Last month, when Congress authorized three hundred and eighty million dollars to help states protect their voting systems from hacking, it was a public acknowledgement that, seven months out from the midterm elections, those systems remain vulnerable to attack.
Texas counties have doled out millions of dollars in recent months to replace thousands of old touch-screen voting machines that lack a paper record – a weakness security experts warn could allow Russians or other hackers to rig U.S. elections without detection.
The problem is, many of the new machines have the same vulnerability. So do similar machines in more than a dozen states across the country.
A pair of senators from each party is introducing legislation meant to deter foreign governments from interfering in future American elections.
The bill represents the latest push on Capitol Hill to address Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and counter potential threats ahead of the 2018 midterms.
A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments.
The U.S. Senate should enthusiastically pass the Graham-Klobuchar amendment to H.R. 2810, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2018.
The amendment would enormously strengthen defenses against cyber attacks that could compromise the integrity of elections in the United States and undermine legitimacy of government. Public confidence in the reliability of elections is a cornerstone of national security—the willingness of the people to fight and die for their country.
“Connecting for a millisecond is enough to propagate malware through a system,” said Rich DeMillo, a computer science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a member of Michigan’s election security panel. “Every weak link in the chain of network security is a problem, so opening the door to the internet is just a bad idea in every conceivable scenario.”
“Pennsylvania is going to be under a microscope in 2020. It needs to have voting systems that are demonstrably secure, trustworthy and auditable,” said Susan Greenhalgh, Vice President of Policy and Programs for the National Election Defense Coalition, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit along with Pennsylvania residents.
More than three years after Russia probed election networks across the nation in advance of the 2016 contest, this is just the latest lawsuit seeking to force states and counties to abandon machines that they say don’t provide a sufficient paper trail to make sure votes were tallied correctly.
Susan Greenhalgh, vice president at the National Election Defense Coalition, said too many election officials have been convinced by vendors and colleagues that spending more money and deploying more technology will result in a better, safer election. “That isn't always true,” said Greenhalgh, whose group advocates for better election security. “These elaborate election systems benefit companies’ bottom line far more than the taxpayers and voters paying for them.”
A critic of the states' election systems says North Carolina's public campaign is creating a false sense of security about the strengths of its defenses against malicious actors. Susan Greenhalgh with the advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition said later Thursday in a release that North Carolina election officials are "bringing a knife to a gun fight" by relying on standard election practices to attempt to block foreign hackers.
Interviews with 10 secretaries of state, conducted by the Hearst Television National Investigative Unit at the annual summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State held this year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found unanimity across party lines.
When asked whether their states needed more money for election security, one secretary after another answered in the affirmative.
Organized by election-security advocates, 200 Pennsylvania voters filed a petition Tuesday seeking to force the Pennsylvania Department of State to reconsider its approval of a touchscreen voting machine selected by Philadelphia and other counties.
Those machines, the ExpressVote XL from election mega-vendor Election Systems & Software (ES&S), have security flaws and do not comply with the state Election Code, the voters say in their petition submitted by certified mail and email Tuesday. It was signed by voters from Allegheny, Bucks, Delaware, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia, and Westmoreland Counties.
WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved expansive election security legislation that would mandate the use of backup paper ballots and postelection vote audits to guard against potential foreign meddling, seeking to pressure Senator Mitch McConnell to lift his blockade of election legislation in the upper chamber.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the top-polling candidate in the first Democratic presidential debate tonight, also has the most ambitious plan for how to protect U.S. elections from foreign hackers.
But that aim-for-the-fences approach, which Warren introduced in an eight-page blog post Tuesday, is sure to be a nonstarter among Republicans. And it will face serious scrutiny from some of Warren’s Democratic opponents who are championing a more practical approach to securing elections.
INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s Secretary of State Connie Lawson is facing a lawsuit from a national cybersecurity group because her office has failed to turn over emails and other forms of communication on election security the group requested under public records laws.
The National Election Defense Coalition, a network of experts on elections, filed a lawsuit in Marion Superior Court Thursday saying Lawson has denied access to public records about the reliability and security of voting machines.
Troubles at the Election Assistance Commission could undermine the effort to safeguard the 2020 presidential contest from foreign meddling. A tiny federal agency that plays a crucial role in assisting the nation’s local election supervisors is gripped by a leadership crisis that has sparked concerns that it is unprepared to play its role in protecting the 2020 presidential race from foreign interference.
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