Situation Room: Incidents in Colorado and Pennsylvania highlight the very real risks posed by insider threats.
Resource Library: Best Practices: Chain of Custody offers an in-depth review of chain of custody procedures across every phase of the election process.
Planning Desk: Protect the continuity of voting and vote-counting no matter what unfolds on Election Day by applying PACE planning across critical election functions.
When a Teammate is the Risk Factor
Election offices are often encouraged to concentrate on guarding against external threats, but some of the most consequential risks can come from inside the organization.
An insider threat is any individual who misuses their legitimate access or specialized knowledge, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in ways that harm the election operation. Because elections rely on distributed teams of staff, vendors, contractors, and temporary workers, privileged access can be widespread, and the potential for harm exists.
The Situation Room focuses on real security incidents and threats in the news relevant to election security. To review previous issues, see thenewsletter archive.
Best Practices: Chain of Custody
Best Practices: Chain of Custodyis a detailed guide to chain of custody procedures in election administration. Developed by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, it covers best practices across all phases of an election, from mail ballot processing to results auditing.
Chain of custody in elections refers to the documented, unbroken process of tracking election materials—from the moment they are created or issued to the moment they are securely stored or legally destroyed. A strong chain of custody ensures that only trained, authorized personnel handle election materials, that every movement is logged and verifiable, and that, where called for, election workers are paired to ensure mutual oversight and accountability.
The Best Practices: Chain of Custody guide describes chain of custody procedures throughout each step in the election, including:
In-person Voting at Polling Places -- Tips for documenting each time an item changes custody or a required procedure is followed.
Mailed and Over-the-Counter Voting -- Procedures for tracking each critical point in the life cycle of a mailed ballot.
Voting Systems – Questions to consider when maintaining a chain of custody for voting system equipment.
Ballot Tabulation and Audits -- Critical steps in the ballot tabulation and counting process to maintain the chain of custody documentation.
Third Party Post-Election Audits -- Instructions for ensuring the chain of custody is not broken for materials involved in a third-party audit.
It also offers templates for implementing chain-of-custody procedures and checklists to verify documentation at each step.
For a web-based chain of custody tool for ballot drop box teams, see the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence's Drop Box Chain of Custody Tool.This tool allows staff to enter counts, seal numbers, and sign off on the chain of custody from their phones or tablets while in the field.
The Resource Library section of the newsletter spotlights election security resources. All highlighted resources are available online in the Resource Library.
Week E-31: PACE your preparedness!
When the unexpected hits, it is critical to keep operations moving forward.Most organizations have an everyday operational plan and then a backup plan for disruptions. Too often, plans end there. When a disruption persists and the backup fails, operations can halt entirely if alternate solutions haven’t been identified in advance.
PACE is a planning principle to help you build election resiliency by anticipating disruption and preparing redundant backup capabilities. The acronym represents four tiers of capability–the first-line method plus three backups.
Primary: The preferred and intended, most reliable method.
Alternate: A backup method if the primary fails, common but less optimal.
Contingency: A fallback method if primary and alternate fail, less ideal but still viable.
Emergency: Method of last resort, used only when all others are unavailable.
Here are examples of applying PACE to:
Voter Check-in
P: Electronic pollbooks.
A: Paper pollbooks printed in advance.
C: Ability to quickly print paper pollbooks on demand.
