“We Are Effectively Flying Blind:” Election Officials Say Cuts to CISA Are Affecting Operations

Ever since President Donald Trump’s victory in November, election officials at every level and voting rights advocates have worried that he would gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — the little-known federal agency responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure from digital threats. And now that those cuts have come to fruition, election officials are already experiencing the loss of crucial CISA resources they said are integral to voting security.

In the seven years since CISA’s creation, it’s become a crucial agency to help secure elections from foreign and domestic cybersecurity threats. Among the agency’s routine functions are sending cybersecurity experts to local election offices to recommend upgrades and best practices, training election officials to spot foreign interference and connecting offices with law enforcement agencies — a crucial practice as violence and threats to election officials significantly grew in the past decade. 

But ever since CISA put its election staff on administrative leave, all of those functions have ceased. 

“My issue is that we may lose one of the most vital services that actually kept us safe in 2024 and kept our elections moving, even with all the disruptions that we could have had,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) told Democracy Docket. “CISA provided a whole host of services, including the [Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC)], which is an information exchange space. And they provided physical and cyber security agents… who physically went out and did inspections at all of our county election offices in the state of Arizona.”

Fontes particularly relied on the staff and resources of CISA in the months before the 2024 general election to help train election officials across the state to identify and address AI-related election threats. In June, Fontes’ office held a conference for local election officials to go through tabletop exercises of potential threats to disrupt the upcoming election. Among them was an 18-minute AI-generated video of Fontes created to show just how deceptive the technology has become — and how effectively it could be used to spread voting disinformation. 

CISA coordination and efforts with Fontes’ office helped foster a crucial communication network between state, federal and local law enforcement agents, and county election offices. All of the training and roleplaying exercises prior to the election proved necessary and effective: On Election Day, 10 counties in Arizona were targeted by Russian bomb hoaxes. 

“The reason we had almost no disruptions was because CISA helped us figure out how to deal with these sorts of things,” Fontes said. “And they helped us train our people so that we could very seamlessly address each of the issues as they arose, which we did.”

So when Fontes heard of the cuts to CISA, he sent a letter to Trump’s White House. “I urge you to reconsider these decisions and to reaffirm the federal government’s commitment to securing our elections,” he wrote. “It is imperative that we collaborate transparently to maintain public confidence in the electoral process and to ensure the continuity of the critical infrastructure that underpins our democracy.”

The effect of the Trump administration’s cuts to CISA reverberates all the way down to the local level. In Santa Fe, NM, County Clerk Katharine Clark (D) worries about the effect it’ll have on her office. She told Democracy Docket that CISA would regularly send staff to tour the Sante Fe election warehouse and do an assessment to make specific suggestions to improve the physical security space. She’s also worried about how cutting CISA’s information sharing via EI-ISAC will impact election offices across the country.

“Just in the last election, I felt like we were really coordinated, we worked with our law enforcement and there was that sort of acceptance and recognition that elections are critical infrastructure,” she said. “Now that we’re rolling back those resources, we are not going to see that emphasis anymore.”

Both Arizona and New Mexico will see a handful of local elections this year — along with counties across the country — and election officials are bracing for the impact the CISA cuts will have on their operations. Clark is already dealing with a likely funding gap for running local elections in Santa Fe this year and, coupled with the lack of resources she got from CISA because of the cuts, she’s worried that she won’t “have the same kind of level of expertise by the time November rolls around” for training staff to identify various election threats. 

“Right now, we are effectively flying blind,” Fontes said of the upcoming local elections in Arizona. “And it’s just bonkers that the administration wants to stop doing the things that we were doing to protect against foreign interference and these purposeful, targeted, intentional attacks against our democracy.”