Election security measures and ‘curveball’ training in Minnesota, nation put to the test

Minnesota’s top election security official said Monday the state is aware of election disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, but is not aware of any “specific, credible threats to Minnesota elections.”

Bill Ekblad, the election security navigator in the office of the secretary of state, said he works closely with federal agencies —  the FBI and a federal Department of Homeland Security office called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — to monitor disruptions.

Both have made public statements that “both foreign and domestic bad actors are committed to disrupt the American election,” Ekblad said. “We are not currently aware of any specific, credible threats to Minnesota elections.

“We do believe that the preparations done by Minnesota county and municipal elections officials and the teams that support them have them ready for whatever might come,” Ekblad said. That includes training on what to look for and how to respond, report and ask for help, he said.

“Certainly the topic of cybersecurity as it relates to elections is not new. It is probably the most mature of the threat streams that we have been paying attention to, going back to the 2016 presidential election,” he said. But the most dominant form is misinformation.

“That’s the softer side of cybersecurity,” he said. Specific threats to election networks “do still happen,” but when we think about threats to this election, it is primarily mis- and disinformation, he said.

“We know that the next few days will be a test of all that we and our local partners have put into election security the past few years,” Ekblad said. “There are likely to be curveballs, surprises and things we didn’t see coming,” he said, but he expressed confidence in a safe and secure election in the state.

Part of the physical security for polling places is to enforce state law on who can be within 100 feet of the entrance to polling places. Those are voters, elections officials, news media, party challengers and any employees of the entity where the poll is located, such as school or church employees.

It is now a crime to interfere or attempt to intimidate elections officials or election workers. That was one of many changes to election law passed in the last two sessions of the Legislature.

Secretary of State Steve Simon said he was not aware of any plans to deploy National Guard units to be prepared to aid election security as has been done in Washington state, Nevada and Oregon.

“We know of no existing, imminent plan to call up and activate the National Guard,” he said. “That’s always an option, but that’s really up to the governor.

A spokesman for Gov. Tim Walz said there has been no activation order and that any deployment would be announced publicly if it should happen.

Simon also expressed concern that some people are using a few incidents, such as misprinted ballots and brief exposure of ballot boxes in an open car, to sow distrust in the election. He cited recent polls that showed the percentage of voters who expressed basic trust in state elections to be in the mid-to-high 70% range.

“It is hard to get 76 or 79 percent of people to agree to anything in a poll anymore,” Simon said. “But they agree on this. I understand that some people will leverage particular anecdotes to generalize about the system. But the fact is that we have enjoyed elections that are fair, accurate and secure.

Simon also said Monday that 1,174,224 Minnesota voters had already cast ballots, suggesting the state would surpass the percentage of votes cast by mail at early voting centers in 2022 when 26% of the state vote was cast this way. Far more — 58% — voted outside traditional polls in 2020, a number attributed to the COVID pandemic and special laws that encouraged staying out of physical polls.

Simon said a change in when absentee ballots must be received by elections officials could slightly delay results. In previous elections, those ballots had to be received by 3 p.m. on Election Day, but now are valid if received by 8 p.m. Since all votes for a given precinct must be tallied before results from that precinct are publicly reported, local elections officials must be sure that all have been received.

Still, the secretary of state said, “in Minnesota, we should expect to have nearly all results in before folks sit down to breakfast on Wednesday, November 6.”

Simon’s office has set up voice or text lines for voters to ask questions about voting. They can call 1-877-600-VOTE (8683) or text 651-217-3862 to get information from an election worker.

Editor’s note: Peter Callaghan wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. 

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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