we see that same snowballing distrust in other areas such as with the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline. When the pipeline shut down people rushed to stock up on gas, only to make shortages worse and adding fire to an already big issue.
Social Media also took a front stage in the 2020/2021 election season and likely will again during the 2022 midterms. Krebs explained that regulations are necessary but difficult to create for social media apps because the platforms’ algorithms are covered in heavy secrecy. Regulators' first steps may need to be passing policies that require better disclosure and give researchers visibility into platform operations. Adding that, “I honestly don't think we know enough about how the platforms operate right now to make meaningful regulation,” “We haven't had the appropriate disclosures and transparency into the business operations and financial models that the algorithms, the moderation, the targeting, the advertisements, the sponsored content, all these things.”
Voting methods were also under fire during the election season and will likely continue to be a hot topic during this week’s election, and even into 2022. Officials must examine their equipment choices and ensure their chosen systems will allow for audits to verify election results. Ballot counting machines are shown to tally ballots with more accuracy than human personnel counting everything by hand, Krebs said. But polling places should use systems that leave paper trails to enable auditing — a trend that is growing, but still not universal. “We need as close to 100 percent paper as possible,” he added.
The good news is that (so far) cybersecurity has received bipartisan support. Leaders on both sides of the aisle understand, at least at a basic level, that ongoing failure is not an option in our digital economy with so many critical components connected in cyberspace – both physical and social.
We all need to do more; our democracy depends on it.
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About the Author: Taylor Genter
Taylor is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in data analytics, graphic design, and both digital and social media marketing. She earned her Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Marketing at the University of Wisconsin- Whitewater. Taylor enjoys analyzing people’s behaviors and attitudes to find out what motivates them, and then curating better ways to communicate with them.