Two reports increase alarm about the vulnerability of our elections to hacking. Those two reports are below.
Allegra Dengler
Democrats are renewing their calls for Senate action on election security measures following the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report that found the Kremlin directed Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf
The party has repeatedly gone after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for imposing obstacles to action on election security, a point underscored once again in the wake of the bipartisan Intelligence report.
McConnell was “blocking a full-throated U.S. response” by stopping various election security bills from being brought up in the Senate and burying them “in his legislative graveyard,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) charged in a statement.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a 2020 presidential candidate, called on McConnell to allow votes on election security legislation.
“Foreign interference continues to this day, and we need to take immediate action to prevent foreign adversaries from exploiting social media to undermine our democracy,” Bennet said in a statement. “The future of our democracy depends on it.”
……………..
Verified Voting staff joined the Voting Village at the 27th annual DEFCON conference in Las Vegas in August. DEFCON brings security professionals, journalists, lawyers, researchers, and – of course – hackers under one roof at the world’s largest annual hacking convention. Since its launch in 2017, the Voting Village has served as an “open forum to identify vulnerabilities within the US election infrastructure and to consider solutions to mitigate these vulnerabilities.”
The Voting Village Report, released on September 27, summarized the findings from the DEFCON conference and reaffirmed the known vulnerabilities that exist in today’s election landscape.
https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf
The report emphasized the need for implementing voter-marked paper ballots in every state and conducting risk-limiting audits to confirm the results of election outcomes. The report also noted that while the country’s voting systems remain vulnerable, they “can still be used to conduct high-integrity elections – in spite of their vulnerabilities – by conducting statistically rigorous post-election audits.”