Delaware’s election security efforts balance AI analysis and non-tech methods

We’re less than two months away from the 2024 general election, and voters continue to be bombarded with doubts that the election will be secure. 

Securing the ballot box is one challenge. Securing voters from disinformation is another. Security officials from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency say that, due to enhancements to election security systems, voters can feel confident about the safety of their elections, even as foreign entities tell them otherwise through social media campaigns.

With this week’s Delaware Primary Elections on Sept. 10, that’s top of mind as local voters are finally stepping into the 2024 election year. 

“It takes a lot of resources for us to boost the confidence of our constituents in the election process,” Solomon Adote, chief security officer for Delaware, told Technical.ly.

In Delaware, the Department of Technology and Information (DTI), where Adote works, plays a major role in election security up and down the state. Every state is individually responsible for making sure its elections are secure and votes are protected, counted and accurately reported.

DTI partners closely with the elections commissioner, the official tasked with focusing on the physical side of election security and the delivery of the vote at the actual in-person polling places. DTI focuses on electronic security. 

In preparation for the elections, the officials do walkthrough exercises, such as ‘a day in the life of a vote,’ that give them a threat perspective of everything from when the ballots are delivered from the manufacturer to validation, physical security, door badges, motion sensors and who can interact with the physical ballots. Such election security exercises have become a common part of safeguarding efforts.

Election Day involves high alert, the National Guard and AI

Election security is a 24/7 process for DTI, as voter registration systems and voter information do need to be on the internet with constant protection. 

With internet cybercriminals and bots cut off from the voting systems themselves, monitoring them is manageable. But Election Day is still game day, with the state’s managed security service on high alert for the duration. For the last few years, the Delaware National Guard has also been activated for the elections.

“They’re able to look at what we’re analyzing and what we’re detecting,” Adote told Technical.ly. “They do some confirmations, some highlights and they bring the significant skill set that they have.” 

The most important part of ensuring that voting devices are secure, Adote said, is to make sure that none of them can be interacted with in any way other than physically being there as a voter or poll worker. 

“We make sure there’s no connectivity available — there’s no wireless, there’s no Bluetooth, there’s no interface that allows somebody to [electronically] interact with it,” Adote said. “We have a very sophisticated, very next-generation technology, which we use … without making it available on the internet.”

Artificial intelligence — as in machine learning, not generative AI — is also used to identify abnormal patterns that may not be otherwise noticeable, by monitoring large quantities of data at once.  

“If every five minutes something happens, and all of a sudden it’s happening every four or three minutes, those are the things that we’re trying to detect,” Adote said.

One area of election security DTI can not directly protect voters from is disinformation, a huge issue with elections in the age of social media. 

Just last week, employees of a Russian state broadcaster were charged with a scheme to fund U.S. influencers to make high-traffic propaganda content to impact the election. 

Since those kinds of disinformation campaigns operate outside of DTI’s control, they rely on residents to alert them if they see anything suspicious, especially if it’s a disinformation account or site posing as an official site connected to the Delaware. 

“[If you] come across a Twitter page that doesn’t seem right, we want to know about those,” Adote said. “We want to respond quickly to take them offline.”

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