In response to a series of reports that the Russian government interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson publicly released last week plans to designate election systems as a critical infrastructure subsector.
“By ‘election infrastructure,’ we mean storage facilities, polling places, and centralized vote tabulations locations used to support the election process, and information and communications technology to include voter registration databases, voting machines, and other systems to manage the election process and report and display results on behalf of state and local governments,” Johnson said.
Johnson said his department reached its conclusions based on conversations with state and local elections officials. The designation now places elections infrastructure as a priority within the National Infrastructure Protection Plan and enables the department to provide cybersecurity assistance only to state and local elections officials who request it.
Elections infrastructure now joins other protected national infrastructure systems such as commercial facilities, communications, dams, emergency services, energy, nuclear reactors, transportation systems and water systems.
While the decision was met with skepticism from some local elections officials who questioned if the move signified a government takeover, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) said the designation was a positive step.
“In the long term, this will put our electoral systems on a more secure footing and maintain public confidence in our elections,” Thompson said. “I commend Secretary Johnson for making this important decision. For future elections at all levels, state officials who want to engage with DHS on enhancing the cyber and physical security of their electoral systems will have federal partner working with them.”