Jen Easterly, Director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell in a January 19th segment that "the American people should have confidence in the election process" in 2024 and beyond, despite concerns over AI capabilities.
In a LinkedIn post the day after her interview with Mitchell, Easterly said:
"Enjoyed talking with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC yesterday about the intersection of elections and AI, and importantly, why the American people should have confidence in our elections processes due to the tireless efforts of state and local elections officials of both parties, charged with the responsibility to administer, manage, and secure our election infrastructure.
These officials ran secure elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022, with no evidence that malicious actors changed, altered, or deleted any votes that impacted the outcome of those elections. With respect to the 2020 Presidential election in particular, all states where the outcome was close had paper ballots which allowed recounts and audits to verify election results. The outcome of that election was validated time and again, including in multiple court challenges."
Easterly weighed in on the threat AI poses to election security following a recent column in Foreign Affairs Magazine (gated content) that she co-authored with Scott Schwab, Secretary of State of Kansas and the state's Chief Election Official, and Cait Conley, Senior Election Security Adviser at CISA at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
From the Foreign Affairs article: "Although the technology won't introduce fundamentally new risks in the 2024 election—bad actors have used cyberthreats and disinformation for years to try to undermine the American electoral process—it will intensify existing risks. Generative AI in the hands of adversaries could threaten each part of the electoral process, including the registration of voters, the casting of votes, and the reporting of results. In large part, responsibility for meeting this threat will fall to the country's state and local election officials. For nearly 250 years, these officials have protected the electoral process from foreign adversaries, wars, natural disasters, pandemics, and disruptive technologies."
"Election officials have defended election infrastructure from cyber threats, from physical threats, from threats of foreign influence and disinformation, and have done it in a way where there is security and there is integrity in the elections process," said Easterly. "I have confidence. And Andrea, the American people should have confidence in the election process."
Easterly continued in her LinkedIn post:
"Since I took this job in 2021, I've had the privilege of spending time with state and local elections across the nation serving on the front lines of our democracy, seeing firsthand how hard they work to ensure the security and resilience of our election processes. But as the article in Foreign Affairs on 'AI's Threat to Democracy' notes, these officials need support, especially because of the intense pressure they have faced since the 2020 election and the baseless allegations of voter fraud that followed it.
If anyone is unsure about the security of our election infrastructure, I urge you to serve as a poll worker or as an election observer and witness firsthand the multiple layers of controls—technological, physical, procedural—put in place to ensure that votes are counted as cast. Moreover, if you have any questions about how elections work, please talk to your state or local election official; they are the true subject matter experts in this area. 'TrustedInfo2024' on the website for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) is a great reference.
Finally, if you read the recently declassified Intelligence Community report on the 2022 midterm elections, you saw that the aggregate scope and scale of foreign activity targeting the 2022 midterms exceeded what was detected in 2018, with a diverse and growing group of foreign actors engaging in operations to interfere with our elections, including Russia, China, and Iran. We cannot allow foreign adversaries to sow partisan discord and undermine confidence in our election processes. Elections are the golden thread that runs through the fabric of our democracy; it is up to all of us to keep that fabric strong."
More from the Intelligence Community Report:
"The involvement of more foreign actors probably reflects shifting geopolitical risk calculus, perceptions that election influence activity has been normalized, [and] the low cost but potentially high reward of such activities. So although these threats are not new, today's generative AI capabilities will make these activities cheaper and more effective. Specifically, AI-enabled translation services, account creation tools, and data aggregation will allow bad actors to automate their processes and target individuals and organizations more precisely and at scale."
Election security will be a topic on several SecureWorld conference agendas in 2024, including at SecureWorld Charlotte on April 10.
Torry Crass, State Chief Risk Officer for the State of North Carolina, said the keynote panel will address the question, "How is AI going to be used responsibly?" The state's chief privacy officer is building out the framework for how AI is handled by the state and the elections division.
The biggest worry over AI is it being used to generate fake images, audio, and video to create disinformation and misinformation to harm competing candidates. "It can be hard for voters to know what to trust or not," Crass said.
