Identity Management: How a Platform Approach Can Help Safeguard Elections

Identity has long been a core concern among state and local officials charged with ensuring safe, secure and accurate voting. Are voters who they say they are? Are poll workers who access voting systems adequately and appropriately credentialed?

Secretaries of state and their staffs aren’t the only ones worried about identity issues as the nation rolls toward a presidential election. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that about 41 percent of Americans surveyed do not think the country is prepared to protect the election system from attack. In a 2020 survey by Okta and Juniper Research, opponents of mail-in voting cited security as their number one concern.

While there are many safeguards in place to ensure voter and poll-worker identity, modernized technologies could help to further reinforce the integrity of voting systems.
A platform approach to identity management could help state and local officials to better manage identity at lower cost — and with less IT intervention.

A Readiness Checklist

With the national election drawing near, state and local officials can ask themselves a number of key questions to ensure they have put in place all the needed mechanisms of identity control.

Transparency and Accountability

Identity is about security but it’s also about public trust and confidence in the electoral process. Any solution to the identity management problem therefore needs to deliver a high level of transparency and accountability. When

state and local agencies rely on disparate and fragmented systems to support election-related identity, it can be difficult to deliver on that high level of public visibility.

“You need an identity platform gives you a central location where there’s authentication, where transactions are tracked, audited and reported,” Forbes said. “Then you are able to identify when a p