Two senators introduced a new election security bill with the aim of providing assistance to states in order to protect against cyberattacks on voting infrastructure. The bipartisan bill — the Securing America’s Voting Equipment (SAVE) Act — was put forward by Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). The aim of the bill, according to Collins, is to “assist states in protecting the integrity of their voting systems. “Our bill seeks to facilitate the information sharing of the threats posed to state election systems by foreign adversaries, to provide guidance to states on how to protect their systems against nefarious activity and, for states who choose to do so, to allow them to access some federal grant money to implement best practices to protect their systems,” Collins said on the Senate floor. Collins said that she knew of “no evidence to date that actual vote tabulations were manipulated in any state” during the 2016 U.S. election, but noted that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found 21 states had election systems probed by Russian hackers.
… At the DEFCON conference in July, Barbara Simons, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery and president of Verified Voting, a non-partisan and non-profit organization promoting laws and regulations that support accuracy, transparency and verifiability of elections, said risk limiting audits are an essential part of ensuring election results but are very difficult with electronic voting systems and are much more effective with paper ballots.
While the SAVE Act calls for audits of election systems for states that receive federal grant money, there are no stipulations for auditing actual election results.
“If we are talking about vote integrity, the major shortcoming of any electronic voting system is an independent, auditable record. With paper voting, someone could miscount ballots or ‘stuff the ballot box.’ It’s not perfect, but when an election is over we can match the records of individuals who registered, and rescan and recount the paper ballots,” Pittenger said. “With electronic voting, we have an electronic audit trail, but any competent criminal would cover their tracks.”
Full Article: SAVE Act attempts to bolster election security.