Strong emergency response requires close collaboration with your election security partners, and bringing them together now can ensure everyone understands the threats to critical election infrastructure and stays aligned. With 10 weeks until Election Day, now is an ideal time to reconvene your Election Security Working Group (ESWG), or even to hold that first meeting if the year has been too busy. There is still time to test response plans, refine procedures, and verify redundancies and backups.
The third issue of our Planning Desk offered a sample agenda for a productive first meeting, which can also serve as a guide for recurring meetings. At this point in the general election cycle, consider prioritizing the following topics for discussion:
- Election Overview
Help your ESWG understand how critical election infrastructure is being accessed – for what, by who, and when – by reviewing your:
- Timeline: Call out significant dates for the upcoming general election, such as voter registration, early voting, and certification. Provide addresses and operating hours of all polling locations.
- Operations: Note which technologies, systems, and processes are being used by staff, vendors, and the public, and when.
- Vulnerabilities: Describe what’s most at risk in your election operations and how losing access to your facility, systems, or specific critical data would impact your ability to administer the election.
- Redundancies & Backups*: Verify which ones are in place and which ones are needed. Determine who will test and confirm that all are available and ready, and establish a schedule to ensure it happens.
*Redundancy mitigates the risk of downtime, and backup mitigates the risk of data loss.
- Incidents & Threats
Help your ESWG understand the cyber, physical, and operational risks to elections in your jurisdiction by sharing:
- Threat Intelligence: Provide any alerts, awareness, and intelligence you have on both active and potential threats so that everyone has the same information. Create a plan for sharing information and intelligence up through Election Day to maintain awareness of emerging threats.
- Impact of Natural Disasters: Describe how natural disasters could impact or have impacted election operations in your jurisdiction.
- Recent Incidents or Concerns: Review any recent physical or cyber incidents or near misses, and highlight any concerns about your organization’s ability to respond to or continue operations during an incident. Other jurisdictions’ experiences can offer lessons for best practices, especially those in neighboring jurisdictions or in similar geographic areas.
- Election Day Plan
Help your ESWG prepare to support you on Election Day by reviewing:
- Joint Training Options: Tabletop exercises (TTX) and Election Scenario Test Decks can help find vulnerabilities and improve incident response plans.
- Tour Opportunities: In-person visits to polling locations and election operations facilities can help illustrate the risks to equipment, people, and processes.
- PACE Principles: Build resilience by preparing for cascading failures.
- Communication Plan: Ensure everyone has a current contact list and access to the desired communication channels. Consider activating the ESWG on Election Day through a web-based emergency operations center, chat space, or open virtual meeting for real-time chatting and brief check-ins throughout the day.
- Incident Response Plan: Confirm roles, responsibilities, and plans are current and ready to be activated if necessary.
- Follow-up
Help your ESWG maintain accountability by scheduling a:
- Follow-up Meeting: Ensure action items assigned in this meeting get accomplished by having everyone report back to the group. Ideally, the follow-up would happen in September so that the ESWG still has time to complete any additional tasks.
- Post-election Review: Even if you experience no disruptions during the general election, reconvening the ESWG in December or January provides an opportunity to identify issues that may not have risen to the level of ‘incident’ but caused temporary concern at the time. Reviewing the election in retrospect can prime the ESWG for a new year of meeting, exercising, and planning.
Sustaining an effective ESWG supports election resilience and incident response before, during, and after elections. Convening your trusted security partners now can optimize that response and help ensure the continuity of your election operations.
The Planning Desk is a running timeline of key election security tasks. You can find prior editions in the newsletter archive.