IRI Partners with NDI and Harvard Belfer Center on European Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook

Cybersecurity threats pose an increasingly serious risk to political campaigns around the world, with the potential to undermine the democratic process and faith in democracy itself. In an effort to share best practices with our European partners ahead of the 2019 EU elections, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) partnered with Defending Digital Democracy (D3P)—a project of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center—to adapt the Belfer Center’s Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook for a European audience. 

The resulting report, “The Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook: European Edition,” represents the insights of a bipartisan group of leading policy, campaign and cybersecurity experts, including Robby Mook, Belfer Center Fellow and former campaign manager to Hillary Clinton, and Matt Rhoades, Belfer Center Fellow and former campaign manager to Mitt Romney. 

IRI also collaborated with NDI and D3P to create an international edition of the “Election Cyber Incident Communications Plan Template.” This template provides easily-adaptable guidance to enable political parties, campaigns and other stakeholders to communicate quickly and effectively in the event of a cybersecurity incident in order to maintain confidence in the democratic electoral system. 

Read more about the Defending Digital Democracy project here.