Situation Room: Earlier this year, a drone flew over a Houston area polling place, raising novel questions about electioneering and security.
Resource Library:Drones in Election Settings: A CSSE Briefing for LEOs can help facilitate a conversation with law enforcement about appropriate drone incident response.
Planning Desk:Plan ahead to ensure secure transmission of ballots to and from UOCAVA voters.
When Electioneering Takes Flight: Flying Lessons from a Harris County Drone Incident
During the recent Texas primary election, election officials at a polling location in Harris County encountered an unusual form of electioneering. According to reporting by the Houston Chronicle, a drone carrying a campaign poster flew directly over voters waiting in line outside the polling place. Electioneering itself is not new and routinely shows up, but it’s the method that made this worth another look.
Alan Foster, an election judge in Harris County, reported that the drone crossed the 100-foot electioneering boundary and remained in the restricted area for an extended period before the operator agreed to stop flying it. The operator was ultimately located across the street.Publicly available videoshows the drone flying near voters and a tense interaction between election officials and the operator.
The Situation Room focuses on real security incidents and threats in the news relevant to election security. To review previous issues, see thenewsletter archive.
Drones in Election Settings
The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections’Drones in Election Settings: a CSSE Briefing for LEOs(Law Enforcement Officers) is a resource to help law enforcement and election offices understand and work together to manage drone incidents.
The Briefing stresses that drone activity can be harder to pin down, triggering delays and uncertainty about how to respond. Some of the issues it suggests election officials and their law enforcement partners should discuss in advance include:
Some election sites may be located in areas where unrelated drone flights take place.
Some voters may find the buzz and erratic movement of a drone inherently threatening.
How do you measure a campaign-free zone above a polling place?
Is a drone flying 120 feet in the air directly over a polling place beyond the 100-foot line?
Federal Aviation Administration rules may overlap or run counter to state election law, so you’ll need to grapple with any uncertainty before an incident happens. If drone activity is determined to be illegal, finding and identifying the operator can be more difficult than when a campaigner crosses the line.
Drones in Election Settings is part of a CSSE series called “Law Enforcement Briefings,” intended to address threats with which law enforcement officials are already familiar, focusing on how the election setting might prompt adaptations to existing protocols. Each Briefing follows the template of CSSE’sFive Steps to Safer Electionsguide, which suggests Meeting with law enforcement to Share operational details and Agree on needs, followed by Planning incident response, and Practicing to develop the muscle memory you need when something happens.
Election officials can provide each Briefing to local law enforcement as an information piece or discussion starter.
The Resource Library section of the newsletter spotlights election security resources. All highlighted resources are available online in the Resource Library.
Week E-11: Securing UOCAVA Electronic Ballot Transmission Systems
While millions of Americans cast their ballots inside a local polling place, many overseas service members and citizens rely on a ballot delivered or returned digitally. The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) largely runs on electronic transmission: allowing voters to register, access a blank ballot, and, if a state allows it, return materials online. That digital channel is a polling place in its own right, and it requires the same commitment to accessibility and security as any physical polling location.
What makes securing your UOCAVA system difficult is that you cannot lock it down the usual way. A county website can often block standard web traffic from outside the United States without impacting a single voter. A UOCAVA system cannot. A U.S. soldier deployed in Germany or a U.S. civilian living in Costa Rica has to access the system from a foreign IP address, so simple defenses do not apply. The challenge is to keep the door open for the right people without letting it become an opening for disruption.
A few critical moves matter most:
Keep the system up. A denial-of-service attack, the kind that floods a website until it falls over, can lock out overseas voters during the short window they have to act. Ask your system provider or your state how the system holds up under heavy loads and what the plan is if it goes down.
Verify that traffic from overseas is allowed. Some jurisdictions and service providers will restrict traffic from foreign nations as a matter of routine cybersecurity protections, particularly from countries with a demonstrated history of malicious cyber activity. UOCAVA voters seeking election information may have difficulty accessing your website in blocked locations. Ask your network administrator what options are available to bypass default network blocks and allow legitimate U.S. citizens to access your online systems used by UOCAVA voters.
Scan everything that comes in. Returned materials usually arrive as attachments or uploads. Treat every file as suspect and scan it before anyone opens it. Consider opening UOCAVA-related emails on a separate device such as a tablet.
Verify the voter, not just the ballot. Confirm that the person on the other end is the registered voter by using the identity checks your state requires while maintaining a secret ballot.
These are basic steps with extra care, because the UOCAVA channel is open to the whole world by design. Do them well, and the virtual polling place should hold up just like the physical ones.
The Planning Desk is a running timeline of key election security tasks. You can find prior editions in thenewsletter archive.
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