The meeting between top US election officials and their cybersecurity partners from the federal government almost went off without a hitch. Then Mac Warner spoke up.
Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, didn’t have a mundane logistical question for the government representatives, who were speaking at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Washington, DC, on February 8. Instead, Warner lambasted the officials for what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks.
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told the officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who watched him impassively from the stage. “You all need to clean up your own houses.”
Neither of the officials responded to Warner, and the NASS meeting—a semiannual gathering for the nation’s election administrators that handles everything from mail-in voting to cyber threats—soon transitioned to other business. However, Warner, who went to an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory and is now running for governor on a far-right platform, isn’t a marginal voice in the GOP. His fervent speech mirrors a growing right-wing reaction to the election security work of agencies such as CISA and the FBI—a reaction that now endangers the alliance that the federal government has carefully established with state leaders since Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
CISA is crucial in aiding states conduct safe elections, but its commitment to notifying social media companies about misinformation has particularly upset conservatives. While most GOP secretaries of state keep their views about CISA’s actions to confront online falsehoods private, Democrats and nonpartisan experts fear this may alter in upcoming years. With national Republicans progressively opposing CISA—scrutinizing its activities and proposing to cut its budget—the agency’s collaboration with GOP leaders in the states are more at risk than ever before.
“The tough and necessary task of safeguarding our elections should not be a partisan matter,” says US representative Chris Deluzio, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former cyber policy scholar. “So I am deeply troubled that some Republican secretaries of state may undermine that effort just to cater to their partisan interests.”
The federal program that earned Warner’s scorn was created in response to the widespread misinformation and disinformation that has disseminated online since the 2016 election.
Determined to avoid another contest marred by viral false claims about voting processes, CISA in 2018 began coordinating conversations with social media companies and other federal agencies about the best ways to counter dangerous and destabilizing lies. During the 2020 election, through a process known as “switchboarding,” CISA alerted social media firms to complaints from state and local election officials about online misinformation, such as posts advertising incorrect voting times and locations.
Lauren Goode
Lauren Goode
Matt Burgess
Angela Watercutter
It was in this spirit that FBI officials met with Twitter and Facebook executives in the lead-up to Election Day 2020 and advised them to be wary of Russian disinformation operations involving fake documents. That warning later led both companies to suppress posts about a controversial New York Post story about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Silicon Valley’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop story outraged conservatives, who began accusing tech companies and their federal partners of conspiring to censor speech in an effort to rig the election. In subsequent investigations, CISA found itself squarely in the crosshairs. The agency had already earned the ire of former president Donald Trump and his allies for reassuring the public about the integrity of the 2020 election, but the new controversy practically made it a pariah on the right.
In June 2023, a House Judiciary Committee report blasted CISA as “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” A few months later, a federal appeals court partially affirmed a district judge’s ruling that placed limits on CISA’s ability to communicate with tech companies, finding that the agency’s work to fight disinformation “likely violated the First Amendment.”
Stunned by the intense backlash, CISA stopped working with social media platforms to combat mis- and disinformation. The FBI, too, scaled back its interactions with those companies, halting briefings about foreign interference activities. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured,” a US official told NBC News.
CISA has staunchly avoided acknowledging the reality that its reputation has been damaged.
“CISA’s election security mission is stronger than ever,” says Cait Conley, a senior adviser to director Jen Easterly who oversees the agency’s election work. “We remain engaged with election officials in all 50 states and will continue to conduct all of our work in an apolitical and nonpartisan manner.”
As the controversies have eroded CISA’s bipartisan brand, Republicans who run elections have split into two camps over whether to keep working with the agency to fight hackers, online falsehoods, and polling-place threats.
West Virginia’s Warner is the indisputable flag-bearer of the anti-CISA camp. “I’ve pulled away from them,” he tells WIRED at the NASS conference, a few hours after venting his frustrations to the federal officials. “I’m not attending their briefings, because I haven’t found anything useful out of them.”
Warner says he’s proud of the “tremendous advances” that federal and state officials have made together on election security since 2016, but he warns that CISA and the FBI will continue losing conservatives’ trust until they investigate their roles in the controversies of 2020. “I’ve brought this to the attention of CISA officials,” he says, “and there’s no effort there to do this.”
Warner argues that CISA’s warnings about foreign disinformation, AI-powered deep fakes, and death threats to election officials are “distractions from the real threat to American democracy” posed by censorship.
Written by: Lauren Goode
Lauren Goode
Matt Burgess
Angela Watercutter
It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA.
“The agency has been beneficial to our office by providing information and resources as it pertains to cybersecurity,” says JoDonn Chaney, a spokesperson for Missouri’s Jay Ashcroft.
South Dakota’s Monae Johnson says her office “has a good relationship with its CISA partners and plans to maintain the partnership.”
But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution.
Idaho’s Phil McGrane says CISA is doing “critical work … to protect us from foreign cyber threats.” But he also tells WIRED that the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), a public-private collaboration group that he helps oversee, “is actively reviewing past efforts regarding mis/disinformation” to determine “what aligns best” with CISA’s mission.
Mississippi’s Michael Watson has expressed concern over the statements made post the 2020 election along with some internal confidence issues that have emerged thereafter. Watson hopes that as we progress towards this year’s elections, CISA will operate as a nonpartisan organization focused strictly on the facts.
The relationships between CISA and Republican secretaries are not as solid as they once were, according to John Merrill, Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023. He attributes part of this rift to the pressure from the GOP base. He further indicates that many conservative Republican secretaries are perturbed not only about their interactions with federal agencies but also about how these interactions are perceived by their constituents.
Despite the criticism, defenders of CISA maintain that the agency plays a pivotal role in aiding state and local officials, often constrained by resources, in dealing with cyber and physical threats to their election systems.
Minnesota Secretary of State, Steve Simon, a Democrat, has commended the agency’s career civil servants and political leaders who have been phenomenal during both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Others specifically praised CISA’s coordination with tech companies to fight misinformation, arguing that officials only highlighted false claims and never ordered companies to delete posts.
“They’re just making folks aware of threats,” says Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. The real “bad actors,” he says, are the people who “want the election denialists and the rumor-mongers to run amok and just spread out whatever lies they want.”
If Republican officials begin disengaging from CISA, their states will lose critical security protections and resources. CISA sponsors the EI-ISAC, which shares information about threats and best practices for thwarting them; provides free services like scanning election offices’ networks for vulnerabilities, monitoring those networks for intrusions and reviewing local governments’ contingency plans; and convenes exercises to test election officials’ responses to crises.
“For GOP election officials to back away from [CISA] would be like a medical patient refusing to accept free wellness assessments, check-ups, and optional prescriptions from one of the world’s greatest medical centers,” says Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit group advocating for improved election technology.
Lauren Goode
Lauren Goode
Matt Burgess
Angela Watercutter
Worse, some CISA projects will become less effective as they lose participants. The EI-ISAC’s information-sharing initiative is only as valuable as the information that state and federal agencies submit to it.
Even if most states stick with CISA, it would only take a few holdouts to create systemic risk. “America’s election security posture is only as strong as its weakest jurisdiction,” says David Levine, the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.
Election security experts and Democratic officials express cautious optimism that there won’t be a GOP exodus from CISA this year.
“I have faith Republican secretaries of state will continue to prioritize their voters and collaborate with CISA to ensure a secure 2024 election,” says Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee.
Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, notes that some of CISA’s new regional election security advisers “have worked in recent years as or for Republican officeholders,” giving them credibility with GOP leaders.
According to Minnesota’s Simon, “the vast majority of secretaries find these partnerships valuable.”
Still, Warner says some secretaries quietly support his pushback against CISA and other aspects of the Biden administration’s election security strategy. “There [is a] meeting of the minds by some of the secretaries, especially on the right, with some of these similar concerns,” he says, even if “they’re not as outspoken as I am.”
That shared skepticism of CISA means that, even after Warner leaves office next year, the agency will remain on precarious footing with some of its Republican partners. For now, CISA’s allies are left hoping that the agency’s time-tested bonds will prove stronger than pressures from conservative activists.
“You can have strain in some areas of a relationship and still have a strong relationship,” says Arizona’s Fontes. “That’s what being a grown-up is about. And I think most of us are doing that pretty well.”
