Here & Now

Meagan Wolfe on Cybersecurity and Wisconsin's Elections

Frederica Freyberg:

With international tensions high over U.S. support of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, and heightened acrimony between the United States and China, election officials are on alert for cyber-attacks leading up to 2024, including our own officials. Administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Meagan Wolfe, who also is the immediate past president of the National Association of State Election Directors, joins us now. Thanks very much for being here.

Meagan Wolfe:

Thank you. Good morning.

Frederica Freyberg:

So why do election officials precisely, like yourself, have concerns about cyber-attacks from Russia or China in the 2024 elections?

Meagan Wolfe:

Election officials always have concerns about cyber threats regardless of where they’re eventually attributed to. And so as election officials, we are constantly preparing for the possibility of some type of cyber threat. Elections are considered national critical infrastructure, and that means protecting them from a cyber and a physical threat perspective is a priority, both at the national, state, and local level.

Frederica Freyberg:

Is it accurate that you didn’t see any attacks in the 2022 elections?

Meagan Wolfe:

That is — that is accurate to say. While we’re always preparing for that possibility, we’re always preparing for things like a denial of service attack, for example, where someone may try to overwhelm the network of a state or a local government so that it disrupts their flow of being able to conduct their processes. With that being said, we certainly did not see any of those specific types of attacks in the 2022 election, but we’re always preparing for those and working to make sure our systems are resilient and robust.

Frederica Freyberg:

What active cyber-attacks did Wisconsin see in 2020?

Meagan Wolfe:

In 2020, we certainly — I don’t know that we saw any specific cyber threats to our systems, but again, it’s a constant looking at our systems, making sure that they are resilient. It’s doing things like conducting the post-election voting equipment audit. So after each election, we conduct a post-election voting equipment audit, with involves hand-counting ballots in randomly selected jurisdictions to ensure that the paper ballots reflect the machine totals on the tabulators. And in the state of Wisconsin, after the 2020 election, and then again after the 2022 election, we actually audited 10% of the ballots in the state of Wisconsin and compared those paper totals against the machine totals, and found that they were incredibly accurate. And so it’s not just a matter of avoiding those attacks, preparing for those threats. We actually take a look after each election to ensure that our protections of the system did, indeed, work.

Frederica Freyberg:

And yet why could Wisconsin be vulnerable to this?

Meagan Wolfe:

Any corporation, any government entity, any individual is certainly susceptible to cyber threats. So it is our responsibility as not just election officials but as government officials in general to make sure that we are preparing for, practicing our contingency plans and our resiliency efforts. And we do a lot with our local officials to ensure that they understand cybersecurity best practices, and that they have the resources they need to be able to operate their local election systems in a secure manner. We do this through scenario-based trainings with our local election officials, and we also provide grants to local election offices so that they’re able to procure the resources they need, like a secure computer, access to managed support services for their computers, and even grants so that they can attend training where we focus on cybersecurity initiatives. So we may have a very decentralized election system here in the state of Wisconsin, with each of our cities, towns and villages operating elections, but we do a lot to work together to make sure that we’re prepared for any potential physical or cyber threats to elections.

Frederica Freyberg:

What does Wisconsin and other states need for that preparation and that training going forward? Something more than what we have now?

Meagan Wolfe:

That’s a great question. I think from my perspective, what we need is sustainable funding for cybersecurity in elections. And physical security in elections as well. What we see right now is we received federal grant funding, which allows us to implement one-time solutions for local election offices, for state election offices, for us to be able to build out our capabilities. But there is no finish line when it comes to cybersecurity in elections. Every day that goalpost moves. The threats that we face, those move and they change. And so we really need to find a way as states and local governments to be able to sustain those initiatives. Because the threat of a cybersecurity attack, it’s not going to go away and there is no finish line. So I think finding ways to create sustainable funding and programming to support security in elections is really, really an important initiative and should be a priority at both the state and the local level.

Frederica Freyberg:

Right. Meagan Wolfe, thank you very much.

Meagan Wolfe:

Thank you.