Last week I was in Singapore on with the IFES launch of Cyber and Information Resilience Elections Network (CIREN) Asia-Pacific. It was an honor and honestly a lot of fun.

CIREN is global initiative, now well into its second year, to increase the ability of election management bodies – AKA EMBs, AKA national election commissions – to prevent, detect, and respond to the cyber and information attacks that aim to damage elections around the world. These issues are obviously urgent and are going to be with us for a long, long time. That means the future of democracy lies not only with one-off solutions, like taking down a particular botnet or calling out a given disinformation campaign (both important!), but building strong and sustainable in-house capacity in EMBs to engage proactively with these threats as a core part of conducting an election. It also means they need stronger connections and a shared operational language to speak with all kinds of tech companies, who are so critical in providing a bird’s eye view of the internet, among other things.

The theory behind CIREN is pretty straightforward but important: these are regional and global threats, and the elections community needs to coordinate and respond at these scales. Not country by country whac-a-mole. The problem is we’re not very used to doing business that way, elections generally being national and local affairs, after all. We’re hoping CIREN, in various regional cohorts globally, can help create the space for transnational election security.

The CIREN Asia-Pacific launch brought together representatives from more than 15 countries, major tech companies, and expertise from IFES’ work around the region and world to jumpstart just such a community in Asia and the Pacific. It was awesome. We talked about everything from the fundamentals of risk management, to preserving EMB independence during technology procurement, to the potentials, threats, and dangerously distracting hype related to AI. Personal highlights for me included group groans from the EMB techies in the room about trying to make the case for important tech investments to their executives (and reciprocal group groans from the executives about incomprehensible tech investment asks), talking with our Pacific colleagues about the rapid changes that 3G and 4G are bringing to some of their countries, and our last session where we co-designed the future of CIREN A-P together.