A bill that would provide a billion dollars to states for election security was blocked by Senate Republicans.
The Election Security Act, proposed by presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would have required paper ballots for voting systems as well as for President Trump to provide a strategy for protecting institutions from foreign cyberattacks.
“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,” said Klobuchar.
Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.), who has worked with Klobuchar on previous election security efforts, voted to stop the bill, arguing that federal funding couldn’t be effectively implemented in time for the 2020 elections.
“No matter how much money we threw at the states right now, they could not make that so by the 2020 presidential election,” Lankford said.
Calls for legislation to secure elections have been renewed in the wake of the redacted release of the Mueller report, which detailed Russian interference in 2016. While several bills have passed the House of Representatives, many have been blocked in the Republican-controlled Senate, particularly by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
