Securing Down Ballot Political Campaigns: The Next Frontier | Daniel Bardenstein | San Diego 2022

Down-ballot threat model

Daniel Bardenstein argues election security discourse focuses on presidential races while state and local campaigns face serious but under-resourced threats. Even small challenger campaigns hold data and infrastructure attackers can disrupt, and every seat affects national governance.

Campaign security gaps

Volunteering for a friend’s congressional primary, he found egregious practices uncommon in enterprise environments: questionable web hosting, limited backend access for defensive scripts, and no budget for professional security tooling. Campaign staff often prioritize fundraising over infrastructure hardening.

DDoS and attribution limits

After DDoS attacks traced to EC2 infrastructure, reporting to authorities yielded little response. Forensics and hardening helped, but the candidate ultimately lost the primary. Bardenstein uses the case to highlight that private citizens and volunteer teams cannot match nation-state or organized troll capabilities alone.