Washington — Countries aiming to undermine Tuesday’s U.S. elections are being forced to rely on faked videos and other disinformation because they are unable to penetrate systems that could alter the actual tally of the vote, according to the latest assessment by the U.S. agency responsible for election security.
Officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, said late Monday that with less than 24 hours before polls open on Election Day, there is no evidence to suggest foreign adversaries like Russia, Iran and China have the wherewithal to infiltrate and manipulate the country’s election infrastructure.
“I can say with great confidence that I do not believe that a technical hack of our elections in the way that it would materially impact the presidential election is possible,” said CISA Director Jen Easterly.
“Given the multiple layers of safeguards, the cybersecurity protections, the physical access controls, the pre-election testing of equipment for accuracy, the postelection audits, it would not be possible for a bad actor to tamper with or manipulate our voting systems in such a way that it would have a material impact on the outcome of the presidential election, certainly not without being detected,” Easterly told reporters.
Some of the confidence stems from the decentralized way U.S. elections are run — with each state using its own, individual system to record and tally ballots. But it also follows years of preparation by CISA, working with state and local election officials across the United States.
Those efforts have included more than 700 cybersecurity assessments, and hundreds of election exercises and training sessions since the start of 2023.
Additionally, none of the state voting systems are connected to the internet, and an estimated 97% of U.S. voters will be casting ballots in jurisdictions that produce paper records as a backup.
“Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Easterly said. “The election community has never been better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free and fair elections.”
As of late Monday, CISA estimated that more than 77 million Americans had already cast ballots during the early voting period, with tens of millions more expected to vote in person on Election Day.
Yet while most votes have been cast without issue, organizations representing state election officials cautioned there are likely to be some disruptions.
“As with any Election Day, it is important to note operational issues may arise,” according to the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State.
“Voting locations could open late, there could be lines during busy periods, or an area could lose power,” they said in a statement. “These are inevitable challenges that will arise on Election Day.”
There have also been other efforts to try to derail the election.
CISA said it has observed “small scale incidents,” including efforts to take down official election websites with distributed denial of service attacks, as well as several attempts to blow up or set fire to ballot drop boxes.
“We expect that these types of incidents and other forms of disruptions will continue on Election Day [and] in the days that follow,” Easterly told reporters.
But she added that despite those disruptions, there has been “no significant impacts to election infrastructure.”
Instead, the bigger concern is what U.S. officials have described as “a firehose of disinformation,” much of it blamed on Russia, Iran and China.
A declassified U.S. assessment issued just two weeks before the election warned those three countries “remain intent on fanning divisive narratives to divide Americans and undermine Americans’ confidence in the U.S. democratic system consistent with what they perceive to be in their interests.”
Russia, Iran and China have repeatedly rejected the allegations. But U.S. officials and cybersecurity analysts argue there is ample proof.
U.S. intelligence agencies have already attributed responsibility for some social media videos to Russian influence actors — including one claiming to show Haitian immigrants voting multiple times, and another purporting to show ballots in Pennsylvania being ripped up.
And the FBI has likewise denounced additional videos pretending to be from the bureau as fakes.
Separately, tech giant Microsoft last week identified a Chinese cyber campaign targeting Republican lawmakers and candidates seen as critical to Beijing.
And U.S. intelligence has previously pointed to Iranian efforts to hack the campaign of former President Donald Trump.
Gauging the effectiveness of these efforts, especially the recent videos attributed to Russia, is difficult to determine.
“The successfulness, I would say, is quite small,” said Brian Liston, a senior threat intelligence analyst with Recorded Future’s Insikt Group.
“We have not really seen these videos, or this content break out beyond social media or on Telegram,” Liston told VOA.
There are concerns, however, that some of these narratives could gain traction on more mainstream social media platforms, like X and Meta.
“Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and gutted content moderation and really changed the purpose of X, we’ve seen it become just a hotbed of mis and disinformation,” said Audrey McCabe, an information accountability analyst at Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog and advocacy organization.
McCabe told reporters Monday that the changes to X have rippled across the social media space.
“[It] has allowed other platforms to lower their standards for content moderation and what they’re doing to protect users,” she said. “And so, we’re seeing an increase of this stuff everywhere, including on Meta, and other platforms as well.”
And with voters going to the polls Tuesday, there are concerns that the threat environment could worsen.
The latest U.S. intelligence assessment, for example, warned that both Russia and Iran are likely to use their influence operations to incite violence, especially in the hours and days after the voting ends.
“They are deliberately finding narratives to try to stoke partisan discord and inflame domestic tension and pit Americans against one another, and we cannot let them succeed,” a senior CISA official said, who briefed reporters last Friday on the condition of anonymity.
“We’ve seen how these disinformation campaigns have led to very real threats of violence targeting these public servants, and that should be unacceptable,” the official added, citing repeated threats against election officials across the country.
CISA’s Easterly said Monday that state and local election officials have been in close contact with law enforcement agencies, and that precautions have been put in place.
She and other CISA officials also emphasized that so far, there have been no credible or specific threats to polling locations.
“We’ve not seen specific reporting about violence at polling places,” Easterly said in response to a question from VOA. “I certainly don’t want voters to feel at all intimidated about going to voting locations.”
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