King Urges Senate Leaders to Provide Funding for Auditable Election Equipment to Help Safeguard Against Attempts to Alter Election Results

Press Release

U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today sent a letter to the leaders of a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee asking them to provide federal funding to state and local governments for the purchase of auditable election systems.

"A simple and effective solution to the cybersecurity vulnerability of our voting systems is available immediately: audit the results of elections instead of trying to secure computer systems. Risk limiting audits can provide a check on computer tallies to solve for malicious tampering (as well as inaccuracy from other sources like software bugs and clerical errors) and provide authoritative confirmation about the outcome. However, audits can't take place if state and local governments do not have auditable systems or funding to perform audits," Senator King wrote.

Writing that American "voting equipment will certainly be subject to sophisticated cyberattacks" in the future, Senator King urged the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Homeland Security Appropriations to provide $160 million to state and local governments to purchase auditable election systems.

"You can begin to help us to take hold of our elections and secure the integrity of one of our most important civic actions. We must ensure that votes cast are counted accurately and that we have the backup of an audit in the case of potential election meddling," Senator King continued. "To fail to cybersecure this foundation stone of our representative democracy will undermine our own people's faith in the integrity of our political system as well as to diminish the example we set for the nations of the world."

Senator King's letter comes in the wake of an October 2016 joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence revealing that some states had experienced scanning and probing of their election-related systems.

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