Will the 2026 midterms be safe from cyber threats?
With the 2026 midterms days away, concerns over the administration of the election and voter access have continued to escalate, as bad actors look to cause chaos with newfound advancements in artificial intelligence.
Foreign interference in U.S. elections has become something of a theme in recent cycles. Whether that’s the alleged attempts by Russian actors to influence campaigns in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections, or efforts by Russian and Chinese hacktivists in 2022 to exploit divisions, the threats to election integrity from outside actors are numerous and evolving, experts say.
With the 2026 midterms on Nov. 3, concerns over the administration of the election and voter access have continued to escalate together with questions over the security of the polls, as bad actors look to cause chaos with newfound advancements in artificial intelligence.
Other countries have faced similar threats to election security. In Romania, authorities reported tens of thousands of cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure during the 2024 presidential election, alongside a Russian-linked influence campaign. In Estonia, officials reported unsuccessful attempts to breach the country’s internet voting system during its 2023 parliamentary election.
But are concerns over cyber vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting systems really justified? Only to a degree, security experts say.
The decentralized administration of U.S. elections and reliance on paper ballots help to make it less hackable — and potentially more secure — than other countries, security experts say.
In the U.S., elections are administered by the states, with each deploying different election software, physical voting equipment and methods for tallying votes, said Engin Kirda, a professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, who specializes in systems, software and network security.
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The modernization of voting methods has produced a patchwork of systems across the U.S. Such methods range from hand-marked paper ballots counted by optical scanners to electronic ballot-marking devices and touchscreen machines that record votes directly, according to Votem, an Ohio-based election systems technology company.
The fact that the U.S. system “is heterogeneous is actually very helpful” from a cybersecurity perspective, Kirda said. “It actually does provide defense.”
Kirda said the paper ballot system can serve as a potential redundancy that can help verify electronic tallies or conduct recounts if questions arise about the results. It likewise serves as a hedge against any cyberattack or software malfunction that could compromise electronic vote counts.
Paper trails are nearly uniform across the country. In 2024, over 98% of voting jurisdictions used election equipment that has voters mark a paper ballot, or else produces a paper record of voters’ ballot preferences that can be audited, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency tasked with supporting election administration and improving voting systems nationwide.
Still, there have been successful cyber intrusions into recent U.S. elections, including the 2016 Russian breaches of state voter registration systems and the 2020 Iranian theft of voter registration data. However, federal investigations did not establish that hackers changed vote totals or otherwise meaningfully altered any federal election outcome.
This year’s run-up to midterm elections include an intense Trump administration effort to reshape how elections are conducted, with unfounded claims of voter fraud frequently cited as the reason for changes.
The Justice Department on Monday announced election-related arrests of 48 noncitizens in several states, including Pennsylvania, California, Florida, New York and Nevada. Last week, the Justice Department charged more than two dozen foreign nationals in California with alleged voting-related crimes.
Trump has made election integrity a key focus of his second term in office, even as public confidence that the ballots will be accurately counted remains strong ahead of Election Day, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
But the same survey shows less confidence that the election will be free from hacking. With the administration embroiled in a prolonged conflict with Iran, and as more sophisticated artificial intelligence enables new forms of foreign meddling, new threats can — and do — emerge, Kirda said.
One factor that has raised concern is federal government support. Last week, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration has pushed out or laid off more than 1,000 personnel at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, the federal agency responsible for protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats, including helping state and local election officials secure their systems.
The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Northeastern Global News.
Experts are optimistic about warding off threats. Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said that election officials have spent the last decade strengthening their defenses — a fact that continued despite “CISA’s pullback from the election security mission,” he said.
“Where that retreat may ultimately be felt is in security information sharing,” Hale told NGN. “If a cyberattack occurred on election systems anywhere in the country, there used to be a shared commitment to working with CISA to understand and pass that information to other election jurisdictions to protect themselves.”
There are also other safeguards being employed.
Voting systems are still routinely checked for weaknesses and heavily scrutinized by professionals, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer sciences at Northeastern.
And, as much as AI can be weaponized to wreak havoc, it can be used to shore up defenses, he said.
“Whatever cybersecurity advances there have been due to AI, impact attackers and defenders equally,” Wilson said.
