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.
Republicans care a whole lot about election security these days. Fueled in part by the “Big Lie,” the baseless claim that there was widespread fraud in last year’s election, Republican lawmakers around the country have made an aggressive push to pass new laws to prevent what they saw as a nightmare scenario from happening again.
Much of the “election integrity” legislation in Georgia and around the country would actually weaken our election systems and reduce their capacity to recover from a technological problem, whether a malfunction or an attack.
To help local election officials prepare for and respond to cyber threats, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a draft framework that takes NIST's pre-existing cybersecurity best practices and applies them to the voting equipment and information systems supporting elections, such as voter registration databases and the networks that connect elections infrastructure.
Even though the 2020 election is over, many Republicans are still holding onto the “Big Lie,” or the baseless claim that voter fraud cost former President Donald Trump the presidential election. Trump has managed to not only persuade his base that the election was “stolen,” but now many state legislators are using it as a justification to restrict voting rights.
![Sidney Powell, attorney for then-President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference at the ... [+]CQ-ROLL CALL, INC VIA GETTY IMAGES](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55d2259ee4b0323a540ddef6/1616614653147-45HQQ6OQ6GU2OG1EAX3U/960x0.jpeg)
Sidney Powell, attorney for then-President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference at the ... [+]
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Mar 22, 2021, 05:37 pm EST
Carlie Porterfield
Forbes Staff
Former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed against her by Dominion Voting Systems Monday, arguing her earlier claims that Dominion was involved in an orchestrated voter fraud effort were so outrageous that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”
Powell’s lawyers argued her claims that Dominion worked with Democrats to rig its voting machines to ensure a win for Joe Biden were clearly her own “opinions and legal theories” and not statements that the public would immediately believe.
According to the lawyers, Dominion’s descriptions of Powell’s statements as “wild accusations” and “outlandish claims” support the idea that a reasonable person would not automatically believe her.
Her claims were made as she served on former President Donald Trump’s legal team, which was tasked with challenging the results of the 2020 election in courts across the country after he lost to Biden, all of which were thrown out.
As state legislators consider hundreds of bills on election policies this spring, false claims of voter fraud are being repeated as justification for proposals to claw back recent advances that have made voting easier for Americans.
A voting technology company swept up in baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election filed a monster $2.7 billion lawsuit on Thursday against Fox News, some of the network's star hosts, and pro-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, alleging the parties worked in concert to wage a "disinformation campaign" that has jeopardized its very survival.
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