Situation Room: Missteps in election night reporting highlight the importance of preparing to respond to unexpected errors.
Resource Library: Lowering the Impact of Logistical Issues offers four organizational actions you can take to strengthen operational resilience.
Planning Desk: Election emergencies may look different on the surface, but planning around their common effects helps you protect core election functions.
Elections are highly complex processes, and each process and step carries the risk of human or technical error. Ballot counting and results reporting are not immune to these risks. As election officials know, election night reporting (ENR) is always unofficial. The canvass period exists precisely to catch and correct errors before results are certified.
Unfortunately, from an election security perspective, inadvertent reporting errors and actual security incidents can look identical to an outside observer. That ambiguity is itself a vulnerability, one that bad actors can exploit to cast doubt on legitimate results. Reducing the frequency of reporting errors is therefore not just an operational goal; it also supports security.
The following incidents show how procedural breakdowns in ENR can present an election security risk. When unofficial reported totals shift unexpectedly, even due to routine corrections, it can be mischaracterized as evidence of manipulation, eroding public trust in ways that are difficult to reverse. Chicago, Illinois - March 2024 Primary
In Chicago’s March 2024 primary, more than 10,000 vote-by-mail ballots received the day before the election were not included in the tally ... READ MORE HERE.
The Situation Room focuses on real security incidents and threats in the news relevant to election security. To review previous issues, see thenewsletter archive.
Lowering the Impact of Logistical Issues
Election officials are routinely called upon to respond to unexpected logistical challenges. Whether it is equipment breakdowns, transport failures, staffing shortages, or programming errors, things happen along the way that can challenge your logistics plan. Each potential problem is unique, but the mitigations are surprisingly similar.
Lowering the Impact of Logistical Issues, a new resource from the Election Security Exchange, suggests four organizational actions to strengthen your operational resilience:
Decide who makes decisions and how information moves. Create clear channels for communication and escalation.
Implement real-time monitoring and rapid response mechanisms. Track operations continuously and empower staff to act immediately when issues arise.
Develop redundancy across people, processes, and resources. Ensure backups for personnel, vendors, facilities, and supplies are in place.
Conduct regular exercises, debriefs, and planning reviews. Use drills, simulations, and post-election debriefs to identify vulnerabilities and institutionalize improvements.
Logistical challenges are inevitable. However, following these four steps can help ensure that you are prepared to respond and recover when they do occur.
The Resource Library section of the newsletter spotlights election security resources. All highlighted resources are available online in the Resource Library.
Week E-28: Building All-Hazards Resilience
While the causes of emergencies vary greatly, the potential effects do not. This means that jurisdictions can plan to deal with effects common to several hazards, rather than develop separate plans for each hazard.
The all-hazards approach to incident response planning focuses on developing core response capabilities, such as communication, coordination, and resource management, that apply across scenarios. Here are two examples of the all-hazards approach in the election space:
Bomb threats, fire, and potentially hazardous materials can all force people to evacuate the election office. You can develop a plan around the tasks, or functions, of moving people to safety; securing critical assets such as ballots, equipment, and poll books so you can set up a temporary location; and communicating any changes to the public.
Ransomware, DDoS attacks, fires, and seizure of assets can all cause election staff to lose access to systems and data they use to administer an election. A plan that ensures you have redundancies and backups* allows you to restore and/or continue operations with minimal disruption. Make sure to test your backups before you need them. *Redundancy mitigates the risk of downtime, and backup mitigates the risk of data loss.
Although an incident can be cyber, operational, or physical (or any combination), cyber and physical security are no longer two separate things. Instead, it’s security convergence – the risk is combined, so the mitigations should be combined. The parts of an Incident Response Plan can be structured around the problem to be solved, the objective to be attained, or the task to be performed without having to be categorized as cyber, operational, or physical.
Dedicate 30 minutes to thinking through:
What’s most at risk in your election operations? How would losing access to your facility, systems, or specific critical data impact your ability to administer elections? (The lists suggested in thesecond issue of our Planning Desk may help with this.)
Which processes and procedures prompt the action you, your staff, and your security partners must take when dealing with a security incident? Are there any missing steps?
What are the communications plans for alerting your security partners and informing the public of changes that impact them? Who would you need to notify internally and externally? What methods and channels do you intend to use to communicate effectively and timely? And, if any of those fail, what’s your backup plan? (Think PACE!)
Keep your notes handy–next week we’ll introduce an Incident Response Plan format based on an easily understood, common-sense approach. Stay tuned!
The Planning Desk is a running timeline of key election security tasks. You can find prior editions in thenewsletter archive.
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