FLORIDA BIPARTISAN LETTER FOR ELECTION SECURITY
August 17, 2020
To: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee
In December, Congress appropriated $425 million in grants for states to upgrade the security of election infrastructure ahead of the 2020 election.
Your state has been allocated considerable funds to improve election security. We urge you to use these funds to take appropriate, low-cost security steps to ensure that your state does not suffer from Election Day chaos.
Americans in both parties support action to defend election security. Voters deserve to know that their elections are conducted fairly and honestly, with each vote counted as cast, and free from malicious actors seeking to cast doubt on our democracy.
The threat is real – a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report has shown that our voting infrastructure is at risk from malicious hackers seeking to cast doubt on the integrity of our elections. Attention has focused on Russia, but threats could come from Iran, China, and North Korea or other foreign and domestic hackers.
To mitigate this threat, we believe voter-verified paper ballots are the gold standard for safe and secure elections. Paper ballots, processed and retained in a secure chain of custody, provide reliable hard-copy evidence that officials can use for cost-effective audits and recounts.
As you work to improve your state’s election infrastructure, we urge you to be good stewards of taxpayer resources by spending federal money as efficiently as possible.
We believe the following cost-effective steps will help you secure upcoming elections while making certain that taxpayer resources are wisely spent:
1. Ban all technologies that allow Internet connectivity for election tabulation management systems and devices that Americans use to vote. This will eliminate an avenue that hackers can use to exploit or compromise voting systems, install malicious software, and tamper with election data in current or future elections.
2. Place emergency back-up ballots in all precincts, sufficient for 6-12 hours of emergency peak voting. This will allow your citizens to cast a ballot if voting systems are hacked or malfunctioning.
3. To mitigate the spread of Coronavirus, limit the use of touchscreen machines to a smaller number of voters including those with disabilities and language access needs, and allow all voters the option to cast a hand marked paper ballot instead of using touchscreen voting machines.
4. Ensure that voting machines produce human-readable, voter-verified paper ballots. This allows state residents to know that their votes were counted as cast and provides officials with multiple sources of secure data to compare during audits.
5. Conduct post-election, risk-limiting audits as a quick, cost-effective check on the validity of electronic results. Whenever close or contested elections are subject to review, inspectors should rely on human-readable vote selections or voter-verified paper ballots instead of bar codes or QR codes.
6. Implement 24/7 video monitoring of all ballot processing areas to ensure that all votes are counted as cast.
Taken together, these cost-effective approaches will help uphold the safety and integrity of your elections in 2020 and beyond.
We appreciate your attention to these urgent matters and welcome the opportunity for further discussion and collaboration.
Signed:
Grover Norquist
President, Americans for Tax Reform
Matt Collins
Executive Director, Committee for Government Accountability
Dr. J. Robert McClure
President and CEO, The James Madison Institute
Rick Watson
Chair, Tallahassee Center-Right Coalition
Tom DeWeese
President, American Policy Center
Katie McAuliffe
Executive Director, Digital Liberty
Adam Brandon
President, FreedomWorks
Ethan Rome
President, Issue One
Seton Motley
President, LessGovernment.org
James Plummer
Policy Director, Liberty Coalition
Ben Ptashnik
President, National Election Defense Coalition
Paul Rosenzweig
Senior Fellow, R Street Institute