Secure Elections Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, yesterday Facebook, Google, and Twitter removed hundreds of pages, groups, and accounts of Iranian and Russian individuals who had coordinated attacks to try to influence our election. Earlier this week, conservative think tanks, Republican groups, and Senate official sites were targeted by Russian hackers. Today, the Democratic National Committee just detected and announced what it believes was a sophisticated attack to try to hack into its database system--very similar to the attack Hillary Clinton's campaign had during the 2016 election time period. Today, we postponed in the Senate a committee debating election security.

Clearly, states such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others are trying to influence our elections. They demonstrated the capability, the willingness, and the intent to come after us to try to influence us. They are looking for vulnerabilities in States, not to necessarily pick one candidate over another but to sow chaos and use information against us.

These same nation states are also pursuing independent hackers--not necessarily working for their government at all but just individual hackers who are willing to be hired to do whatever these nation states want them to do or to hack in and get information and then sell that information to a nation state that might be interested in it.

Election security is not a partisan issue; it is a democracy issue. We should take the security of our next election seriously, just as we take the security of our infrastructure, our banking system, our power and electrical grid, and our water seriously. Those are areas that need to be secured. I am disappointed that there was yet another delay in working through that on election security. But I do appreciate the work of the Rules Committee and what they are doing to continue to refine this.

I do anticipate that in the days ahead, we will have a hearing on this issue, and it will move to this floor for final passage. The bill that is being debated is pretty straightforward.

It requires voter-verified paper audit trails. In order to receive any kind of Federal funding, they have to have some way to audit their elections.

It requires that all States that take Federal money to help them in their election systems also conduct post-election audits that are determined by the States. It is not a reason for the Federal Government to step in and tell the States how to do that; that is uniquely a role of the States.

It requires communication between the States and the Federal Government on election infrastructure breaches. There are ways to do that, to honor the States' authority to run their elections but still understand that we have vulnerability nationwide if any one State is vulnerable. I heard the arguments on the bill and on information sharing, but I would say that it is clear that an attack on any one State, on any one county, could jeopardize the integrity of our Nation's election security system.

I have heard that States may not need to conduct their own post- election audits. It has been kind of a ``trust us; things will work out fine.'' The challenge I have with that is that five States in the United States right now and as of this election coming up in November will not be able to even do a post-audit election on their systems. Nine additional States have some counties within their States that cannot do a post-election audit. So the problem with ``trust me'' is that there is no way to be able to verify on the back side. I get ``trust me'' but no verification.

The bill that is coming through, the Secure Elections Act that Amy Klobuchar from Minnesota and I are working so hard to work through the system, allows the States to run their own election systems and allows for the flexibility that the States absolutely need in the vendors they choose to use and all the details they choose on that, but it requires the simple ability to audit their systems after it is over so that no nation state, no group of hackers can stand up and say ``We did it'' and there is no way to be able to prove them wrong. Audits are not recounts; audits just give voters confidence that the vote they cast was counted.

To be clear, we have advanced a tremendous amount since the 2016 time period. The Department of Homeland Security has done a lot to help protect our system. States have stepped up significantly to protect their systems, but there is more to go.

The DHS now has security clearances for election officials or has the capability to have an immediate security conversation with every single State in the United States. That is important because in 2016 that didn't occur, and the threat against the United States could not be communicated to the States sometimes for months, sometimes for over a year. That has been fixed.

There has been cyber assistance that has been offered to every single State, and many of those States have taken it. The DHS has been able to work with individual States and to check their systems to make sure they are secure, and it has been able to provide filters so as to filter out malicious hackers on top of their already consistent filters that are there. This is to provide a kind of belt-and-suspenders protection for their election systems.

The DHS has already given priority to any requests from any State that asks for election assistance. The DHS will literally take people off of other assignments in order to get those individuals to the election officials of any State that asks for it, and all requests from every State that has asked for additional assistance have been fulfilled.

Recently, the DHS also ran what it called the ``Tabletop the Vote 2018.'' It ran a national cyber exercise in order to practice how this would work, what would work, and what vulnerabilities there would be. The DHS received tremendous feedback from the States as it did the exercise. It participated with the States and found out where they could share information. The DHS has set up a tremendous resource for election day itself so as to watch out for malicious attacks during election day and the runup to the election and to make sure it has rapid communication.

None of that existed in 2016. That is real progress, but we have to get some of these legislative solutions in place as well. At the end of the day, States are going to control their elections, but I don't expect every State in the United States to protect itself against a foreign attack. It is the Federal Government's responsibility to step in and help protect our systems. We are trying to hit this balance with the Secure Elections Act, wherein the States would run their elections, the Federal Government would do its part, and the American people would do their part by stepping up to vote and have confidence in knowing their votes actually count.

Congress needs to pass this legislation. We need to move it across the committee line and across this floor because the election issues that we are facing right now are not going away and are not getting easier, and States could use our help. It is about time we stepped up and did it.

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