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Election Security Concerns Flare Ahead of Iowa Caucuses

As the first contest in the 2020 race to the White House approaches, a new round of potential cybersecurity worries has come into focus.

i voted sticker spool on white surface 1550336Earlier this month, the chief information security officer for presidential candidate Pete Buggigieg resigned, citing “differences” over how to secure the campaign. The staffer, Mick Baccio, was the only known cybersecurity chief at any of the presidential campaigns, according to TechCrunch.

Baccio’s exit came ahead of the start of voting in the presidential primary season, with the Iowa caucuses to be held on February 3. For the first time, Iowa’s Democratic Party will use a smartphone app at this year’s caucuses, sparking its own cybersecurity warnings, as NPR reports. Caucuses work differently than primaries, and the app is intended to speed up the process and help tabulate votes.

But the party has declined to share information about the app and its security, leaving it unclear how the app would respond to cyberattacks like Russia’s successful hacking of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s email prior to the 2016 presidential election. The head of the state party said, “If there is a challenge, we’ll be ready with a backup and a backup to that backup and a backup to the backup to the backup.”

Meanwhile, a report that Russian military officers hacked Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy business at the core of President Trump’s impeachment, has Democratic lawmakers ringing alarm bells anew about 2020 election security, as The Hill reports. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) told The Hill that the attack was “just a further confirmation” of Russia’s ongoing attempts to interfere with the 2020 election.

Separately, cybersecurity firm Cloudflare has announced free services for federal election campaigns, as The New York Times reports. The initiative is a partnership with the nonprofit group Defending Digital Campaigns. A Rolling Stone article—citing “seven months of reporting, [interviews with] more than 40 experts as well as current and former government officials and ...thousands of pages of records”—concludes that while election security has improved since 2016, it’s still weaker than it should be.

“In some ways, we’re less vulnerable than we were in 2016,” said Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council. “In other ways, it’s more.”

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