An agency involved in running elections fended off repeated attempts to guess its login credentials on Election Day, and bomb threats forced voting outdoors at an Ohio school, Nextgov/FCW reported Tuesday night, citing an election security information-sharing center. The incidents were ordinary, but they fell on state and local offices as the federal government played a smaller public role in election security.
What Happened
The Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which collects incident reports from election offices, said one office saw its online services probed for weaknesses and an unsuccessful attempt to break in, Nextgov/FCW reported. At an agency involved in elections, repeated password guesses all came from a single internet address; a person aware of the matter told the outlet none succeeded. After that agency flagged the address, several other election offices reported malicious traffic from the same source.
A state election office recorded five traffic spikes on the webpage voters use to find ballot drop boxes. The traffic fell after officials added a CAPTCHA, a test that separates people from automated programs. In an earlier update reported by Nextgov/FCW, EI-ISAC described limited threat activity, mostly resolved quickly, including one office that logged more than 600 web requests a minute for unclear reasons.
Physical threats caused more disruption. A bomb threat at Beverly Elementary School in Toledo, Ohio, pushed voting outdoors while police searched the building, and a court let voters assigned there cast provisional ballots until 9:15 p.m. local time. EI-ISAC said at least four other area schools received threats, as did three polling-place schools in a mid-Atlantic state.
Voters in Fulton County, Ga., received texts falsely saying their polling place had moved; the county said it did not send them. In Westchester County, N.Y., ballot scanners failed because they had not been updated after a change to a local race, the state Board of Elections said, and the Center for an Informed Public said the glitch was being spread online with "a false, conspiratorial framing."
EI-ISAC had received no reports of foreign influence operations as of Tuesday night. "So far, we have not seen evidence of significant cyber incidents," Geoff Hale, a former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) election security official now at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Nextgov/FCW.
Separately, Colorado's public results website went blank as polls were about to close; vendor SOE Software blamed automated traffic from results scrapers, and officials said it was not a cyberattack and affected more than Colorado, the Colorado Sun reported.
Why It Matters
Password guessing and bot floods are the same low-level attacks that hit corporate login pages, and election offices contained them with basic controls. Hoaxes and fake texts still disrupted voting locally, and one vendor's outage shows how a shared supplier can take down public reporting in several places at once. CISA said Monday it would not hold election security briefings with reporters, and Nextgov/FCW's reports included no CISA assessment of the day. The Primary Wire reported in October, citing Nextgov/FCW, that federal links to state election offices had thinned.
What to Watch
Whether the FBI identifies who made the threats, whether the single-address login attempts are traced, and whether CISA or the FBI publishes a post-election assessment. Both agencies had warned election officials about AI-assisted phishing in October.
