National: GOP senators nix vote on Election Security Act, similar bills wend their way through Congress | Teri Robinson/SC Media
Republicans in the Senate rebuffed an attempt by presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, to bring the Election Security Act to a vote Tuesday. “We know there’s a continued threat against our democracy. What we need to do now is address these facts with a common purpose, to protect our democracy, to make sure that our election systems are resilient against future attacks,” said Klobuchar when calling for a vote on the act, which would require voting systems to have paper ballots and give states grants for election election security. “There is a presidential election before us and if a few counties in one swing state or an entire state get hacked into there’s no backup paper ballots and we can’t figure out what happened, the entire election will be called into question,” she said. Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who has worked with the Minnesota senator on bipartisan election security legislation, thwarted her efforts, noting their past collaboration and saying, “I think we still can resolve this and we can actually get a result, but a partisan proposal will not get us an end results where both parties come together and get to resolve this.”