Nation’s Top Cybersecurity Official Lauds NH Elections Process, Visits Precincts

LONDONDERRY – The state’s top election official spent the 2024 Primary Day, Tuesday, touring a number of voting precincts with the nation’s cybersecurity director, who said election security has never been as strong as it is right now.

And she said the experience the state had with a rogue robocall two days before the first-in-the-nation primary, purporting to be the president telling residents not to vote, and the state’s reaction to treat it as a crime has offered other election officials an example to deal with such efforts that they might face in the future.

Visiting voting precincts in Peterborough, Antrim, Amherst, Manchester and Londonderry were Secretary of State Dave Scanlan and his staff and Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, one of the nation’s newest agencies that stood up in 2018.

They met with the media at the end of the day at Londonderry High School’s polling location in a basketball court as some of the more than 17,000 registered voters lined up to cast their votes. Londonderry is the second largest voting precinct behind Derry and it is trying out voting machines from VotingWorks.

Londonderry Moderator Jonathan Kipp said the machines were working flawlessly, as of 3:30 p.m.

Scanlan was in communication with other officials and the Attorney General and said statewide, at that hour, things were as smooth as he could hope.

Speaking with reporters, Easterly and Scanlan discussed the national and local efforts focused on the protection of elections through cybersecurity, both generally and specifically and their interrelationship.

Scanlan said the day was “a great opportunity to share with Jen how New Hampshire polling places operate, and the dedication of all of our local election officials in making this process work. She has seen the electronic systems operating the ballot counting devices…and we have talked about our voter registration system and artificial intelligence issues generally.

“I personally am proud to showcase New Hampshire and its polling places and really enjoyed the conversation with Jen on how we can work together in making sure the elections are safe and secure, especially from the cybersecurity standpoint,” Scanlan said.

She explained CISA stood to be America’s cyber defense agency and the national coordinator for critical infrastructure and resilience, which includes the infrastructure Americans use to cast their ballots and to ensure that those ballots are counted as cast.

She has nationally advocated for a system that quickly detects, responds and recovers data and works to mitigate damage. CISA works with the private sector on such new and emerging threats in addition to local, state and the federal government.

Noting that the federal government does not run local elections, she said CISA is there to help provide guidance and support to reduce risks. The department can offer cybersecurity risk assessments, but they don’t control the election, the locals do that, she stressed.

“Every state is different,” she said. “As the old saying goes, if you’ve seen one state’s election you’ve seen one state’s election. And again, it is really up to the state how they manage their elections. What we do at CISA is we bring our capability. We bring our technical expertise. We bring our resources and we partner with the Secretaries of State and chief election officials to provide them with the support that they need.”

She noted that the great diversity of the various elections systems throughout the country offers resilience in and of itself to help secure elections.

“We’ve had a fantastic partnership with Secretary Scanlan,” she said.

Scanlan added that he is a firm believer that states should conduct their own elections but with the use of technology, now with artificial intelligence, social media and misinformation, maintaining and operating the systems are very complex, he could use the help.

“And especially when we know there are national issues and we just have to look at some foreign actors that are out there trying to cause havoc with our systems, at this point, unsuccessfully in my opinion, it is important that we have that relationship where we have a federal level of knowledge available to us to help us do our jobs,” Scanlan said.

Easterly said teams at the local and state level are “on the front lines of defending our democracy and from what I have seen all of the work that state and local officials have done, and particularly the awesome work that has been done here in New Hampshire, election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election stakeholder community has never been stronger.”

She said there is no election software that does not have vulnerabilities but because the vote casting systems and tabulating systems are not connected to the internet, that provides a “massive mitigation” to any vulnerabilities that may be in software.

She said another thing to consider is what state and local officials have put in place, which is multiple defense and in depth layers, “So even if there is a software vulnerability, there are technical controls. There are physical controls. There are procedural controls to ensure that the risks to that software are as reduced as possible.”

Scanlan agreed.

Easterly has a background as an American intelligence officer and former military official who earned a bachelor’s degree from the United States Military Academy in 1990 and a Master of Arts in politics, philosophy, and economics from Pembroke College, Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

She served in the Army for 20 years and was an assistant professor of social sciences at the United States Military Academy and was an executive assistant to the National Security advisor from 2002 to 2004 and later served in Baghdad as chief of the cryptologic services group for the National Security Agency and from 2009 to 2010, and as a cyber advisor for the NSA stationed in Kabul.

After retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, she served as deputy director of the NSA for counterterrorism from May 2011 to October 2013.

Easterly was also a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council.

After spending some time in the private sector working for Morgan Stanley as global head of its cybersecurity division, she was tapped by Biden to the position she now holds.

She said her job is not just to just support election accuracy but all of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” including cybersecurity as it relates to water, power, transportation, communication, health care and education.

“We work every day on issues around artificial intelligence in terms of how we think about AI being a threat to critical infrastructure, how do we use AI in a positive way,” she said, referring to videos Secretary Scanlan has made.

With respect to the robo call incident in January before the FITN primary, she said, “it’s one of the reasons why I was excited to come up here because everybody is worried about AI. There is a lot of hype going on out there. And what we saw in the primary, I guess it was two days before the primary, was actually a great example of what other election officials should look to.

“When we saw that attempt to influence the election, you saw the (NH) Attorney General come out very quickly saying, ‘I think this is inauthentic. We are going to investigate it as evidence of a crime.’ That went out widely. Then Secretary Scanlan put that same information out across all his channels. So at the end of the day, one of the big ways to deal with some of these maligned attempts to influence elections is through proactive and effective communications.

“And again, it is your state and local election officials who are the authoritative, subject-matter experts. And I just thought that was a fantastic example for other election officials across the country who may be grappling with similar situations.”