Voting Rights Roundup: GOP blocks Democratic effort to protect election systems from Russian hackers
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Leading Off ● Election Security: Last week's bombshell indictments of 12 Russian nationals by special counsel Robert Mueller laid bare the threat to American election security: Russia did indeed hack various Democratic Party organizations and state electioVoting Rights Roundup: GOP blocks Democratic effort to protect election systems from Russian hackers
Leading Off ● Election Security: Last week's bombshell indictments of 12 Russian nationals by special counsel Robert Mueller laid bare the threat to American election security: Russia did indeed hack various Democratic Party organizations and state election systems in an attempt to swing the 2016 elections to both Trump and the congressional GOP. Not only did Trump stand by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin's side on Monday and categorically deny this truth despite all evidence, three days later, congressional Republicans banded together to block Democratic efforts to bolster election security. Campaign Action Mueller’s recent indictments revealed that Russian intelligence officers hacked into at least one state's election database and stole information on 500,000 registered voters. That unnamed state was likely Illinois, where election officials had previously said at least 200,000 voters had their information exposed in 2016. There's still no evidence that Russian hackers were able to alter election results outright in 2016, and voting methods such as paper ballots would make such an attempt very difficult. However, this interference with voter registration systems suggests that Russia could try to swing elections by removing voters from the rolls or altering their registration data, such as their addresses. That could produce Election Day chaos that deters voters as election officials scramble to correct registration rolls that have been tampered with, or even disenfranchise them altogether. Following the indictments, news separately broke that one of the country's top voting machine manufacturers admitted to Congress that it had installed «remote-access» software on some of that hardware that election administrators use to program voting machines and tabulate their results, exacerbating the risk of hacking. And in yet another incident, the FBI notified Maryland officials that the state's voter registration and online systems were built on software from a firm financed by Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin, who is tied to Putin. (There's no indication that these systems have been compromised—at least, not yet.) Responding to this cavalcade of disturbing news, congressional Democrats sought to strengthen the integrity of U.S. elections by amending an existing government funding bill that would have given states hundreds of millions of additional dollars to make their election systems more secure, but House Republicans voted as a bloc to reject the amendment. Congress had previously authorized $380 million in funding this year for the federal Election Assistance Commission to provide grants to the states, but officials have been slow to put that money to use by upgrading their election systems. Read more