Election Security & Resilience

START, in collaboration with the National Capital Chapter of ASIS International, Maryland Democracy Initiative, and Axis Communications, will co-host a hybrid event on "Election Security & Resilience." The day-long event will feature morning panel discussions with experts in election security and an afternoon interactive exercise. The in-person event will have limited capacity, and the morning panel discussions will also be livestreamed. Discussions will focus on physical, cyber, and mis/disinformation threats to the upcoming U.S. elections, as well as strategies for building resilience in the face of these threats. Registration is required for both in-person and online participation.

Sponsors

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Mr. Dan Avondoglio

Dan Avondoglio is currently serving with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Office of Security Programs as the Portfolio Manager for Active Assailant Security. He is a member of the Private Sector Preparedness National Advisory Council and a regular contributor to the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. Dan maintains certifications in De-escalation, Advanced Counterterrorism, and Security Planning. He is also a decorated Navy combat veteran with more than 24 years of service, leading and operating across a diverse range of organizational assignments, currently serving as a Commander in the United States Navy Reserve. He has more than a decade of experience operating in austere environments, as well as conducting threat and vulnerability assessments for high-risk locations, both domestically and overseas.

Dr. Cody Buntain

Cody Buntain studies online information and how people use online spaces during crises and times of unrest, with a focus on information quality, preventing manipulation, and enhancing resilience. Beginning with studies of social media during disaster, Dr. Buntain has worked on methods for making online spaces more informative, examining how we can identify critical crisis information rapidly, and summarizing new developments in ongoing crises. Much of this work is equally applicable to studies of informedness and information quality during high-impact events like conflict, unrest, and elections. As such, Dr. Buntain has branched into political science and studies of how malevolent actors use online spaces to influence and manipulate audiences. This work has lead Dr. Buntain into recent efforts that examine how we can make online spaces more resilient against manipulation. This work includes studies on the role of recommendation systems as a method of content moderation and its effects across multiple online spaces, as well as the impact of deplatforming on information and engagement quality online. His work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED, and others.

Dr. Sean Doody

Sean Doody is a Senior Researcher at the START Consortium, located at the University of Maryland-College Park, specializing in computational sociology, political economy, and the study of online political communities. Dr. Doody's research focuses on the epistemological challenges and the social, cultural, and political conflicts arising from informational surplus, social media, and digital platforms, especially with a focus on how broader political economic forces and social inequalities structure and mediate these conflicts. In his work, Dr. Doody is especially interested in far-right extremism and far-right political violence, contrarian and "heterodox" intellectual communities, and misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

Dr. Doody has expertise in collecting and analyzing large volumes of big data pulled from digital sources. His research applies deep neural language models, social network analysis, and conventional quantitative and qualitative inquiry to study discourses, social dynamics, and information flows in online communities. Working at the intersection of social science and data science, Dr. Doody has expertise in developing and managing data science workflows, including building and scaling large databases, training and fine-tuning machine learning models, and deploying trained models for inference.

Mr. Benjamin Hovland

Benjamin Hovland was confirmed by unanimous consent of the United States Senate on January 2, 2019, to serve on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Mr. Hovland currently serves as Chairman of the EAC and the Designated Federal Officer (DFO) for the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC).

In 2020, Commissioner Hovland served as EAC Chairman and helped lead the agency during an election year with unprecedented challenges. Under his leadership, the EAC administered nearly $825 million in federal grant money to help election officials respond to the pandemic and enhance election security. In addition to distributing critical funding, the EAC strategically pivoted resources to help election officials as they confronted obstacles and made difficult decisions of how to best run their elections. 

As EAC Chairman, Mr. Hovland also served as Co-Chair of Election Infrastructure Subsector’s Government Coordinating Council and Chair of the Joint Subsector COVID-19 Working Group to coordinate pandemic response amongst state and local election officials, federal partners, and the private sector. Other innovations under his leadership included the first-ever National Poll Worker Recruitment Day, which led national recruitment efforts to alleviate concerns about a significant shortage in poll workers due to the pandemic. 

During Commissioner Hovland’s tenure as Chairman, the EAC also adopted a new version of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG). Known as VVSG 2.0, this represents the first major overhaul of the standards in 15 years and a major leap forward for future election systems. 

Mr. Hovland’s career in elections spans over 20 years and includes service as Acting Chief Counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, where he was a driving force behind Congress appropriating $380 million in Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funds to enhance election security to the states in 2018. While at the Senate, he focused on the federal government’s role in election administration and campaign finance regulation. He organized several hearings on election security preparations and improving election administration. He was integral to pushing for the restoration of a quorum at the EAC in 2015.   

Mr. David Levine

David Levine is an independent Election Integrity and Management Consultant. He is also an election security adjunct professor at George Mason University, an advisory committee member for the Global Cyber Alliance's Cybersecurity Toolkit for Elections, an advisory council member for The Election Reformers Network, and a member of the Election Verification Network. Previously, he worked as the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, where he assessed vulnerabilities in electoral infrastructure, administration, and policies. And prior to that he was the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director, managing the administration of all federal, state, county, and local district elections for 25% of the state’s population. His work has been published and quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg Technology, The Hill, Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, BBC, EU Observer, and elsewhere. David received a BA from Haverford College and a JD from the Case Western Reserve School of Law, where he discovered his passion for elections. Since then, he has administered elections, worked with advocacy groups to improve the election process, and observed elections in the United States and many other countries.

Dr. Doug Lombardi

Doug Lombardi is the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Graduate Studies, College of Education, and Professor, Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park. As the Principal Investigator of the Science Learning Research Group, an interdisciplinary team that includes educational and developmental psychology researchers, science and social studies education researchers, and classroom teachers. SLRG seeks to contribute toward a more scientifically literate and civically-minded society, one better able to mitigate and adapt to the scientific issues of social relevance (e.g., the climate crisis). SLRG develops and applies learning and teaching theories related to the development of scientific and critical thinking and knowledge construction. The team designs and tests teaching tools and strategies to support deep science and civics learning. Much of our research is situated within the context of formal classroom settings at the elementary, middle, high, and undergraduate levels.

Dr. Lombardi has received early career research awards from the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the Society for Text and Discourse, and NARST: A Worldwide Organization for Improving Science Teaching and Learning Through Research. His research has been well supported by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Education.

Dr. Lombardi is currently an associate editor for the Journal for Research in Science Teaching and the Journal of Educational Psychology. He also serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Science Education and the Educational and Developmental Psychologist. His research and theoretical positions have been published in journals such as Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Educational Psychologist, the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Learning and Instruction and Research in Science Education.

Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Lombardi was an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Temple University. Earlier in his career, he held various science education roles, including as project facilitator, program evaluator and regional science education trainer at the Southern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program; education and public outreach manager for the NASA Phoenix Mars Mission at the University of Arizona; and high school science teacher positions in Tennessee and Arizona.

Dr. Amy Pate

Amy Pate is START’s Acting Director. In this role, Pate oversees day-to-day operations and crafts long-term strategy, as well as provides guidance for START researchers from proposal development through project implementation and submission of final deliverables. Pate is the primary implementer of START’s center-wide quality control processes and is accustomed to working with a wide variety of researchers and government funders.

Pate has been Principal or Co-Principal Investigator on awards totaling more than $9 million since 2011 from funders including the Department of State, Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation. She is PI of a recent $3 million award from the Department of Defense to enhance datastreams for counterterrorism, as well as a $500,000 award from the State Department to build capacity for countering violent extremism in Malaysia.

A political scientist specializing in international relations and comparative politics, Pate has worked with START since the center was founded, first through her work on the Minorities at Risk Project and as a START researcher, prior to becoming research director. Pate is trained in both quantitative and qualitative methods, has conducted fieldwork in conflict zones in Africa, and has extensive experience working with researchers in developing countries.

She earned her Ph.D. in government and politics with specializations in comparative politics and international relations from the University of Maryland, where she also earned her M.A. She graduated with bachelor’s degree in Russian, Political Science, and History from Miami University (Ohio).

Dr. Natalie M. Scala

Dr. Natalie M. Scala is a professor in the College of Business and Economics, a fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary and Innovative Cybersecurity, and the director of accelerated programs at Towson University. She earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research is in decision analysis, with specialization in military and security issues, including risk in voting systems, attack trees and strength of threat in mail voting, integrity of votes throughout the supply chain, poll worker education, and cybersecurity metrics and best practices. She co-directs the Empowering Secure Elections research lab, which defines threats to voting as systemic and an interplay between cyber, physical, and insider sources. Her work in elections security earned a University System of Maryland Board of Regents Award for Excellence in Public Service, the system’s highest faculty honor. In conjunction with Anne Arundel County, Maryland, her work in cybersecurity and threat training for poll workers received a U.S. Elections Assistance Commission Clearinghouse Award for Outstanding Innovation in Election Cybersecurity and Technology.

Dr. Scala frequently consults to government clients and has extensive professional experience, to include positions with Innovative Decisions, Inc. / ITA International, the United States Department of Defense, and the RAND Corporation, as well as a faculty affiliation with the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security. She has previously served as the director of the graduate programs in supply chain management at Towson University. She co-edited the Handbook of Military and Defense Operations Research and Mathematics in Cyber Research, both released by CRC Press in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The second edition of the Handbook released in 2024. She is an associate editor for Military Operations Research and is a Past President of the Military and Security Society of INFORMS.

Dr. Steve S. Sin

Steve S. Sin an associate research scientist and director of the Unconventional Weapons and Technology Division (UWT) of START at the University of Maryland. He develops, leads, and manages large interdisciplinary research projects spanning across a broad range of national and homeland security challenges. His research projects have been sponsored by offices and agencies such as the OUSD (I&S), DARPA, DTRA, NSA, DOD Basic Research Office, DHS CWMD Office, and TSA. His research areas include adversary decision modeling; operations in the information environment; insider risk management and Mitigation; irregular warfare; countering weapons of mass destruction; and Northeast Asia regional security.

Prior to joining START, Dr. Sin served as the Senior Research Associate and Section Chief at the National Center for Security & Preparedness (NCSP) at University at Albany (SUNY), a strategic partner with the New York State Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Services (DHSES). His professional experience also includes a career as a U.S. Army Officer. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University at Albany (SUNY) and is fluent in Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese.

Mr. Rhyner Washburn

Rhyner Washburn is the cyber threat intelligence lead at the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center (MCAC). Prior to his position at MCAC, Mr. Washburn was a senior faculty specialist and project manager with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland (UMD). His academic and practitioner expertise includes critical infrastructure security; cyber threat intelligence; influence operations—specifically mis-/dis-/malinformation; online extremism; data privacy regulation; and supply chain risk management. In addition, Mr. Washburn maintains research affiliation with UMD, and is a member of the Cyber Threat Intelligence League: Global Volunteer Cyberthreat Community-CERT.

Dr. Louis Wasser

Louis M. Wasser is an Assistant Research Scientist in the Unconventional and Asymmetric Threats Division of START, working in the Geospatial Research Unit. Trained as a political scientist (PhD, Yale 2019), Dr. Wasser’s doctoral work and related research focused on the interplay between violent conflict, nonviolent resistance, and institutional politics including elections, exploring trade-offs and synergies between related strategies for both center-seeking and secessionist movements. (A co-authored piece presenting the corresponding dataset of secessionist strategies was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.)

In addition to continuing to pursue his own research interests, Dr. Wasser is currently involved in several projects at START, including one on the security implications of climate change in North and West Africa and another on the potential malign uses of geospatial technologies. As a Lecturer at Yale (2019-20), Dr. Wasser taught courses on both the Arab Spring and political violence, and he will be teaching graduate courses at START on topics including research methods in terrorism and counterterrorism.

Prior to graduate school, Dr. Wasser lived in Cairo from 2007-10, where he worked as a journalist and freelance writer. Before joining START, he also worked in research and policy consulting. Outside of work, Dr. Wasser enjoys spending time with his dog, woodworking, and playing tennis, among other things.

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