Finding Common Ground on Cyber and Elections Security

The nation’s election systems were added as critical infrastructure in late 2016 by the Obama administration.

With that as background, see this column: “5 Ways to Boost Cybersecurity for the Midterm Elections.”

Emergency managers don’t operate power plants, purify water or maintain cell tower networks. So no, we don’t run election systems either, but that does not make them any less our responsibility than the previous mentioned critical infrastructures that we support and are concerned about functioning well.

If you don’t know the status of your community’s election infrastructure, now would be a good time to make that connection, the same way you might for the more hardware-focused infrastructures in your community. In this case they are not in private hands, and more than likely part of the county government that you are part of — if you are a county emergency manager.