The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Tuesday afternoon that it was seeing relatively smooth sailing for voting infrastructure and processes across the United States with polls open in all 50 states for the 2022 midterm elections.
“We continue to see no specific or credible threat to disrupt election infrastructure or Election Day operations,” a senior CISA official said during a call with reporters this afternoon. “We’ve seen no activity that should cause anyone to question the security, integrity, or resilience of our election infrastructure.”
The senior official noted that with 8,800 individual election jurisdictions, “you’re going to see a few issues arise.” For example, the agency said it is aware of issues in Maricopa County, Ariz. – referring to malfunctions with the county’s tabulator machine – and has “been in touch with officials at the state and county levels.”
In a video explanation from the county, Maricopa County Chairman Bill Gates said the county is working to resolve this issue “as quickly as possible.” He said the county also has a “redundancy in place” so that voters can simply drop their ballot in a secure box to be centrally tabulated later this evening.
“This is actually what the majority of Arizona counties do on Election Day all the time,” assured Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.
Despite these technical issues, the senior CISA official said, “none of this is out of the ordinary, and it’s really important that we all work not to make the normal out to be nefarious.”
“We know in this environment, normal technical challenges can sometimes be misinterpreted to mean malicious activity. We have seen no indication to date that this is the case,” the official said.
The agency also made clear that it has “not seen any evidence of foreign influence affecting any of our election infrastructure,” and it is “very encouraged by the high use of paper ballots,” which voters can directly verify.
