Access Control — Election Security Glossary

Access control governs who can reach election systems, what they can do once inside, and under what circumstances their access is logged, reviewed, or revoked. The scope is broad. It covers the county employee logging into a voter registration database, the vendor technician uploading firmware to a tabulation machine, the poll worker opening a ballot bag on election morning, and the remote auditor connecting to a results-reporting portal from a home office.

Why this category matters for election security begins with a simple observation. Most successful intrusions, both in commercial cybersecurity and in documented election-administration incidents, have started with credentials. An attacker who has a valid username and password, or who has persuaded a user to hand one over, often bypasses the most sophisticated perimeter defenses. The controls that limit who has access, that verify the identity of users at the moment of access, and that log what they did are therefore not optional extras but core infrastructure.

In election administration, access control is shaped by a mix of federal expectations and state implementation. The Election Assistance Commission publishes voluntary guidance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issues advisories, and individual states layer their own requirements on top. What results is a landscape where the controls in place in a small county office may be very different from those in a state-level system, even when both are designed to protect the same kind of asset.

The terminology in this category reflects both the principles (least privilege, separation of duties, multi-factor authentication) and the practical realities (shared accounts during election night, vendor access for routine maintenance, federated identity for cross-jurisdiction data exchange). The concepts here are not abstract. They describe what happens at the door.