The U.S. government agency that leads election security efforts insists there is “no specific or credible threat” to disrupt election infrastructure following reports of some voting challenges in certain locales.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, put together an Election Day operations center in the nation’s capital in collaboration with other federal agencies, state and local election officials, and cybersecurity partners from the private sector.
An official at CISA reportedly said Tuesday afternoon they were aware of voting issues in Arizona’s Maricopa County but that “we continue to see no specific or credible threat to disrupt the election infrastructure or Election Day operations.”
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Officials in Maricopa County in Arizona said Tuesday morning that they were experiencing issues with vote tabulators at about 20% of polling locations, according to the county elections department. The county’s Twitter account released a video showing Republican Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates and GOP County Recorder Stephen Richer explaining that some ballots were not going through the tabulator properly but that they were working to fix the problem.
The officials said they had a “redundancy” in place and that any uncounted ballots would be transported to a central location to be counted.
“We’re aware … of reports of some issues in Maricopa County, Arizona, and we’ve been in touch with officials at the state and county levels,” a senior CISA official said Tuesday afternoon, according to Politico. The official added that “we’ve seen no activity that should cause anyone to question the security, integrity, or resilience of our election infrastructure.”
Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, said during a Tuesday afternoon press conference that “this is incompetency — I hope it’s not malice.” Former President Donald Trump insisted on Truth Social that “Maricopa County in Arizona looks like a complete Voter Integrity DISASTER.”
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Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor, is currently Arizona’s secretary of state, helping oversee elections there.
“When you have 8,800 individual election jurisdictions, you’re going to see a few issues arise. We’ve seen a few of these today, as happens on every Election Day. None of this is out of the ordinary,” a senior CISA official said, according to Politico, adding, “We know in this environment, normal technical challenges can sometimes be misinterpreted to mean malicious activity. We have seen no indications to date that this is the case.”
In Illinois, the Champaign County Clerk tweeted Tuesday morning, “Our website has been under constant attack for the past month and we’ve been able to keep the site up. We believe the issue today is due to our VR vendor being attacked. We are working with them to resolve the issue. Thank you for staying the course.”
It was reported by WCIA, a CBS affiliate for the central Illinois area, that the clerk’s office “is reporting that computer server performance is being impacted by cyber-attacks on the network and servers” and that “election judges and staff are doing everything they can to process voters according to the requirements of election law while navigating these attacks.”
A senior official with CISA said the agency wasn’t aware of this, telling reporters: “We’re gonna go back and look at Champaign and get in touch with them to see if there’s any issues. … We have the vendors sitting in the room with us, and they have not reported any issues at this time.”
A briefing by CISA just after polls opened this morning showed the agency was confident in the election.
“We continue to remain in high confidence in the security and resilience of the elections, because of the extensive preparation that goes into every election and the numerous safeguards in place across every step of the process,” a senior CISA official said, according to the Record.
The official said that “cyber activity has been quieter” compared to recent elections, “although not nonexistent.” The agency said this morning that it did not have “any attributed malicious cyber activity on election infrastructure yet.”
CISA said that “influence activity has been a point where we continue to see normative behavior across multiple nation-states” and that “now we have observed participants who did not really engage in 2020 willing to engage in election influence in 2022.”
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The FBI and cybersecurity experts agreed last month that China was getting more aggressive with its influence campaigns, including the Chinese government’s targeting of the midterm elections.
The intelligence community concluded Russia worked to hurt now-President Joe Biden and that Iran worked to undermine then-President Donald Trump in 2020, but there was disagreement within spy agencies about whether China sat on the sidelines or took steps to harm Trump’s reelection. The FBI is now saying China has ramped up its election influence efforts in 2022.
The bureau conducted a briefing last month in which the FBI discussed China, Russia, and Iran as the three main foreign election threats.
