Democracy Docket reports:

Ever since President Donald Trump’s victory in November, election officials at every level and voting rights advocates have worried that he would gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — the little-known federal agency responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure from digital threats. And now that those cuts have come to fruition, election officials are already experiencing the loss of crucial CISA resources they said are integral to voting security.

In the seven years since CISA’s creation, it’s become a crucial agency to help secure elections from foreign and domestic cybersecurity threats. Among the agency’s routine functions are sending cybersecurity experts to local election offices to recommend upgrades and best practices, training election officials to spot foreign interference and connecting offices with law enforcement agencies — a crucial practice as violence and threats to election officials significantly grew in the past decade.

But ever since CISA put its election staff on administrative leave, all of those functions have ceased.

“My issue is that we may lose one of the most vital services that actually kept us safe in 2024 and kept our elections moving, even with all the disruptions that we could have had,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) told Democracy Docket. “CISA provided a whole host of services, including the [Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC)], which is an information exchange space. And they provided physical and cyber security agents… who physically went out and did inspections at all of our county election offices in the state of Arizona.”

Fontes particularly relied on the staff and resources of CISA in the months before the 2024 general election to help train election officials across the state to identify and address AI-related election threats. In June, Fontes’ office held a conference for local election officials to go through tabletop exercises of potential threats to disrupt the upcoming election. Among them was an 18-minute AI-generated video of Fontes created to show just how deceptive the technology has become — and how effectively it could be used to spread voting disinformation.

CISA coordination and efforts with Fontes’ office helped foster a crucial communication network between state, federal and local law enforcement agents, and county election offices. All of the training and roleplaying exercises prior to the election proved necessary and effective: On Election Day, 10 counties in Arizona were targeted by Russian bomb hoaxes. [Continue reading…]