The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cautions that domestic actors have introduced new unknown factors into the 2024 election cycle. Its 2024 threat assessment warns that DHS expects the upcoming election cycle to be “a key event for possible violence and foreign influence targeting our election infrastructure, processes and personnel.”
In 2020, DHS warned about what Iran, Russia and China might do to sow “discord, division and distraction” around the presidential election. These concerns remain in 2024, but domestic actors with a range of motives are playing an increasing role, cultivating distrust of election processes and antagonism toward the people who administer elections.
The DHS assessment confirms the concerns of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, which works to preserve election integrity.
In a webinar on Tuesday of this week, “What Can We Do to Have a Fair and Safe Election in 2024?,” project director and legal scholar Rick Hasenbrought together election administration experts to review lessons from 2020 as well as anticipate the effects of developments in social media, artificial intelligence and foreign interference that could bring novel challenges.
He was joined by MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III; Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory; Kate Klonick, a law and technology researcher based at St. John’s University; and Kim Wyman, senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. For her part, Wyman also served as the Republican secretary of state in Washington state before joining the Biden administration as election security lead for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency….