Hi everyone,
We spent this week reporting from the National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Rapid City, South Dakota — Dion’s first NASS, and Jessica’s … ninth? Tenth? These things should come with a punch card.
It was a weird one. Several attendees described it as the strangest, or worst, NASS conference they could remember — not because anything happened there, but because of the drama elsewhere, hanging over the whole event.
President Donald Trump’s election speech Thursday night was not formally part of the conference. But the president’s remarks on elections took place, attendees pointed out, during a NASS summer conference with a striking lack of federal officials present: no Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, no U.S. Election Assistance Commission, no FBI, no Justice Department.
State election officials were gathering without the federal partners who, for years, have been fixtures at these meetings, and one of the big questions they are trying to game out as they prepare for the midterm elections is what those same federal institutions might do next.
That is not normal. EAC commissioners — who the Trump administration fired earlier this month — are usually here, often sitting on panels about voting machines, certification, and election administration best practices. CISA and the FBI typically give security briefings, sometimes including closed-door briefings for election officials about the threat environment heading into the next election. Those conversations have been a fixture of these conferences for years.
Leslie Reynolds, the group’s executive director, said she didn’t invite federal officials to speak at the summer conference because it typically focuses on state-level issues, while the winter conference focuses on outside speakers, including federal officials.
But still, state officials made it clear that diminished federal cooperation throughout the second Trump administration has left state officials trying to replace pieces of the federal election-security apparatus that, in some cases, can’t be replaced.
Several secretaries of state noted that DHS typically gives regular briefings to state election officials outside of the conference throughout the year, offering threat overviews and mitigation options. But not this year.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said that while states can pay outside vendors for security assessments and other services CISA now no longer provides, they can’t replicate briefings from the federal government.
“You can’t just buy that off the shelf,” Simon said. “You can’t hire a private vendor to give you a U.S. government-grade intelligence assessment.”
The hardest gap to fill, he said, is exactly what Trump discussed in his Thursday speech: the monitoring of foreign actors that might try to harm or interfere with U.S. elections.
Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat, said the lack of federal briefings creates unevenness across the country, with some states able to rely on in-state agencies and others less equipped to do so.
“We know these foreign actors have been ramping up their desire to sow chaos and put out disinformation, so it’s hard to operate in the gap, not knowing,” Thomas said.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, was less concerned. He characterized the federal intelligence briefings as having been of “limited value,” saying much of what he learned in classified briefings had already been publicly reported.
“Nothing ever came out of those briefings that I got from CISA that was like, oh my gosh, we’ve got to stop what we’re doing and go work on this now,” LaRose said.
The briefings were useful mostly for “vulnerability detection” and planning exercises and threat assessments, he said, but Ohio has continued doing that work without them.
And yet the federal government’s role in elections loomed over nearly every serious — and unserious — conversation in the room during the NASS conference.
For example, the Justice Department recently sent letters to election officials in several states warning that they could face criminal prosecution if they knowingly leave noncitizens on their voter rolls or allow noncitizens to receive, cast, or have ballots counted in federal elections, a move that prompted a sharp response from some of them.
The rest of the conference had an almost surreal normalcy. Held in a massive conference center that will soon host a Luke Bryan concert, the panels went on. Secretaries and their staff compared notes and watched the World Cup semi-final together. They visited the booths of companies that make the voting machines that Trump on Thursday night said are vulnerable — though election officials say they have long known that all electronic systems are vulnerable and have taken steps to mitigate known weaknesses. At the coffee kiosk, baristas would add a shot of Bailey’s to your latte for $8; it isn’t clear whether anyone opted for it.
Elections officials at the event spent lots of time between sessions talking about what Trump might say in his primetime address. But when it was time for the president’s Thursday night speech, most of them weren’t watching. While Trump was speaking, many of the state officials were eating dinner near Mount Rushmore and preparing to board buses for an evening lighting ceremony at the historic monument.
Many of those at Mount Rushmore — from Indiana, West Virginia, Connecticut, North Dakota, and Georgia — said they’d watch Trump’s speech later.
Among the few to watch the speech live was Simon, who said Trump repeated “the same old rehashed and debunked ideas” he has shared before.
Nonetheless, it was just the latest hurdle the administration chose to throw at secretaries and their staffs with the election looming. Trump’s continued efforts to sow doubt in election security have left election officials feeling as if they are stuck in a game show — waiting for the next surprise challenge, and for which rules might change next.
The word conference participants most often used to describe their state of mind was “exhausted.”
At Wednesday’s lunch, the keynote speaker — a South Dakota motivational speaker who once finished fourth on Survivor — began her speech with a photo reel of her grandchildren before asking, “So what does a crazy lady from South Dakota have to do with public officials? Probably nothing.”
Maybe more than she realizes.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.
