Election Security: How Integrators Can Keep Voters Safe When They Head to the Polls

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Millions of Americans will head to their local polling place to cast their vote for the next president of the United States as well as their picks for several state and local offices and answering questions that could change how they live their everyday lives. The last thing on their minds should be election security.

Rachelle Loyear, vice president of integrated security solutions for Allied Universal, helps customers across a wide swath of vertical markets to build integrated security programs. This includes dispatching security professionals, offering technology services and security assessments.

Loyear helps Allied Universal customers “take a risk-based look at what their issues might actually be, and then find that sweet spot mix of people, process and technology that can really make the best set of mitigations against it.

“My whole job is to help people think about the big picture rather than one item at a time, because integrating all of these things together is really the best way to mitigate security risk, and we want to make sure everyone’s thinking at that level,” she says.

Allied Universal’s clients include municipalities across the U.S. and around the world, houses of worship, K-12 schools and colleges and universities, all of which are in the crosshairs during election season.

The company also provides security services for urban centers across the country, including Chicago and Minneapolis.

“There’s a lot of impact there, regardless of how close or far away you are from an actual election activity,” says Loyear.

“When you get into a more charged environment, such as an election year, that’s when we help people take a second look at what they might need in place to really align what their risk profile is in that arena,” she says.

Safety First During Election Season

Election security, says Loyer, is “really more of an enhancement to the overall security program at times of year, where you put people on call and you say, ‘Okay, if this happens, then we have this in place. If that happens, we have that in place.’ It really is more of a boost over the course rather than somebody calling up and saying, ‘I want something for this specific time.’”

Installations to enhance election security can be done quickly if needed, but “we prefer obviously to have some lead time on it,” says Loyear.

“We know when the election is, we knew the dates of all the debates,” she says. “You’re going to want to start having these discussions, if you can, a couple of months in advance.” Those early discussions will help with meeting staffing level requests and improving security equipment, such as cameras and access control systems, says Loyear.

“However, as we saw over the past six months, crisis can pop out of anywhere,” she says. “There was a lot of protest activity over the past several months and oftentimes we are called at the last moment and most of the time, because these are people that we’ve worked with, we can help them boost what they already have in place.

“Last minute is never the time to have to plan, but sometimes last minute is the time when you have to react, and it’s really good to be able to be nimble in that way,” says Loyear.

Thinking About Election Security

A building or region’s risk profile often determines whether an election security enhancement is temporary or permanent, says Loyear. Factors such as population, crime rate and traffic can help to make that decision.

“Humans are very easy to deploy on a temporary basis because we have cars and we can show up in a place and do the job and then go home,” she says. “There’s technology that can be temporarily deployed as well. There’s a lot of really good rapid-deployed technology solutions out there with cameras and lights. It’s all solar-powered and you can deploy them then dial it back.

“You have to understand your own environment, see your own risk and then act accordingly. If you aren’t deploying something temporarily and you say, ‘This is a good reason to look at our security, because we know something is coming up,’ and you find something that could be not only a temporary threat, but an ongoing risk, then you may want to decide to take the opportunity to put something in place that stays,” says Loyear.

Artificial intelligence has been a popular feature across Allied Universal’s customers these days, but Loyear isn’t sure if those having election security systems are asking for AI because of the upcoming vote or simply because the technology is growing across all sectors.

“What AI is bringing to the technology space is a conversation that we have a lot and with the kinds of people that might have impact from the civil unrest that might be potentially associated with an election, with the kinds of insider threats you might get associated with having to make sure something as sensitive as an election is protected,” she says.

“People want to know what they’re looking at and what’s going on and technology never has to sleep,” says Loyear. “Technology never has to take a break. Technology never blinks. The AI is always there and always seeing what’s going on. So when you get into some of these analytics and pattern recognition and even with the really good masking, these technologies are getting really good at identifying anomalies.”

In election security, says Loyear, there are three angles of protection: protecting volunteers who are working at local polling places, protecting people exercising their right to vote in those elections and protecting the ballots they’re casting.

“If you’re involved in any of these things, the awareness, the detection piece is huge because you’ve got to catch the problem early and then, on the other hand, the ability to respond,” she says. “So those are the two big pillars when you’re dealing with when we don’t know exactly what might come at us.

“You’ve got to be able to see it and then you’ve got to be able to respond to it. Security, like insurance, is best when you don’t need it. Fingers crossed, nothing happens and all of this is put in place and it does its job and nothing bad happens. But if it does, you definitely want to have something in place to take action,” says Loyear.

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