Midterm Election Day passes without major cyber incidents; a few state websites strain under bot traffic
GovTech's roundup separates the real glitches (ballot scanners, website outages) from anything that touched the vote count.
The November 3 US midterms passed without significant cyber incidents, GovTech reports. Overnight reports from the election-security information-sharing center described one office facing failed exploitation attempts, a small number facing denial-of-service attacks or heavy web traffic, brief website interruptions, misleading text messages and a handful of bomb threats; none appeared to significantly limit voting. Former CISA director Chris Krebs told NPR it was "just another Tuesday on the internet."
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs confirmed a cyberattack on his office's website, KOMO reports; some pages were briefly unavailable amid bot traffic, and he said the counties' tabulators are not connected to the internet. Colorado's election-night results site went down for about 45 minutes; its vendor, SOE Software, blamed unusually high automated traffic from results-scraping services across several vendors, and the state said ballots and results were unaffected.
The biggest problems were not cyberattacks: ballot scanners rejected ballots in most of Westchester County, New York, after a late programming change, and some Pennsylvania scanners jammed.
Across the spectrum 2
Democrat
In a May 2026 letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Sen. Mark Warner said state and local officials report CISA no longer provides the election security training, intelligence sharing and cybersecurity help of past cycles, writing that "it is impossible for states to independently obtain intelligence, subject-matter expertise, and real-time incident reporting" at the scale needed to protect elections.
Nextgov ↗Republican
Responding to Sen. Warner in May 2026, a DHS spokesperson said that under President Biden CISA "was focused on censorship, branding, and electioneering instead of defending America's critical infrastructure," and that under President Trump the agency is "committed to delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence" to federal, state and local partners.
Nextgov ↗-
Election security
After exploring 'Just Another Tuesday': Election Day Sees No Major Cyber Incidents, what election officials are guarding is laid out in Election security.
Election security covers protecting voting machines, election office networks and voter registration databases from cyberattacks and other threats.
Wikipedia · Wade · 5 min
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