Securing the count: inside the technology battle for election infrastructure security

Election infrastructure has been designated as a critical infrastructure subsector in the US by the Department of Homeland Security since 2017, placing it in the same category as power grids and financial systems. Election infrastructure security is no longer an episodic effort that ramps-up around voting timelines but has become a permanent operational requirement.

And yet, for all the attention paid to securing voter registration databases and voting machines, one critical layer has historically been slightly overlooked: the operations center itself. The technology that collects results from dozens of locations, routes them to a central hub, and displays them on a shared screen for a room full of coordinators and decision-makers. That infrastructure carries enormous responsibility – and enormous risk.

The core challenge facing election operations centers is deceptively straightforward: getting the right information from the right places to the right people, securely, in real time, without interruption.

In practice, this means pulling in video feeds and results from multiple polling locations and processing centers simultaneously, routing that information through a secure network, giving operators instant access to everything from a single workspace, and displaying the full picture on a large, shared screen for the whole room to see. After which the results and insights are shared with other parties, like the media. Each of those steps is a potential vulnerability. Each handoff between systems is a potential point of failure. And in an environment where access control compromises conducted by insider threats have occurred multiple times across the election infrastructure community, the need for continuous, automatic accountability at every layer is a baseline requirement.

Traditional KVM technology – the hardware that lets operators control multiple computers from a single keyboard, mouse, and screen – was never designed for this environment. It connects systems but does not integrate them. It switches between sources but does not secure the handoffs. It was built for a simpler world.

Barco CTRL, the KVM over IT solution for control rooms, takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than sitting alongside the IT infrastructure as a separate system, it integrates natively into it, speaking the same language as the rest of the organization's technology ecosystem. For a detailed look at what that distinction means in practice, the article 10 ways KVM over IT beats KVM over IP goes deeper into the technical advantages. But for an election operations center, the most important implications are operational, as there is no ‘day two’: everything needs to happen on a single day.

Barco CTRL securely pulls in camera feeds and election results from multiple locations and delivers them to the operations center in real time. Operators get access to all that information from a single unified workspace, using one keyboard and one mouse. The underlying networks remain completely separate – as they must, for security reasons – but operators experience everything on one seamless canvas.

The security architecture behind this is built on zero-trust principles: nothing is assumed safe by default, every user and every device is authenticated and verified, and all communications are encrypted end to end using mTLS and TLS 1.2/1.3. Crucially, every access, every configuration change, and every interaction can be logged automatically, creating a continuous, tamper-evident audit trail that gives election officials the documentation they need for post-election reviews and oversight processes. This is not a reporting feature added afterward. It runs continuously, in the background, from the moment the system comes online. Barco CTRL holds ISO 27001 certification and undergoes regular independent penetration testing – and the platform is fully TAA compliant, meeting the baseline procurement requirements for US federal and state government deployments.

In an election operations center, security and uptime are inseparable. A system that goes dark on election night – even briefly – creates a public trust problem. Barco CTRL addresses this through redundancy at the server level. If this hardware component fails, a spare takes over automatically. Software services run in isolated containers on the server, meaning that if one service malfunctions, it cannot bring down the rest of the system. Updates roll out system-wide from a central location in minutes, with minimal downtime, removing one of the most common reasons organizations delay security updates and leave themselves exposed.

The platform also integrates with existing government IT infrastructure through open APIs and standard IT services, which means there is no need to rip out current investments to gain next-generation security. For election offices already working with constrained budgets and limited IT staff, that matters enormously. 

Additionally, Barco CTRL was built for ease of use. Although very powerful and secure, all complexity is hidden from the user. This means the system is intuitive to operate and requires very limited training to operate. As there are a lot of volunteers in election efforts, this ease of use is of great importance.

Most visualization platforms secure the network and the software, but leave the display itself unprotected. Barco closes that gap. Combined with Barco LED video walls and the Infinipix image processor, Barco CTRL creates a chain where every link is protected – from the source data leaving a polling location all the way through to the image on the video wall. The Infinipix processor adds a dedicated layer of security at the display level, ensuring that what appears on the wall is as protected as what flows through the network. For government procurement, it is worth noting that Barco's full range of solutions is TAA compliant, and the NT-I series LED video walls go further still – meeting Buy American Act (BAA) requirements, the highest compliance tier available for US government deployments.

Election infrastructure security is not solved on election night. Electoral security needs to be approached as an ongoing resilience challenge. One that demands continuous attention, regular updates, and a technology partner that will be there long after the votes are counted.

Barco has been active in mission-critical control room environments since the early 1990s, serving emergency operations centers, national infrastructure facilities, and government command centers across the world. Barco CTRL is backed by a dedicated in-house product security team, a forward-looking security roadmap, and a commitment to supporting the platform for the long term. In an environment where the technology running your operations center is as scrutinized as the results it displays, that kind of institutional reliability is the whole point.

Ready to see what Barco CTRL can do for your election operations center? Request a demo at barco.com/ctrl-demo.