Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Wednesday that this week’s midterm elections were the “most secure” the U.S. has ever seen.
“Thank you to all our state and local and private sector partners who worked with @DHSgov, @NPPD, & @Cyber to ensure that this #ElectionDay was the most secure ever,” Nielsen said on Twitter Wednesday morning.
DHS has not reported any mass fraudulent voting, amended vote counts, or abnormal disruptions in the nationwide vote.
Since Russia’s confirmed attempts to meddle in the 2016 election, federal agencies have launched several offices and programs meant to secure cyberspace and the U.S. voting process.
[Related: Feds reassure voters on eve of midterms: ‘No indication of compromise’ on election infrastructure]
Nielsen’s department took the lead on election security in early 2017. That job included helping all 10,000 state and local jurisdictions prepare for Election Day.
Election infrastructure includes voter registration databases; information technology systems used to count, audit, and report election results; voting machines; storage facilities for those systems; and the actual polling precincts. It does not include campaigns or any nongovernment entity.
The 10,000 local and state election jurisdictions were not required to seek support from DHS in setting up their systems, but around 1,300 did ask the department for help.
All of those localities use different systems and methods to administer elections, making it more complicated for hackers to manipulate all of those systems, but just as difficult for the government to help with so many different processes. One potential way hackers could have affected votes would have been during the transmission process, when tabulated results were sent over the Internet.
The administration asked for $15 billion for cybersecurity in this year’s budget and created the Election Information Sharing Analysis Center, which all 50 states and 900 counties have joined to learn how to prevent, respond to, and stop attacks.
States already have access to $380 million in funding to use to lock down their election systems ahead of Tuesday’s election.
In September, Nielsen demanded Congress pass legislation by the end of the year that turns the department’s cybersecurity office into an agency that has the freedom to operate independently.
“DHS wasn’t built for a digital pandemic. Our cybersecurity arm — the National Protection and Programs Directorate — needs to be authorized in law and transformed into a full-fledged operational agency,” Nielsen said during a speech at George Washington University in D.C.
