When Adam Clayton Powell III talks about election cybersecurity, he’s not talking about one single election. He’s talking about the thousands of election districts across 50 states, plus the work USC’s Election Cybersecurity Initiative has done connecting with election administrators in other countries.

In the run-up to the 2024 United States presidential election, the Initiative has been training officials, campaign workers and civic leaders across the U.S. to strengthen election systems, said Powell, executive director of the Election Cybersecurity Initiative.

“You don’t want to wait until there’s a fire to learn where the fire escape is,” said Powell, who has worked at USC since 2003. “You need to learn before them. So the training that has to go on for months beforehand is what really is essential.”

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Powell has worked on cybersecurity initiatives at the University since 2015 — first for the internet at large and, after the 2016 Democratic National Committee email system hack, on election security specifically.

Though Powell was originally a professor in the Viterbi School of Engineering and Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, he said the Initiative also takes USC experts from the Price School of Public Policy, Gould School of Law, Marshall School of Business, and political science department at Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to bolster its small staff.

“I ran into USC then-President Max Nikias, brilliant engineer, signal processing guy. He said, ‘Adam, you’re thinking too narrowly,’” Powell said. “And I said, ‘Max, you want me to report to four deans?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

In 2018, after being approached by the National Governors Association, which lacked funding to scale up election security, the Initiative provided pro-bono security assistance for six states in the midterm election. Jake Williams, a cybersecurity expert whom Information Technology Services invited to present on election threats, said most states would like to improve cybersecurity but need standards and funding assistance.

“I’ve talked to numerous county election supervisors,” Williams said. “The reality is they’re all concerned about it. None of them have money to address it. And honestly, it’s not just money, but I think there’s going to be standards and maybe even help coming from [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and [Department of Homeland Security].”

Today, the Initiative advises officials to improve passwords, prepare to face disinformation and misinformation, and have a mapped-out emergency plan. 

“One of our slogans is ‘You are going to be a target, so prepare for it.’ Know who to call when it happens. If you’re running a campaign and you’re hit with disinformation, that could be an offense, call the FBI but even better,” Powell said, “don’t wait until you’re attacked to call the FBI, call when your campaign starts.”

A 2019 conversation with Center for the Political Future co-directors and former campaign strategists Mike Murphy and Bob Shrum produced the three messages down from 11 initially. Kamy Akhavan, who sat in on the discussions and is managing director at CPF, said the simplification was important to improve the training.

“The people who are going to attend these kinds of discussions that the [Election] Cybersecurity Initiative would be hosting are not necessarily technologists,” Akhavan said. “If they feel like the things that they’re learning are way over their head, because you need a PhD to absorb it, they’re less likely to want to engage and participate.”

By the 2020 election — with a multi-million dollar donation from Google — the Initiative scaled up to provide training in all 50 states before ultimately pivoting to an online format due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Powell said the donation began with a chance encounter with a Google representative at the July 2019 National Governors Association summer meeting. He hadn’t even considered training in all 50 states as a possibility when he approached the representative.

“‘We don’t have time to get this through your hierarchy. So why are we even discussing [doing training in all 50 states],’” Powell said at the time. “And the person I was talking to said, ‘It’s in my budget already.’ … And in 20 minutes, in the hotel hallway, where we met, we worked out the basic agreement for how USC would do all 50 states.”

According to a conversation Powell had with a government official after the election, they were the only group to conduct training in all 50 states in 2020, as the federal government only did training in 48.

To help provide training for the 2020 presidential election, Powell said he looked for professors with experience with entertainment to prepare for the 50-state training regimen.

“This is a roadshow, except instead of Michael Jackson, we’re going to have USC professors doing the training,” Powell said. “In our first round of interviews to staff up, we talked to people who had actually done entertainment roadshows, saying, ‘Okay, you’re gonna do a road show in Idaho, you’re gonna do one in Vermont, you’re gonna do one in Utah.’”

For the upcoming election, Powell said that while there has been increasing activity from actors like Russia, Cuba, Iran, and China in October, they do not expect issues on election night.

“The good news is, as far as we know, no major problem exists — which was also the case in 2022 and 2020,” Powell said. “There are so many people and so many different parts of government, academia [and] corporations that are working on this. We’re optimistic that this will be a safe election.”