The Trump administration election security czar told state and local government leaders that protecting the integrity of the election process in 2020 is “a top national security priority.”
“In the midst of all the other challenges that we’re facing at this time, I have confidence that we’re bringing all of the resources, expertise, and information to this problem as we go through this year together,” said Shelby Pierson, the top election threats official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission summit in Washington Tuesday.
Pierson said the threats against the United States are more sophisticated now than they were in 2016 because foreign nations and enemies residing domestically and abroad have learned from information the federal government has shared, and they have improved their interference techniques. Those can include manipulating electronic voting machines and changing voter registration data, among other things.
[Previous coverage: McConnell backs $250M in election security funding]
“We’re uniquely cognizant that as we share information on election threats, we don’t want to undermine American confidence in our democratic process,” said Pierson, who was appointed in July 2019.
During the 2016 election season, Russian hackers broke into the Democratic National Committee servers in an effort to hurt the party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton. Many other attacks on the election process have occurred in the previous two election cycles. U.S. officials said in 2018, election procedures were compromised in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Wisconsin because of outside interference.
“This is not a Russia-only problem. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, nonstate activists all have opportunity, means, and potentially motive to come after the United States in the 2020 election to accomplish their goals,” said Pierson. “What we’re trying to do is take the focus that we’ve galvanized in 2016 and move it and evolve it to a posture that is more integrated, more understood going into 2020 and beyond.”
