Trump’s 2020 outrage drives fear of ‘insider’ election threats

Former President Trump’s campaign to undermine the 2020 election is fueling concerns over midterm election security, with experts warning of “insider” threats from the very officials charged with guarding the vote. 

Hundreds of GOP candidates in federal and state races have embraced his false claims about the election, including at least 20 Republican candidates running for secretary of state, according to an NPR analysis. 

Trump’s election denial movement has raised concerns among U.S. officials and experts who fear the conspiracy theories could undermine the legitimacy of future elections.

“I think that’s kind of a new element to the threat landscape of elections,” said William Adler, a senior technologist in elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “I think that the new risk is the risk of insider threats.”

Arizona is among the states where false claims about the 2020 election are the center of this year’s campaigns. 

Trump has endorsed Arizona state representative Mark Finchem, who attended ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies in January, for secretary of state. Finchem was also among several Republican politicians who attended a QAnon conference in Las Vegas last fall. 

Finchem’s opponent, Shawnna Bolick, is also an election skeptic. In early 2021, she introduced a bill that would allow Arizona lawmakers to overturn election results, by a simple majority, in response to fraud claims. Her bill later died in committee.

“There is a conscious campaign of people running for Secretary of State for the express purpose of trying to rig the election,” said David Hickton, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security.

The trend of election deniers running to oversee elections prompted a dozen House Democrats to urge the Department of Justice to address “insider threats to election systems.”

“Unfortunately, many of the candidates seeking to fill newly vacated state and local election posts support former President Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen,” the lawmakers said in the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“We are concerned that this new cohort of election officials may be inclined to abuse their authority to directly influence the results of future elections.”

Hickton said that insider threats should be treated with the same urgency as foreign threats.

“Now we have this domestic threat that is a residue from the Trump-MAGA experience. And for the first time in our history, we have candidates who lost and who are now saying that they lost because the election was rigged,” Hickton said. 

“Richard Nixon didn’t do that; Al Gore didn’t do that,” he added. “That’s a guardrail that was protected where we all had a common interest in election integrity.”

Hickton added that another threat to election security is the attempt to suppress votes in certain states, pointing to recent state legislation introduced following the 2020 election that would make it harder for certain voters to cast ballots. 

For instance, lawmakers in Georgia introduced restrictive bills that would limit early and absentee voting and would also require proof of identification to vote. Among Trump’s unfounded claims were that millions of people voted illegally and thousands of dead people voted in Georgia. 

“There is a conscious effort to re-engage in voter suppression by suggesting through disinformation that people who are not qualified to vote are voting or that people are counting votes beyond those that exist,” Hickton said.

“That’s just disinformation and it has to be called out,” he added. 

Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told lawmakers in April that her agency is preparing for a slew of security threats leading up to November — including foreign interference, insider threats and physical violence against election officials.

Easterly also pointed lawmakers to a webpage CISA created called the Rumor Control, which the agency is hoping will help debunk common disinformation narratives so voters “have the information they need to maintain confidence in the integrity of elections.”

Some Democrat-led states have passed laws to protect elections from these new insider threats, and increased targeting of officials overseeing the vote count. 

In late May, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed two bills into law intended to fight against insider threats and protect election workers from physical threats and online harassment.

“We want to make sure that every vote is accurately counted,” Polis said as he signed the bills. “And we also want to make sure that those that oversee elections themselves don’t have to worry about their physical safety.”

Adler of the Center for Democracy & Technology said that the federal government needs to set up channels to communicate with state and local officials as they seek to counter a range of threats, from false narratives to cyber attacks on electronic voting systems. 

“The goal of election security is not just to secure machines from being tampered with but also to make sure that people trust the outcome,” Adler said.

“To build trust in our elections you need to come at it from both angles; you need to make sure that the systems are actually secured, but you also need to make sure that disinformation about election security isn’t spreading randomly.”