Uh, Oh, Again: Homeland Security Role in Bizarre Election Day "Tabletop Exercise" Denied
Organizers of a Election Day cyber exercise suddenly repudiate their own announcement of Homeland Security involvement. What gives? Plus, a peek at new DHS FOIA material
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has been the subject of multiple Racket stories in recent years. A year ago, we followed up a House Weaponization of Government Committee report with Twitter Files documents detailing the Homeland Security agency’s help forming the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford, which mass-flagged social media content in the last presidential election.
Now, a week before another presidential vote, the agency again stepped in it, in a seeming effort to quell conspiracy theories that are almost certain to achieve the opposite.
CISA went unintentionally viral in recent weeks when its participation in a “large scale” cybersecurity exercise on Election Day in Atlanta was announced by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). When Kentucky Senator Rand Paul sent DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas a WTF letter, CISA said the event was canceled. Now, despite both DHS and CISA being listed as “pivotal organizations” at the event, with the Election Day exercise scheduled to be led by a CISA official named Klint Walker, the organizers, i.e. the people who wrote the brochure below, are reportedly telling reporters DHS/CISA had “no involvement” with the event.
CISA, meanwhile, has just sent a letter to Paul’s office. “While conference organizers invited Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) officials to attend this year,” Director Jen Easterly writes, “no CISA employees will be attending either the conference or preconference exercise.”
Surprised staff in Paul’s office are responding to media queries by sending out copies of original documents showing scheduled DHS/CISA participation. You can expect new denials to hit large news organizations as soon as tonight, with the result that a tale once destined to be a footnote to Election Day may now blow up into something larger and weirder.
When the AFCEA announced the conference weeks ago, it was to include not only DHS/CISA but a cadre of public and private security officials, ranging from the FBI to the Army, Air Force, and Georgia National Guard.
The announcement went viral, with an assortment of outlets like InfoWars and influencers like Laura Loomer warning of “Election interference by Homeland Security on Election Day.” Anti-Disinformation researchers like the Center for an Informed Public railed against posts “ascribing intent of election fraud to a pre-conference practice exercise,” even making a pretty graph showing how the evil rumor spread when people like Sidney Powell retweeted certain posts.
Nearly all the content, however, was along the lines of the @VoterGa tweet that asked, “WHY would anyone want to conduct a cybersecurity ‘exercise’ on Election Day?” This is not a conspiratorial question at all. Why would cybersecurity officials take time out on the ostensibly most threat-laden day of the year for an event almost guaranteed to stoke election fears? DHS/CISA spent much of 2024 pushing dire warnings about Election Day, including a joint statement with the FBI the same day as the AFCEA announcement. “Our foreign adversaries are looking to attack our democratic process,” said CISA Senior Advisor Cait Conley. “We need the help of all Americans in ensuring they are not successful.”
“All” Americans, except those scheduled to hit Atlanta to play cybersecurity Dungeons & Dragons on Election Day? Senator Paul, the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, asked in his letter to Mayorkas why a resource-diverting event was scheduled for a key swing state:
Rather than monitoring cyberthreats that may occur relative to the election, senior federal officials plan to spend Election Day participating in a four-hour “Critical Infrastructure Tabletop” led by CISA staff… It is well-known the State of Georgia is perceived as a critical swing state… The presence of DHS, CISA, and other senior administration leadership in Georgia on Election Day may contribute to the efforts of those who would seek to undermine the perception of electoral fairness.
Paul asked for correspondence about the affair between the DHS/CISA and the Army, Air Force, FBI, the Georgia National Guard and other agencies. By end of last week, CISA informed Hill members the event was off and CISA would not be sending anyone. Meanwhile, AFCEA put out a press release announcing the cancellation. Even that was worded oddly. It left out the November 5th Election Day tabletop, mentioning only postponement of an event “in proximity” to Election Day:
After careful consideration, AFCEA-Atlanta… are postponing the 2024 Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Conference originally scheduled for November 6-7, 2024, in Atlanta. A rapid and unanticipated rise in rhetoric and threats stemming from disinformation about the purpose of the event and its proximity to Election Day contributed to the decision to postpone… Out of an abundance of caution and because a number of government agencies are unable to participate, we made this difficult decision…
One Democratic staffer late this afternoon dismissed the story as “just a dumb optics accident.” It might be. But the abandoned CISA/FBI/DoD exercise comes as Racket received nearly 2,000 pages of FOIA documents featuring correspondence between DHS/CISA and “anti-disinformation” researchers, revealing the agency to be very sensitive to public perception.
Some papers were already disclosed by the House Weaponization of Government Committee in June, 2023, but some are new and fascinating. Despite this week’s bumbling, they show CISA carefully weighing every public move, and intent on building a network of external (Orwell alert!) “validators” with “broad reach” to amplify messages to the American public:

We were already working on a longer story about the CISA material, but in light of today’s Atlanta fiasco, we’re sharing highlight/lowlight docs now, especially those that concern elections and/or tabletop exercises. Are some of CISA’s “validators” helping whitewash a perhaps silly decision to role-play a cyber attack on Election Day?
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