Vendors point to their own multi-layered security procedures and the development of vulnerability disclosure programs in recent years, such as the program announced by Election Systems & Software in 2020 at DEF CON’s sister convention, Black Hat. Ahead of the 2018 Voting Village, for instance, the National Association of Secretaries of State called the village a “pseudo environment which in no way replicates state election systems, networks, or physical security,” BuzzFeed reported at the time. “The election space seems to be stuck to 30 years behind.”Įlection officials and the vendors argue that things have improved, and have been critical of the Voting Village almost from the start. “Other industries, especially in the critical infrastructure area, have understood the value of the hacker community, the security community, to work together,” he said. “In almost every other industry than elections, the gap is closing and is has been steadily closing,” he said. Nevertheless, he said, there remains a gap between election security researchers and the hacker community more broadly and the election vendors.
Even as people from the election industry are harsh critics of the Voting Village, they all generally agree on the main point: There is no evidence of widespread manipulation of voting systems to rig the 2020 election. The unprecedented pressures on election administrators in the wake of the 2020 election has put people like Hursti, a longtime critic of the election equipment industry, in the position of repeatedly explaining that while legitimate vulnerabilities can be found, there’s no evidence of widespread manipulation or fraud. And Nicole Tisdale, a former National Security Council staffer, talked about how disinformation and misinformation targets minority communities to suppress votes.
Staffers from Maricopa County, Arizona, home to some of the most intense post 2022 election conspiracy theories, gave a presentation on how their elections work. That context informed some of this year’s programming in the village. Election officials from Georgia in June detailed the threats they’d received from Trump supporters, a disturbingly common report across the country over the last two years. Elections officials in Colorado and Michigan stand accused of giving unauthorized access to voting infrastructure in a quixotic effort to prove the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Election offices are, at times, buried in records requests looking to expose fraud.
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