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Congress is running out of time to secure the 2020 elections

Congress is running out of time to secure the 2020 elections

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And Mitch McConnell is standing in the way

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Voter rolls are available to political parties and, in many cases, to the general public.

Russian hackers targeted US elections in 2016. They spread misinformation across social media platforms and attempted to infiltrate voting machines. Last week, Special Counsel Robert Mueller warned Congress that 2016 “wasn’t a single attempt” and that foreign actors continue to threaten the democratic process “as we sit here.” 

He wasn’t the first to give that warning. This spring, FBI director Chris Wray said that protecting the 2018 midterm elections from foreign interference was just a “dress rehearsal for the big show” in 2020. Earlier this year, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, gave a similar warning: “Despite growing awareness of cyber threats and improving cyber defenses, nearly all information, communication networks, and systems will be at risk for years to come.”

But despite the string of warnings, Congress has yet to take any meaningful action to address the threat. As the 2020 elections approach, it’s not clear whether America will be any better prepared than it was in 2016. A number of lawmakers have sponsored legislation to help secure the 2020 elections, including measures focusing on online political ads, paper ballots, and voting machine security. But one person has stood in the way of these bills becoming law: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

The day after Mueller’s warnings, the Democrats pounced on the opportunity to push through two measures addressing the issue. One would have authorized $775 million to go to states in preparation of 2020 and require them to create paper trails of votes. A second would have required campaign officials to report any foreign interference or attempted interference to the FBI. But as the story goes with McConnell and anything even remotely resembling campaign finance reform, he shot them down.

McConnell’s explanation for dunking the legislation was that both were too “partisan.” Those two measures clearly had little support from Republicans, but they were only two out of a large pool of bills with bipartisan support seeking to remedy the vulnerabilities intelligence officials discovered in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

“Mueller’s testimony was a clarion call for election security.”

”Mueller’s testimony was a clarion call for election security,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Mueller’s testimony should be a wake-up call to every American, Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Conservative, that the integrity of our elections is at stake.”

The former special counsel has good reason to be worried: outside of his own report, the Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its bipartisan investigation into Russian interference, released findings last week claiming that elections in all 50 states were targeted by hackers. There was no evidence that votes were changed, but the committee determined that Russian intelligence was “in a position to delete or change voter data.”

It’s no longer just Russia, either. Iran is also increasingly posing security risks through disinformation online. Over the past year, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google have removed accounts and posts that they’ve determined originate from Iran and have engaged in coordinated and deceptive behavior. 

But despite these bipartisan warnings coming from all parts of the federal government, little has been done to patch the vulnerabilities. At the beginning of the year, House Democrats passed HR 1, which, apart from getting dark money out of politics, included a handful of elections security measures. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner, (D-VA) and Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) Honest Ads Act was passed in the House as part of HR 1. 

If put into law, it would require large social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to be more transparent about who is purchasing political ads on their platforms. The bill would accomplish that by making it mandatory for platforms to host a publicly available database that included disclosures of who purchased an ad and for them to make “reasonable” efforts to combat foreign entities from purchasing political ads.

McConnell has so far refused to take up that bipartisan bill.

Democrats like Klobuchar and Warner and Republicans like Graham and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) have sponsored security measures, but hardly any of them have been taken up for a vote in the Senate, despite clearing through the committee process. Democrats have no plans to relent, either. Those in the House plan to make elections security a priority once they return from recess in September, introducing new legislation that largely overlaps with HR 1. Senate Democrats made the television news circuit over the past week, referring to McConnell as “Moscow Mitch,” in part because he won’t take up legislation to protect elections.

McConnell is arguably the most powerful person blocking any efforts to stop the Russian threat. The primary concern from Republicans, including McConnell, has been that these measures give too much power to the federal government to govern elections. From a conservative perspective, that makes sense. Last Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told reporters that he would have supported the bill Schumer tried to bring up if the “things in it that federalize state elections” were removed. McConnell has made similar remarks.

Shortly before blocking the measures brought up last week, McConnell received donations from voting machine lobbyists, according to Newsweek. But Election Systems & Software CEO Tom Burt, a voting machines company that donated to McConnell, has previously been supportive of stronger security measures, like paper ballots. Some of the legislation blocked by McConnell wouldn’t even affect the company.

McConnell’s also spent a majority of his time in the Senate in strong opposition to any bills that touch on campaign finance reform, filibustering a major reform bill in the 1990s and becoming a strong proponent for the 2010 Supreme Court decision on Citizens United v. FEC. Honest Ads and HR 1 fall into this bucket. 

But the biggest threat election security legislation poses is its ability to delegitimize the Trump presidency. The intelligence community has widely agreed that the Russians worked to get Trump elected with congressional Republicans disagreeing en masse. If Republicans were to side with the Democrats on election security, they would largely be playing into what McConnell refers to as the “Russia conspiracy” and justifying claims that Trump would have never been elected without the help of foreign actors. 

“These theatrical requests happen all the time in the Senate.”

In response to being called “Moscow Mitch,” McConnell went to the floor on Monday to undermine the attacks and the Democrats’ legislation. “These theatrical requests happen all the time in the Senate,” he said. “This kind of objection is a routine occurrence over in the Senate. It doesn’t make Republicans traitors or un-American. It makes us policymakers with a different opinion.”

Time is running out for Congress to get this right before 2020. Just yesterday, Lankford told reporters that if something was signed by the president requiring paper ballots, states wouldn’t have time to ensure a paper trail before November of next year. Some lawmakers have been working on this issue for years following the 2016 election, and they’re pulling out all the stops to get McConnell on board.