State election officials got an unusual invitation from the Trump administration last week: a late February call about midterm preparations organized by the FBI.
The surprise email came at a tense moment. The Justice Department has sued dozens of states for unredacted voter rolls, the FBI raided an Atlanta-area elections office, and President Donald Trump has called for nationalizing at least some elections.
Some state election chiefs said the invitation was also the first time they have heard from anyone in this Trump administration about election security in months — or ever. Seven Trump officials — including as many as three Cabinet secretaries — were expected to appear at a National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., last month, but ultimately just one White House aide showed up.
“Given what has happened over the last two weeks, the drama that occurred at NASS, and then to arbitrarily just send out an email with a predetermined date and time with everybody’s emails exposed, saying get on this call,” said Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, “my response was — [I] wrote back to them immediately, like, is this real?”
Nine secretaries of state at the annual NASS conference, which took place before the FBI’s briefing invitation, said in interviews that they’d had little contact with the second Trump administration, which gutted the federal agency charged with helping states secure their elections last year.
The first Trump administration designated elections as critical infrastructure and established the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which worked with states to help secure their elections both physically and digitally, under the Department of Homeland Security.
The agency offered money, manpower and expertise and funded information-sharing between states until last year, when it was devastated by major cuts. Funding for threat monitoring through the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a DHS-funded nonprofit agency, was cut because it “no longer supports Department priorities,” according to a letter DHS sent to the center last year, which was obtained by NBC News.
“The fact that they’ve actually dismantled and defunded the very real, tried and true infrastructure that was in place in 2020 to protect our elections against foreign interference, that speaks for itself about where their focus really is,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who is running for governor. “State officials are all we have left in terms of guardrails over all these processes.”
Benson said she has been trying to get the funding to hire former CISA employees to work for the state and try to “reknit” those federal systems back together for upcoming elections in Michigan.
“It’s harder now than it was, because we had these tools, and we came to rely on these tools,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “You can kind of jimmy up a solution to your problem, but those other tools that you were used to that can give you the best results are not there.”
When an Arizona elections web portal was hacked last year, Fontes broke from tradition and chose to alert state authorities only, not the federal government.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said that her state has built its own threat-monitoring operation to replace the one CISA no longer funds but that the loss of the federal government’s resources and analysts has been felt.
“We do pick up a lot of it. I can’t tell you what we’re missing,” said Griswold, a Democrat. “If there’s the same cyberattack happening in three states, we can tell people what’s happening in our state. But we don’t know what’s happening in other states.”
Several secretaries said intelligence briefings from the federal government were invaluable during the first Trump administration.
“In Trump 1.0, the Department of Homeland Security and CISA in particular were excellent partners,” said Minnesota Secretary Steve Simon, a Democrat.
Connecticut’s Democratic secretary of state, Stephanie Thomas, said her office was able to conduct public information campaigns to counter disinformation it knew was coming down the pike because of those briefings.
“But now, who knows? We have no briefings,” she said.
Simon and Thomas separately said they reached out to the federal government last year in hope of continuing the briefings but never got responses.
