Without Trust, Elections Lose Legitimacy
Democratic nations should have full confidence in the security and integrity of their electoral processes. No voter should ever wonder if their vote was manipulated in favor of a different candidate or outcome. Confidence can be difficult to obtain, easy to lose, and even harder to regain. There must be trust from the very beginning. Academic and independent research into election and voting systems have illustrated that the people, process, and technology supporting U.S. democratic processes are complicated, underfunded, and imperfect. Even inaccurate or sensational reporting about election security can test the public’s confidence. Diminishing credibility in any democratic election could have potentially devastating implications for democracy overall, reinforcing the need to make election security and public trust top priorities.
Current Approaches Fall Short
Targeted cyberattacks can be extremely difficult to defend against because the level of sophistication, funding, time, skills, and resources available to the attacker are usually all far greater than non-targeted cyberattacks. In the fall of 2019, The U.K.’s Labour Party experienced two cyberattacks directed at their party’s main platform. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks only caused disruptions but were troubling nonetheless given that they occurred during an important election cycle. By any definition, these attacks would not be considered sophisticated, but they still impacted productivity and public confidence. Conversely, the broadly publicized 2016 Democratic National Committee email breach leaked more than 19K emails to the public. Sophisticated malicious hackers conducted this attack after secretly gaining access and having remained largely undetected.
In addition to targeting political parties ..
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