This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 13th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If election security is a problem in the United States,

what precisely would it take for Americans to care about it?

Cato's Brandon Valeriano says it's well known that certain foreign powers want to exploit

weaknesses in our election system.

He says, however, the distributed nature of American elections

is one of its security virtues.

As to making Americans care, short of some sort of ransomware attack.

Valeriano says it's not clear Americans are going to push to prioritize election security

at all.

We can say with confidence that we're entirely unsecure in terms of election security.

And I'm speaking mainly in terms of digital or electronic election security,

more in the realm of cyber security.

And that's going to be a huge challenge because there are a lot of

adversaries that want to disrupt American processes and

an American institutions.

And the main one that they're seeking to disrupt right now would be the US election.

Again, with confidence, what can we say about the identities of the people or groups that are trying to disrupt U.S. elections.

We know with confidence that Russia has been disrupting U.S. elections and has been engaging in overall electoral

electoral disruption since at least 2014 in the digital realm.

So this is the new process.

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