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1 [1] (March 5, 2020)

handle is hein.crs/govcanx0001 and id is 1 raw text is: FF. ' -iE , ., . i , March 5, 2020 The Election Infrastructure Subsector: Development and Challenges In January 2017, in accordance with Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated the systems and assets used in elections as the Election Infrastructure Subsector (EIS) of the Government Facilities critical infrastructure sector. DHS defines critical infrastructure as the physical and cyber systems and assets that are so vital to the United States that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our physical or economic security or public health or safety. The critical infrastructure designation was intended to help address some of the obstacles election stakeholders faced in responding to foreign interference in the 2016 elections, such as a lack of timely information sharing about threats to election systems. It gave DHS a new role in election security, authorizing it to help coordinate among and prioritize assistance to election security stakeholders. This In Focus provides an overview of the EIS. It describes the formation and development of the subsector and some of the ongoing challenges it faces. DHS established the EIS under an existing policy framework for critical infrastructure security that was first outlined during the Clinton Administration. Current critical infrastructure security guidance derives from the most recent iteration of that framework, PPD-21, published in 2013. PPD-21 designated 16 critical infrastructure sectors, directing DHS to coordinate security collaboration among public and private stakeholders and prioritize provision of its support services to those stakeholders. Primary coordination mechanisms for each sector include Government Coordinating Councils (GCCs), which consist of relevant federal agencies and other public sector stakeholders, and Sector Coordinating Councils (SCCs), which consist primarily of private sector stakeholders. These coordinating councils may also support independently organized Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) to help identify and address threats to infrastructure in the sector they represent. According to DHS, election infrastructure includes both elections -related information and communications technology, such as voter registration databases and voting machines, and physical infrastructure, such as polling places and elections storage facilities. DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) serves as the lead federal agency for the EIS. DHS and its federal, state, and local partners chartered the EIS GCC in October 2017, and private sector partners chartered the EIS SCC in February 2018. The EIS GCC created the Elections Infrastructure (EI) ISAC in 2018 to provide state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) officials with services such as 24-hour threat monitoring, readiness exercises, and assistance with incident response. The same year, the EIS SCC and the industry-focused Information Technology (IT) ISAC established an Elections Industry Special Interest Group (EI-SIG). The EI-SIG focuses on the needs of elections industry companies, providing them with a platform to engage with other members of the IT sector and exchange information on common threats. The federal critical infrastructure security framework relies on voluntary participation and community-wide contributions to increase risk awareness and security. Observers have offered mixed assessments of the overall effectiveness of the voluntary collaboration framework, but they have generally found that critical infrastructure sectors become more effective as they increase active membership, pool resources, and find ways to more efficiently generate and share security-related information. When DHS first designated election systems as critical infrastructure, it lacked experience with election administration practices or well-developed relationships with the SLTT officials who administer elections. Furthermore, officials from the National Association of Secretaries of State and the Election Assistance Commission-the federal agency with the most experience working with SLTT election officials-objected to the critical infrastructure designation as agency overreach. However, observers have indicated that relations between DHS and federal, state, and local partners have since improved and that the EIS has made progress in the areas of active membership growth, resource pooling, and information sharing listed above. For example, as of February 2020, the EI-ISAC has nearly 2,500 members, including many SLTT election authorities. As such, the El- ISAC was the fastest growing of the existing ISACs, according to DHS. By design, the value of the services the EI-ISAC provides increases with the network of stakeholders that use them. For example, the EI-ISAC uses analysis of network traffic on SLTT government systems to help develop cyber threat signatures, so its ability to identify malicious network activity increases as more SLTT authorities share network data. Since 2018, the EI-ISAC has expanded deployment of intrusion detection sensors known as Albert sensors-to mppm qq\ p\w gn'a', ggmm a 'S I 11LULANUALiN,

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