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Secretaries of state and election officials from across the nation gathered at separate conferences this past week in Washington, where the new administration has been moving quickly to slash the federal workforce and dismantle certain agencies.
One pressing question at the gatherings of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors was how the shift in power will affect collaborations with federal agencies that help safeguard elections, including the FBI, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
So far, it’s hard to tell.
Commissioners and staff members from the EAC — a small agency that serves as a clearinghouse for best practices, federal grants, and data, and assesses whether voting machines meet federal standards — were visible at both conferences, and said their work continues.
A representative of the FBI’s cybersecurity division appeared at NASS, where she spoke on a panel about cybersecurity threats. An FBI representative who was expected to join a panel at NASED didn’t show.
The most glaring absence was CISA, whose reserved table at the NASED conference remained empty.
“CISA was telling us that in light of the new administration, they were reevaluating their conference attendance,” said Amy Cohen, executive director for NASED.
CISA was created in 2018, the year after federal officials designated elections as critical infrastructure. Since then, the agency has been an important partner for election officials, providing security assessments, training, and resources aimed at “protect(ing) America’s election infrastructure against new and evolving threats.”
But the agency angered President Donald Trump after it declared the November 2020 election “ the most secure in American history,” disputing the false claims by Trump and his allies that fraud cost him victory. Trump responded by firing Chris Krebs, the agency’s first director, before he left office in 2021.
More recently, CISA has drawn the ire of Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to run the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the cybersecurity agency. During her Senate confirmation hearing in January, she called for shrinking the agency.
Election officials noticed the agency’s absence.
“I note the incongruity with the fact that many of you, maybe all of you, mentioned cybersecurity … and the empty table out front that says CISA on it," Judd Choate, elections director for Colorado, told a panel of congressional staffers, an absence that he said he could “only interpret as: They were told not to attend.”
A CISA spokesperson told Votebeat that because of funding uncertainties — Congress passed a short-term funding bill that expires in March — the agency is “reevaluating all conferences and engagements until a resolution.” The agency did not say whether it had been directed not to send representatives to the conferences, or whether it would continue providing services to election officials.
Kim Wyman, a former senior election security adviser at CISA who was secretary of state for Washington during the 2020 election, said she was “certainly concerned” about the agency’s absence, but she’s trying not to read too much into it.
Wyman said CISA was a useful resource for her as secretary of state when she needed physical and cyber security assessments for local elections offices that would help them determine where improvements could be made.
“Having that direct connection to CISA gave, particularly our local counties, a lot of powerful resources to secure their systems,” she said.
Wyman, now a senior fellow on elections at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said there have been some recent “bright spots” in the federal government’s relationship with election officials, pointing specifically to the continuation of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, both of which are funded by CISA.
“That for me was a big positive indication that election officials are going to have these tools available,” she said. “But I am concerned that some of the direct services, like [CISA’s] elections security advisers that are in each of the 10 regions, I hope that they continue to be able to perform those duties and stay in those roles.”
Trump has yet to name a nominee to head CISA. The most recent director, Biden appointee Jen Easterly, departed at the end of the last administration. Last week, the Trump administration placed at least seven CISA employees who work on combating foreign disinformation within the election security arm of the agency on administrative leave, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
Cohen, the NASED director, said that cyber and physical security remains a top concern for election officials.
“It is concerning that they are not here,” she said. “I hope it is not indicative of a larger shift, but it’s hard not to take it that way.”
One federal agency, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, did signal plans to work more closely with secretaries of state on elections. Election officials, primarily from Republican states, have lobbied for more access to federal data to help them determine the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls, and in some cases have sued.
CIS maintains the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, or SAVE, which allows states a way to check an individual’s immigration status, based on a unique DHS-issued identification number.
Tammy Meckley, a CIS representative who spoke on a panel at the secretaries of state conference, said the fee her agency charges for using that service is supposed to rise to $3.10 per transaction by 2028.
Meckley said she is open to working with election officials in what she described as “a different political landscape” to find other ways to search that would produce accurate matches “with a high degree of confidence.”
Interim Editor-in-Chief Carrie Levine contributed.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
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