The Department of Homeland Security said today that senior officials sat down last week with state and local election officials as well as other stakeholders and partners to discuss election security in this midterm year.
On Feb. 15, DHS, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), and state and local election officials convened a meeting of the Government Coordinating Council (GCC) for the Election Infrastructure Subsector.
“DHS met with private sector election industry representatives in Arlington, Va., who had gathered to formally establish a Sector Coordinating Council (SCC) for the Election Infrastructure Subsector, the private sector counterpart to the GCC,” the department said. “This GCC-SCC structure is used by the 16 critical infrastructure sectors to facilitate joint engagement with government and private sector entities and to coordinate security and resilience efforts.”
Members of the SCC include:
- Associated Press (AP) Elections (in the role of making election-night projections, not coverage as a journalism organization)
- BPro, Inc.
- Clear Ballot Group
- Crosschec
- DemTech Voting Solutions
- Democracy Live
- Democracy Works (Parent organization for the Voting Information Project)
- Dominion Voting Systems
- ELECTEC Election Services Inc.
- Election Systems & Software
- ERIC
- Everyone Counts
- Hart InterCivic
- Microvote General Corp.
- PCC Technology Inc.
- Pro V&V
- SCYTL
- SLI Compliance
- Smartmatic
- Tenex Software Solutions
- Unisyn Voting Solutions
- VOTEC
- Votem
- VR Systems
On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen “met with the NASS Executive Board to discuss DHS’ commitment to working with state election officials on cybersecurity for the midterm elections and beyond,” DHS said.
Separately, DHS along with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation held briefings Friday and Sunday for state election officials “focused on increasing awareness of foreign adversary intent and capabilities against the states’ election infrastructure, as well as a discussion of threat mitigation efforts.”
On Saturday, DHS met with secretaries of state and other chief election officials at the NASS Winter Conference, addressed by National Protection and Programs Directorate Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Acting Deputy Under Secretary Bob Kolasky, and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) Winter Conference, addressed by Kolasky.
“At both conferences, DHS reiterated the department’s commitment to working with election officials and system owners to support their efforts and determine where DHS support adds the most value,” said DHS. “The department lends its expertise and services to election partners on a voluntary basis, including risk and vulnerability assessments, cyber hygiene scans, providing real-time threat intelligence feeds, issuing security clearances to state officials, partnering on incident response planning, and delivering cybersecurity training.”
