Donald Trump isn’t the only one worried the American elections could be “rigged” in November. According to sources in Washington, Homeland Security has been considering inserting itself into the November vote counting effort, declaring the electoral system a “critical infrastructure” similar to the electrical power grid, emergency services, water resources navigation, and Wall Street’s trading systems.
Declaring elections a “critical infrastructure” would allow DHS to add a level of Federal security to electronic voting, linking up the nearly 10,000 separate election systems run, largely, by local and state jurisdictions.
The FBI is currently investigating at least two foreign incursions into American voter systems, one minor hack into Arizona’s voting system, and one major hack into Illinois’s, which put more than 20,000 voter data files at risk. The FBI believes the attacks came from Russia, but have not confirmed whether they think the hack was a state-sponsored attempt to influence American elections.
DHS couldn’t take control of the American elections on its own. It would have to declare the electoral system a critical infrastructure by fiat, and comply with any protective methods already in place at state and local levels. It could only then take an active role in handling security for the system if there was evidence of a foreign effort to undermine the system, or a massive system-wide failure.
For now, the varying efforts across 10,000 or so jurisdictions help to keep the process safe. Voting results are tabulated by precinct and reported to a central database. To rig the election results, hackers would have to infiltrate individual precincts, and command control over several different types of vote collections systems.
Voter information databases are more vulnerable, and that’s where the FBI has detected hacking efforts. For now, the declaration is still in the future, but DHS won’t take it off the table if efforts continue.
