Election Cybersecurity: Assessing the Roles of Federalism and Partisanship
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- State and local governments administer elections in the United States—not the national government. In response to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the U.S. national government has offered funding and other assistance to help state election officials bolster election cybersecurity. The conventional wisdom in political science is that proposals that purport to benefit national security or would distribute resources will be popular. Yet while some state election officials welcomed national government assistance, others initially opposed it. Given that national assistance for election cybersecurity is in the U.S. national security interest and would permit members of Congress to distribute resources to their districts, why is there opposition to it? To answer this question, I analyze three case studies: Obama’s move to expand national aid for elections, the failure of an election cybersecurity bill in the Senate, and a Trump effort to improve intelligence sharing between national and state officials. In each case study, I analyze the impact of two variables on state election officials’ policy preferences: (1) partisanship and (2) the institutional culture of federalism, which I operationalize as skepticism about national government involvement. Existing research suggests that partisanship is increasingly influencing state politics; however, I find that election cybersecurity is not a party-line issue at the state level. I suggest that skepticism about national government involvement drives state election officials’ views on election cybersecurity reform. These findings suggest that national officials will be most effective in assisting state election officials if they address fears about losing local control.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Corse, Alexa |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Hall, Andrew |
Subjects
| Subject | elections |
|---|---|
| Subject | cybersecurity |
| Subject | Center for International Security and Cooperation |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-SA).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Corse, Alexa. (2019). Election Cybersecurity: Assessing the Roles of Federalism and Partisanship. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/cj224pc3201
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- alexacorse@alumni.stanford.edu
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