Bipartisan group launches effort to improve election security

The former managers of the presidential campaigns for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney have teamed up with experts from the technology community and the U.S. government to improve election security measures.

The new bipartisan group, called Defending Digital Democracy (DDD), was formed at Harvard University amid growing concerns about election security and Russian hacking threats. The project will be run by Eric Rosenbach, the former U.S. assistant secretary of defense and current co-director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which is one of the organizations at Harvard University sponsoring this initiative. Rosenbach called on Robby Mook, Clinton's former campaign manager from her 2016 run, and Matt Rhoades, who was Romney's campaign manager in 2012, as fellows and to co-lead the group.

According to the Belfer Center, the goal of the Defending Digital Democracy project is "to identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks. By creating a unique and bipartisan team comprised of top-notch political operatives and leaders in the cyber and national security world, DDD intends to offer concrete solutions to an urgent problem."

In an effort to improve election security and to protect against the threats of malicious nation-state and nonstate actors, the group will provide "practical playbooks" that election administrators, election infrastructure providers and campaign organizations can use to bolster cybersecurity. The group also intends to look at the possibility of using blockchain and other emerging technologies to improve election security, specifically electronic voting.

"Americans across the political spectrum agree that political contests should be decided by the power of ideas, not the skill of foreign hackers," Rosenbach said in the statement. "Cyber deterrence starts with strong cyber defense -- and this project brings together key partners in politics, national security, and technology to generate innovative ideas to safeguard our key democratic institutions."

Along with Mook and Rhoades, the Defending Digital Democracy project has recruited the top Democratic and Republican election lawyers as advisers; as well as Google's director of information security and privacy, Heather Adkins; CrowdStrike's co-founder and CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch; the former director of the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate, Debora Plunkett; Facebook's CSO Alex Stamos; and others.

The formation of the Defending Digital Democracy project follows in the wake of politically motivated cyberattacks, such as the phishing attack on Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, as well as the Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. A Senate intelligence committee hearing last month revealed that Russian hackers targeted nearly 50% of states during the 2016 election. While the probing of election systems was detected last year, there is still no evidence that actual votes were changed.

"Cyberattacks on campaigns and elections are a threat to our democracy and affect people of all political stripes," Rhoades said of the DDD project. "Foreign actors could target any political party at any time, and that means we all need to work together to address these vulnerabilities. This project will bring together not just different parties and ideologies, but subject matter experts from cybersecurity, national security, technology and election administration to make a difference."