CISA
A lack of public understanding about elections (!) can undermine confidence in election security, increase risks to cybersecurity and physical security of election infrastructure, and potentially lead to disruption of election operations. As the official source of information about their jurisdiction’s elections, election officials can mitigate these risks through regular and consistent public communication, especially during incident response when there is often increased interest and sometimes confusion among the public. By demonstrating transparency and communicating effectively, officials can provide voters with the information necessary to have confidence that an election has been administered securely.
An effective communications plan will include multiple communication activities that engage a variety of voters. These could include hosting town halls, sending an email newsletter, and maintaining an up-to-date and easy-to-use website. (It is recommended that the website uses a .gov web domain to help the public recognize it as an official state or local government site). Each communication activity should be defined by specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timebound (SMART) objectives. For example, SMART objectives could include increasing the number of visits to the election office’s website during a defined timeframe or seeing a decrease in the number of questions received about a particular topic after the office has provided publicly available information about the topic.
The following guidance and supporting worksheets are created to help election officials design communication activities that achieve their objectives. Each section helps answer a different question about the plan, including what to communicate, who their audience is, and how to reach them through effective methods, partners, and timing, as well as provides additional guidance for incident response communications where clear and transparent communication is especially important.
——
CISA and censorship.