On an afternoon in early October, inside a bland, beige office on Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base, two uniformed servicemen are sitting at desks, their eyes scanning computer monitors. Both are members of a team coordinated by the Cyber Unit of New Mexico’s Air National Guard that helps ensure New Mexico’s election security. At the moment, they’re engaged in what’s called “active threat hunting” — searching for signs that someone, somewhere, might be trying to break into any of the state’s systems related to voting.
“We look for any malicious activity,” says Master Sergeant Ray Torres, a guardsman who works with the New Mexico Secretary of State’s office and the Department of Homeland Security to safeguard elections.
While it’s impossible to hack into voting machines, which are “air-gapped” — meaning they’re never connected to the internet — voter registration rolls and other components of election infrastructure exist online.
“We’ve had nation-states poking around in our websites and our online systems,” says Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico’s Secretary of State, whose office is responsible for running elections. The first time this occurred, as far as she’s aware, was in 2016. The country poking around? Russia.
“No actual election outcomes were affected, but that raised huge concerns,” she says. “Our cybersecurity posture has improved dramatically since then.”
Knowing this, foreign adversaries have attempted to meddle in American elections in recent years. And frequent and false claims by Donald Trump and others in the GOP that the 2020 presidential election was stolen have become a rallying cry for his supporters. Election officials know there’s an imperative to safeguard the integrity of the vote — and to counter widespread disinformation that amplifies lies about rigged voting results.
“The military is nonpartisan,” Torres says. “We can’t show favoritism. We just make sure the election is fair.”
Describing the threats his team looks out for, Torres explains that some hackers “just want to cause havoc. But some state actors might want to get a foothold in the network to see what they can find, and then use that information to possibly throw the result of an election.” Many bots, he says, are automatically blocked by software. “What we’re really looking for is a ‘zero-day exploit’ — something never before seen in the wild, a new vulnerability or strategy to get into the system.”
New Mexico’s online systems haven’t always been this secure. “We’ve had nation-states poking around in our websites and our online systems,” says Maggie Toulouse Oliver, New Mexico’s secretary of state, whose office is responsible for running elections. The first time this occurred, as far as she’s aware, was in 2016. The country poking around? Russia.
“No actual election outcomes were affected, but that raised huge concerns,” she says during an interview at her office in Santa Fe. “Our cybersecurity posture has improved dramatically since then.”
The secretary’s office has its own election security program, which Toulouse Oliver describes as “the first line of defense.” Among its many activities: conducting post-election audits to verify that the vote count is 100 percent accurate; mandating the use of paper ballots; and certifying voting machines. Her office also works closely with an array of partners, including New Mexico’s Department of Information Technology, as well as federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the Department of Justice.
According to Toulouse Oliver, most genuine risks to election integrity involve politically motivated efforts to disenfranchise voters or spread disinformation that influences how people vote. “It’s almost impossible to tamper with a voting machine that’s actively deployed in an election,” she says.
On Election Day, paper ballots are scanned into air-gapped voting machines. When the polls close, the memory cards from those machines are uploaded to another air-gapped system before the results are entered into a system that’s connected to the internet — “So that we’re preserving the record,” Toulouse Oliver says. In addition to tallying the votes, the machines save a digitally scanned image of every ballot, just in case something were to happen to the paper originals.
While statewide rules match the best practices recommended by the U.S. Election Election Assistance Commission, Santa Fe County takes it a step further. According to County Clerk Katharine E. Clark, officials use vote tabulators with GPS trackers so that they know if the tabulators have been moved to any place they’re not supposed to be.
“We have redundancy built into the system,” Toulouse Oliver says. “A lot of people, if they were to say, this is what I think needs to happen in order to make elections more secure — all that stuff is actually already happening. It’s like, no, we already thought of this!”
Left: New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver. Right: A patch given to Toulouse Oliver by the New Mexico Air National Guard, which partners with her office on election cybersecurity. Michael Benanav/Searchlight New Mexico
Disinformation and conspiracy theories
In 2020, New Mexico was one of seven states in which Republicans formed slates of alternate electors who believed that Trump should have been awarded all of their state’s electoral college votes. New Mexico is also home to prominent election deniers and conspiracy theorists.
The best-known is probably former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, the founder of the group Cowboys for Trump. Convicted in federal court in March 2022 for his participation in the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C., he was sentenced to 14 days, time served. Griffin was later booted from the county commission and banned from holding future office in a ruling by New Mexico’s First District Court, which found that he violated the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause by, among other things, having “joined and incited the mob that attacked and seized the Capitol grounds.” Just a few days ago, a federal appeals court rejected Griffin’s attempt to overturn one of the counts on which he was convicted — a trespassing misdemeanor.
Another prominent figure is David Clements, a former assistant professor at New Mexico State University who, with his wife, Erin, travels around the country sharing his theories about election integrity and rigged voting machines while insisting that Trump won in 2020.
These claims are notoriously difficult to combat.
“Social media is very easy, very inexpensive, and you can say pretty much anything you want,” Toulouse Oliver says. Her office has tried to get ahead of some common disinformation themes by creating a web page to address them — including answering the claims made in a widely debunked film called “2000 Mules.” (The film falsely alleges that, in 2020, pro-Biden organizations paid people — so-called “mules” — to illegally deliver ballots to drop boxes in crucial swing states, costing Trump the election.) Another page offers tips on how to identify AI-generated deepfake photos and videos, which can be used to show a candidate doing or saying something that they never did or said.
Of all possible types of voter fraud, New Mexicans tend to be “most concerned about the possibility of a non-U.S. citizen voting,” according to a 2022 report on election security and administration published by the University of New Mexico. More than one-third of voters believe this happens at least some of the time, the report said.
“I understand why voters would be concerned about that, especially in elections that are close, but what we’ve seen and what the evidence has shown is that it’s extremely rare,” Toulouse Oliver says. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan institute, looked at 42 voting jurisdictions nationwide following the 2016 presidential election and found that “improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent” of ballots cast. In all but two of those jurisdictions, election administrators said, the number of suspected non-citizen voters was “zero.”
“The reality is that undocumented immigrants don’t want to get on the government’s radar,” Toulouse Oliver says. Legal immigrants “don’t want to register or vote because it can affect their ability to become citizens — not only will they get kicked off of eligibility lists, but they will get deported. I want voters to understand that the likelihood of that kind of activity affecting the outcome of an election is less than walking out the door right now and getting struck by lightning.” Outside, it’s a bright and sunny day.
High security, low turnout
New Mexico’s voting system is, by some metrics, among the best in the nation. According to MIT’s 2022 Election Performance Index, which grades states based on the convenience and integrity of their elections, it ranks first. “I’m pretty proud of that!” Toulouse Oliver says with a laugh. The state’s main weakness has been turnout, which, at 46.7 percent, is just below the national average of 47.5 percent. In 2020, during the last presidential election, turnout hovered just above 61 percent — still several points below that year’s national average of nearly 68 percent.
Toulouse Oliver wants these numbers to be higher. “Yes, I’m a member of the Democratic party, but I’m a small ‘d’ democrat too,” she says. “I firmly believe that when more people come to the polling place — of all different points of view and ideological backgrounds, personal backgrounds — that means we’re going to elect more folks that better represent us, as New Mexican people. So I think that’s a good thing.”
She wants to reassure people that the state takes election integrity “extremely seriously,” working directly with county clerks, county managers, and regional homeland security offices. “Even if it’s a small county, we’re working to make sure everything is secure at that level. I think folks should feel very confident that their election officials, local and state, are treating election security as the utmost priority,” she says.
Back at Kirtland, the Air National Guard will be staying focused through Election Day. “We have a great group of people who have been doing this for years,” Sgt. Torres says. “We have lots of expertise, and every year we’re improving.”
