The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published on Thursday the 2026 Election Infrastructure Security Plan, a 13-page document prepared by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to safeguard the midterm elections on November 3 against digital and physical threats.
The plan, titled Securing the Next 250, was commissioned last July by the DHS Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, and provides state and local election officials with a range of voluntary and free services: information sharing on threats, vulnerability scanning, risk assessments, simulation exercises, and technical training.
"Electoral security is national security," Mullin declared while presenting the document. "Under President Trump's leadership, CISA has returned to its core mission of protecting critical infrastructure. This plan, which will be fully implemented, is crucial for the security, freedom, and fairness in the election of our country's leaders."
In play are the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 in the Senate, in an election managed by more than 10,000 local jurisdictions across the United States.
The CISA document identifies specific threats: voter registration systems have been targeted by attacks in all fifty states and compromised in at least 20 of them over the past decade.
Among the recommended technical measures are multifactor authentication, network monitoring, least privilege access, and log retention for at least one year.
"Ensuring the integrity of our elections is essential to preserving trust in American democracy," concludes the DHS statement, which reminds that in 2020, CISA and a federal-state-local committee rated those elections as the safest in the country's history, with no evidence of votes being deleted, lost, or altered.
The physical dimension of the problem is equally concerning. Out of 107 recorded electoral security incidents since January 2022, 96 were bomb threats, according to data collected by the agency from open sources.
The publication arrives, however, at a time of institutional paradox. The same administration that is now promoting this plan cut about 1,000 employees from CISA in 2025, approximately 30% of its workforce, and eliminated funding for the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) in March of that year.
In February 2026, additional cuts of 10 million dollars to state and local cybersecurity initiatives were confirmed. Congress responded by partially restoring the funds in the fiscal year 2026 budget, with 39.61 million dollars allocated for election security activities.
The context of external threats exacerbates the situation. U.S. intelligence recently detected a Russian disinformation campaign that uses deepfake videos generated with artificial intelligence to impersonate celebrities and media outlets such as CNN, BBC, and The New York Times.
The network, linked to the operation known as "Matryoshka," has a declared objective to "sow chaos" and undermine public confidence in the electoral process, rather than favoring a specific party.
The plan includes a free information exchange platform for election officials and fusion centers to coordinate with federal partners in near real-time, with the regional directors of CISA serving as the primary support channel.
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