Pentagon Cyber Forces to Guard US Midterm Elections

The National Security Agency and other military intelligence and cybersecurity units will help protect election systems during the November midterm elections, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Monday, weeks before Election Day on November 3.

Key facts

Less than the announcement suggests, on one reading. Military cybersecurity experts have routinely helped monitor systems and deter potential hackers since election equipment was designated critical infrastructure in 2017. Assistance from the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command is longstanding practice.

What's new is the explicit directive and its public framing. Hegseth's memo instructs defense intelligence officials to mobilize every resource toward the task.

Because of what happened to the civilian agency that used to lead this work. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, was created specifically to safeguard election infrastructure and was substantially cut under the Trump administration. CISA released its own election infrastructure security plan last week, laying out potential threats and services available to election officials.

David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department attorney who leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, criticized the timing, saying the short runway suggests the effort is theater. He argued that an administration serious about assisting state and local election officials would not have dismantled federal election cybersecurity capacity and dismissed its experts in early 2025.

The administration's position, as stated in the memo, is that the directive strengthens protection against foreign interference. Supporters of the approach note that the NSA and Cyber Command hold capabilities against foreign state actors that a civilian agency does not.

Many election experts, civil rights groups and Democratic election officials have said they are watching for any signs of interference in voting or ballot counting. President Trump has continued to make false claims that U.S. elections are rife with fraud. The Supreme Court blocked an attempt by the administration to restrict mail voting, while allowing use of a federal database to check voter citizenship.

Mostly unglamorous defensive work: monitoring voter registration databases and election-night reporting systems for intrusion, scanning for vulnerabilities in county-level infrastructure, sharing threat intelligence with local officials, and maintaining paper records that allow results to be audited.

Voting machines themselves are generally not connected to the internet. The higher-risk systems are the ones around them — registration rolls, results reporting, and election office email — which is where most real-world election cyber incidents have occurred.

Election infrastructure security is a live policy dispute, but the practical guidance for individual voters is stable and non-partisan: get information about voting from your state or county election office directly rather than from social media, and be skeptical of claims about results circulating before official tallies.

Source: The Associated Press, via Yahoo News Canada, reported by Jonathan J. Cooper.