Election systems remain safe from foreign meddling, CISA chief says

Less than a week before Americans head to the polls, foreign actors have not compromised the country’s election systems, a top U.S. cybersecurity official said on Wednesday.

"We have not seen any evidence of foreign adversaries getting into our election infrastructure," Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said during a Washington Post Live interview.

Her remarks track with other federal officials who have said that while nations like Russia, China, Iran and others have sought to use disinformation to influence the 2024 election — and potentially cause violent disruptions before next year’s inauguration —  the country’s voting systems remain safe.

“To date, the intelligence community continues to have no information that any foreign actor is seeking to compromise the integrity of election systems,” an official from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters last week.

American officials have said their work since Moscow’s multi-faceted digital assault on the 2016 presidential race has made it difficult to hack into state or local governments to alter vote totals. The state-specific nature of U.S. election infrastructure has also made it an unattractive target for hackers.

“As the saying goes, ‘If you've seen one state's election, you have seen one state's election,’” Easterly said. “That decentralized and diverse nature of our election infrastructure actually brings enormous resilience because it means that a bad actor can't tamper with, manipulate, voting equipment at a scale where it could have an impact on the presidential election.”

So far the only reports of direct disruptions to balloting have involved a handful of arson incidents targeting paper ballots in three states. Authorities said those cases were isolated.

Easterly stressed that citizens should trust their local election officials, citing an independent board in Pennsylvania that called out a video of ballots being destroyed as fake — and which federal officials subsequently attributed to Russia — and an ongoing investigation into the destruction of ballot boxes.

She said more fake videos, and incidents, will likely surface between now and Election Day and into 2025.

“We know that it could be very close in those battleground states and there could be potential violence in the days after elections,” Easterly warned, adding there may need to be audits and recounts of ballots.

“if people see that the candidate that they thought won didn't actually win, just given that it could be so close, and there may need to be audits and recounts, and so you know we are prepared to continue to buy support to state and local election officials.

“My strong hope is that when the winner of the election is announced, Americans will come together in a united way to accept that result and recognize that protecting and preserving our democracy and ensuring a peaceful transfer of power is really central to preserving our democracy.”