Three months before this year’s conference, she also enlisted two pro-bono consultants with a background in counter-terrorism to build and implement a physical and digital security roadmap.ĭEF CON has a separate security staff, also volunteer, while Caesar’s Forum, where this year’s conference is being hosted, provides armed guards. Previously, the event had shared a large auditorium with several other DEF CON events - an arrangement that made it impossible to see who was coming and going through the village, she said. One of the biggest changes Terranova said she made was moving the Voting Village to its own room. They even followed one of them to the airport, per Hursti and Terranova. “Because our work didn’t fit into the false narrative that this was a statewide issue, it caused people to be very angry,” said Hursti.Īt the DEF CON conference in 2022, individuals working for the right-wing media outlet One American News showed up at the Voting Village and began aggressively approaching individuals in the room with cameras.īecause DEF CON rules stipulate that you must ask individuals for permission before taking their photo, the conference’s volunteer security staff later escorted the OAN reporters from the property and banned them from the conference.Īlso last year, a trio of individuals apparently bent on promoting election denialism showed up at the event and harassed some of the Voting Village’s speakers. Though Hursti’s audit did not swing the outcome of the vote, it brought him into the crosshairs of allies of Trump, who cited the now-dismissed recount as evidence of “massive election fraud.” Those kicked up significantly in late 2021, however, after Hursti and a team of auditors disproved allegations of fraud in a controversial New Hampshire recount. The other co-organizer, election security researcher Harri Hursti, said he has been receiving death threats for his work since before 2016. But for the two organizers of it, the concerns around physical security are not abstract. No people had reported being harmed or harassed by late Saturday at of the Voting Village. Overall, according to a March 2022 study from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, one in six election workers have experienced threats because of their job, and 77 percent said those threats had increased in recent years. Two election workers from Georgia are now suing Trump ally Rudy Giuliani for defamation, after they became the target of debunked accusations of voter fraud spread by allies of the former president. Trump’s accusations of widespread fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election have fueled a raft of right-wing conspiracy theories and, with them, a surge in targeted harassment and intimidation against election workers. Since then, the threats facing the country’s election systems have ratcheted up significantly. It started in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, when Russian military and intelligence services sought to undermine the contest through a combination of hacking and disinformation. The Voting Village is a small part of the enormous DEF CON conference, which draws almost 30,000 hackers annually. These folks are members of our communities, and dedicated public servants,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement. “Any threat of violence against an election official, poll worker, or anyone else working to safeguard our democracy is completely unacceptable. It’s an issue government election security officials are thinking about as well. “I said to myself, ‘we are never doing this like this again.’” “The day after DEF CON ended last year, I started pouring all of my time and energy into figuring out how to secure this village,” Terranova said. The rise in disinformation-fueled threats is forcing election administrators, poll workers and security researchers to think more deeply about physical safety, and take a host of new precautions to do their job.Īt last year’s DEF CON, a pair of minor but troubling incidents involving election conspiracy theorists set off alarm bells for said Catherine Terranova, one of the two organizers of the Voting Village. The measures offer a small window into an increasingly regular feature of America’s voting security landscape.
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