National Guard deploys cybersecurity units to 14 states to oversee midterm elections

According to ZeroHedge, the commander of the Washington Air National Guard, Brigadier General Gent Welsh said, "If you don’t have a cyber unit in your state you’re not in a good position to help them protect elections."

The states in which the National Guard will be activated are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, North Carolina, New Mexico, New York, Washington, West Virginia, Iowa, and the battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.

General Welsh said that having these units around "does add an air of credibility to what’s out there" because the National Guard is "one of the most trusted institutions in the United States."

Several states used the National Guard's cyber units during the primaries earlier this year. Fox News reports that these teams are made up of 2,200 men and women and break down into a total of 38 units across the Air and Army National Guard.

The head of the Illinois National Guard, Air Force Major General Rich Neely said, "Our goal is to make sure we have as secure elections as possible. We are at the really beginning stages of this."

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was created under the Trump administration and CISA Director, Jen Easterly, has said that there is "no information credible or specific about efforts to disrupt or compromise" the elections.

She further said that she was, "very confident that we have done everything we can to make election infrastructure as secure and as resilient as possible."

In the lead-up to the midterms Democrat Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata was fired for election fraud last week. In Indiana, a Democrat poll worker was ejected over the weekend for electioneering. Pennsylvania has faced an outage in their online voter database and Chuck Todd has said that the election results will not be known until well after Tuesday.