Perspective: Election insecurityU.S. Election Infrastructure: Troubling Bipartisan Conclusions
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its first of several bipartisan reports about its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference on Thursday. This one focused on Russian efforts against U.S. election infrastructure. The finding that dominated headlines was that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. This meant the Russian effort reached far deeper into the U.S. than previously understood by officials. What also caught people’s attention about the report was how heavily redacted it was. The report, with its worrying conclusions, provokes one overwhelming question: What can be done to stop this from happening again?
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its first of several bipartisan reports about its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference on Thursday. This one focused on Russian efforts against U.S. election infrastructure. The finding that dominated headlines was that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. This meant the Russian effort reached far deeper into the U.S. than previously understood by officials. What also caught people’s attention about the report was how heavily redacted it was.
The report, with its worrying conclusions, provokes one overwhelming question: What can be done to stop this from happening again? Just Security’s Joshua Geltzer and the German Marshall Fund’s Laura Rosenberger pored over the report’s findings and offered these takeaways:
Joshua Geltzer, founding executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. He served from 2015 to 2017 as senior director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council staff.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is striking for one sentence that’s in it…. It’s the second of these two sentences that’s a remarkable statement from a bipartisan group of senators who spent the past two years investigating Russian election interference in 2016:
The Committee has received extensive testimony about these operations, the vulnerabilities that allowed them to occur, and the threat those vulnerabilities pose to the integrity of American democracy. Yet little has been done to prevent it from happening all over again.
That, especially with Robert Mueller’s stark warnings during his congressional testimony on Tuesday still ringing in our ears, is a deeply concerning, even depressing, assessment with the 2020 election fast approaching. And it makes it even more unfathomable to think that, almost precisely as Mueller was issuing those warnings to the House on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was, on the Senate side, blocking two election security bills that had been recommended out of committee with bipartisan support.
