Election officials performed vital work throughout 2024 to successfully administer the presidential election – along with elections for numerous federal, state, and local offices and ballot questions. In cities like Cranston, Johnston, and Warwick alone, that effort included nearly 1,000 poll workers, city personnel, police detail officers, and full-time election staff who maintain our voter rolls, hire and train poll workers, and coordinate early voting and polling place operations.

The common denominator in all these efforts is the focus on securing and maintaining the integrity of our elections. For years, alongside local law enforcement, our biggest partners in strengthening election security have been federal agencies like the FBI, DNI, NSA, Homeland Security, and in particular, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was created under President Trump during his first term in office.

Since 2017, our elections facilities, staff, and equipment have been designated “national critical infrastructure” – the same designation given to other vital facilities like nuclear power plants, ports, and pipelines. If our elections are successfully attacked, the foundation of our government crumbles, so the federal government has, until now, taken this designation seriously in providing significant security support.

This has been sorely needed: election offices are among the smallest, understaffed, and most under-resourced departments of local governments nationwide, yet a tremendous amount of responsibility is put on the shoulders of local election officials. We must process thousands of voter registrations accurately, enforce a complex web of federal and state voting laws, oversee recruitment and training of hundreds of poll workers, ensure ADA compliance and accessibility for all aspects of voting, be responsive to the public in keeping elections transparent, and, among many other duties, we must keep every facet of our elections process secure in order to ensure integrity.

The security of elections is more challenging than ever as we combat well-resourced, hostile foreign nations that have actively tried to undermine trust in our elections via fake, AI-generated videos on social media, robocalls to voters with false polling place information, and attempts to hack into election websites. On Election Day in 2024, hundreds of polling locations around the country received bomb threats – originating from Russia – in a brazen, but unsuccessful, attempt to disrupt voting across America. Fortunately, election officials were well-prepared for these attacks thanks to ongoing training, support, resources, and real-time intelligence from CISA.

These are serious threats from foreign adversaries who are intent on disrupting our elections process, which put local election officials on the front lines of international conflicts. However, we are unequipped to fight off these direct attacks by the governments of Russia, China, and Iran without federal support. That’s why the work of CISA has been so vital: they have been the front-line shield to protect our elections, voter databases, voting equipment, poll workers, and staff from America’s adversaries.

CISA has provided free training, planning templates, classified briefings, cyber-attack table-top exercises, on-site security evaluations, and threat monitoring. For instance, they have routinely made us aware of specific email and IP addresses associated with hostile Russian intelligence agencies that are being actively used to attack elections, so that our city IT Department can take action to block them.

These vital services have been provided at no cost to all 39 Rhode Island cities and towns. If we had to pay for these free federal cybersecurity services from private vendors, municipalities, collectively, would need to spend millions of local taxpayer dollars.

Not all threats come from overseas. Last September, the state Board of Elections in Cranston received an envelope from the “U.S. Traitor Elimination Army” containing white powder, one of many sent to election offices around the country that in some cases were laced with deadly fentanyl. Election officials have been victims of swatting attacks on their homes and have faced credible death threats to their families. In October, incendiary devices were placed on several ballot boxes on the West Coast. CISA provided us with real-time intelligence sharing on these attacks in 2024, and the list of genuine security threats to elections goes on.

Shockingly, in recent weeks, election officials have learned the federal government has terminated all existing security support for our elections. Intelligence analysts at CISA, along with all 10 regional election security advisors – good people who we have worked with directly – were fired. The FBI’s elections security task force was disbanded. All sharing of threat intelligence and security preparations has come to a sudden halt. The Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) – a vital, CISA-funded organization designed to provide election officials with direct security intelligence – was terminated (all 41 state and local election offices in Rhode Island were active EI-ISAC members).

Numerous letters and attempts by state and local election officials from across America to discuss these concerns with CISA and Homeland Security leadership have gone unanswered. In essence, election officials are now completely cut off from our longstanding federal security partners.

Meanwhile, the myriad threats faced by our people, facilities, networks, and voting equipment are just as real, persistent, and dangerous as ever. Our ability to defend our democracy and provide accurate, safe, secure elections is dependent upon our capability to mitigate these threats. We are simply not equipped to do that alone.

For us to confidently administer secure elections, these federal partnerships must be restored and strengthened. Unfortunately, there is presently no indication that will happen, but we continue to remain hopeful that these common-sense, bi-partisan election security concerns will be heard and addressed at the federal level.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Nick Lima has been the Registrar / Director of Elections for the City of Cranston Board of Canvassers since January 2017. He is the Chairman of the Rhode Island Town and City Clerks’ Association’s Elections Committee, which is the state’s association of local election officials.