The U.S. government’s top election security official says her agency has seen “no evidence” that any votes were changed, deleted, or compromised in any of the midterm election races across the country.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly declared Wednesday that “we can all have confidence in the safety, security, and integrity of our elections” thanks to the work of state and local election workers. She also assessed that CISA had observed “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was any way compromised in any race in the country.”
CISA, 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, election officials, and private sector cybersecurity partners.
“Right now, election officials are tabulating votes, reviewing procedures, and testing and auditing equipment as part of the rigorous post-Election Day process that goes into finalizing and certifying the results,” Easterly said. “It’s important to remember that this thorough and deliberative process can take days or weeks, depending on state laws; these rigorous procedures are why the American people can have confidence in the security and integrity of the election.”
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The agency had already insisted Tuesday there were “no specific or credible threat” to disrupt election infrastructure. An official at CISA reportedly said Tuesday afternoon they were aware of voting problems 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.”
Officials in Maricopa County in Arizona said Tuesday morning that they were experiencing problems 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.
Gates said they had a “redundancy” in place and that any uncounted ballots would be transported to a central location to be counted.
Richer put out a lengthy statement Tuesday afternoon apologizing for the tabulation problems.
“I am very sorry for any voter who has been frustrated or inconvenienced today in Maricopa County,” he said, promising that every legal vote would 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.” During her remarks that night, she said, “We have incompetent people running the show in Arizona.” She claimed that “we are going to win this.”
Former President Donald Trump insisted on Truth Social that “Maricopa County in Arizona looks like a complete Voter Integrity DISASTER.” He released a video telling Arizonans that “there’s a lot of bad things going on” but to stay in line to vote.
Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate for governor, is currently Arizona’s secretary of state, helping oversee elections there. Hobbs appeared to hold a slight lead over Lake as of Wednesday afternoon, but not all of the votes had yet been counted. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) held a wider lead over Republican challenger Blake Masters, but that race has also not yet been called.
“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 Tuesday, 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.”
A briefing by CISA just after polls opened this morning showed the agency was confident in the election.
A CISA official also said that “cyber activity has been quieter” compared to recent elections, according to the Record, “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.”
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.
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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.
