In the run-up until the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, law enforcement, intelligence and election officials were on high alert for digital attacks and influencing operations after Russia demonstrated the reality of these threats by attacking the 2016 presidential election. Six years later, the threat of hacking and malicious foreign influence had remained, but 2022 is a different time and a new topline risk has emerged: physical security threats to election officials, their families and their workplaces.
In July 2021, the Justice Department launched a task force to counter threats against election workers, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued security guidelines for election professionals. But in public comments this week, lawmakers, national security officials and election administrators themselves all expressed concern that misinformation about the security and validity of voting in the US continues to pose a new threat landscape heading into the midterm elections.
“In New Mexico, the conspiracies over our voting and electoral systems have gripped a certain section of the electorate and have pushed people to take action,” said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver and the House’s top election official. of Delegates. yesterday. “During the 2020 election cycle, I was doxxed and had to leave my home for weeks under the protection of the state police. Since 2020, my office has certainly seen an increase in social media trolling, insulted emails and phone calls to our office, and other communications that mimic the misinformation circulating far and wide in the national discourse. But more recently, especially since our primary in June 2022, my office has faced serious threats serious enough to be referred to the police.”
In a discussion Tuesday about midterm election security at the Fordham International Conference on Cyber Security in New York City, FBI Director Christopher Wray and NSA Director Paul Nakasone emphasized that federal intelligence and law enforcement are looking at foreign adversaries who have been active during past US elections: including Russia, China and Iran – as potential threats heading into the 2022 midterms. But threats against election workers are now at the top of their list.
“We are positioning ourselves to better understand our adversaries, so we have a series of operations that we are conducting now and in the future as we approach the fall,” Nakasone said on Tuesday. “But I think the other part is, this isn’t episodic, for us this is an ongoing engagement that we have over time, in terms of being able to understand where our adversaries are, what they’re trying to do, where we need to influence them, understand how they get better.”
When asked how the FBI handles misinformation that comes from foreign-influenced operations but eventually settles into the domestic psyche, Wray said the Bureau simply has a series of election enforcement mandates that it focuses on carrying out.
“We are not the truth police,” he told the conference. “It’s not to say there isn’t an important role for proclaiming falsehood versus truth, it’s just that our contributions are quite specific. We target foreign malevolent influences. We investigate malicious cyber actors, whether foreign or not, targeting election infrastructure, ie cyber activity. We investigate federal election crimes, and that includes everything from campaign finance violations to voter fraud and voter suppression, to something we’ve seen alarming in recent times — threats of violence against election workers, which we won’t tolerate.”
