The U.S. did not experience attacks on election infrastructure that significantly affected the midterm elections, President Joe Biden’s top homeland security aide said Tuesday.
The lack of disruptions — combined with the defeats of election deniers who falsely claimed the 2020 contest was illegitimate — should bolster Americans’ confidence in the nation’s voting system, according to White House Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.
Federal election-security efforts have been “thus far, from the evidence that we are seeing in this election cycle, successful but we must remain ever vigilant,” Sherwood-Randall said during a program hosted at Bloomberg as part of the fifth annual 9/11 Memorial & Museum Summit on Security, presented by Fiserv.
“Seeing those who were the election deniers have largely not succeeded in securing elected positions, it affirms that Americans recognize that this is who we are. That we are a country that expresses our political views at the ballot box, not with bullets,” Sherwood-Randall added.
Security experts expressed concern ahead of the Nov. 8 midterms that election deniers would exploit any mishaps to amplify claims of widespread voter fraud. That occurred in Arizona, where a technical glitch affected dozens of voting machines in the state’s most populous county.
A senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official said at the time that security personnel detected no sign of malfeasance in Arizona, and that, ahead of the elections, there were no credible threats to the nation’s voting system.
Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, an election denier who seized on the voting-machine issue, lost her race, as did dozens of other candidates across the country for Congress, governor and secretary of state who said the 2020 election was stolen.
CISA has worked with state and local governments for years to harden election infrastructure against physical and cyber threats, and those efforts helped ward off disruptions, Sherwood-Randall said.
The homeland security aide said the government should have a role in combating disinformation in media outlets and on social media channels.
“This is a role for journalists, importantly, to play in calling out what is true and what is untrue,” Sherwood-Randall said. “In government, we have the same obligation to identify where there is significant misinformation being promulgated, and to address it.”
