Understanding the Impact of Poll Worker Cybersecurity Behaviors on U.S. Election Integrity

In 2017, the United States Department of Homeland Security designated elections equipment as critical infrastructure. Poll workers play a crucial role in safeguarding election security and integrity and are responsible for administering an election at the more than 100,000 polling places needed during an election cycle, oftentimes interacting with, and having unsupervised access to, elections equipment. This paper examines the utility of training poll workers to mitigate potential cyber, physical, and insider threats that may emerge during U.S. elections through an analysis of the relationship between poll worker training performance and their individual cybersecurity practices. Specifically, we measure a poll worker's personal cybersecurity behavior using the Security Behaviors and Intentions Scale (SeBIS) and statistically examine this measure to their performance on three poll worker election security training modules, along with quizzes to assess poll workers' knowledge. The results indicate that a poll worker's personal security behaviors related to Device Securement, Password Generation, and Proactive Awareness have a positive relationship with poll workers' knowledge of the threats related to election equipment and processes, k-means analysis shows that educated poll workers and those who have strong device security personal behaviors tend to score better on the poll worker training quizzes; Device Securement was also the greatest driver of the relationship between individual security behaviors and poll worker threat knowledge. These findings have implications for election security policies, emphasizing the need for election officials and managers to prioritize Device Securement and Proactive Awareness in poll worker training initiatives to enhance election security.