[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 130 (Wednesday, July 31, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5218-S5220]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Election Security

  Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, over the past several weeks, we have seen 
numerous attempts by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to 
take a serious issue and, frankly, I think, turn it into a political 
football. It is an issue on which the Presiding Officer and I have 
spent a lot of time looking at what we need to do, in our having served 
on the Committee on Intelligence and, in my case, on the Committee on 
Rules and Administration, to be sure that people have the maximum 
confidence that what happens on election day is exactly reflected in 
the results.
  Our friends came to the floor last week and sought unanimous consent 
to make sweeping changes to the election laws of the country. Then they 
somehow suggested there was a conspiracy that anybody would say no to 
that. Unanimous consent means exactly that. It is what we do when we 
name a post office. It is what we do when we make decisions that are 
unanimously agreed to. It is usually all it takes to get that issue 
settled. It is not how we shape the laws that are at the heart of our 
democracy. It is also not what we do, in my opinion, when we try to 
make a point about that. In fact, one of the bills on which they sought 
unanimous consent had passed the House. It had received exactly one 
Republican vote in the House. So, clearly, it was not unanimously 
consented to over there and would not be unanimously consented to here.
  This is about press releases, not policy. In fact, today, the 
President called for us to pass voter ID laws that would require voter 
ID in every State and a law that would have a paper trail in every 
State. Right now, I suppose, if I were to draft that bill and call for 
unanimous consent under the same standard, I should expect my friends 
on the other side to say: Oh, that is something that others say would 
help elections, so I should just be for that and be for that 
immediately. Of course, that would not be the case.
  These attempts have all been brought to the floor on the basis of 
saving democracy--that this is what we need to do to save our 
elections. This is in the name of election security, but it is really 
not what it is about at all. Three of the bills were about campaign 
committees, which are managed by lots of laws and may need to be 
managed by more, but how you run a campaign committee is not how you 
secure what happens at the voting place on election day.
  One of the proposals was for the Federal Government to secure the 
personal devices of Members of Congress and their employees. As the 
Presiding Officer and I know, one of the things we do on the Committee 
on Intelligence is to put a Fitbit, like this one, on the shelf before 
we go into a meeting. If you have a phone like this one, you put it on 
a shelf before you go into a meeting.
  This law would say that the Federal Government should secure those 
personal devices of mine so there would be absolute security so that if 
they were to interact with a Federal system, there would be no damage 
done to that system. I guess it would also mean that if one of my 
children were to call me on his personal device, whether he lives at 
home or not--and I would, of course, take that call immediately--he 
would then have gotten into my personal device. Would the Federal 
Government need to secure that as well?
  Even if it were appropriate for the Federal Government to do that for 
Members and their extended immediate networks, I am not sure it is 
possible.

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I am certainly sure that it has nothing to do with election security. 
It might have something to do with the security of our system here in 
the Senate. Frankly, I think it might make it less secure, which is why 
I have chosen not to bring that bill up before our committee until I 
know more about it. I think it might make it less secure if everybody, 
without hesitation, thinks, well, somebody has looked at this personal 
device of mine and has secured it, so I can go into any of the secure 
systems in the Senate that I want to with this device and not have any 
sense that I might endanger that Senate system.
  This doesn't protect the elections. There have been numerous UC 
attempts we have seen on plenty of other bills that have claimed to 
secure elections. One included a provision that would take away the 
authority of the States to determine their own processes for voter 
registration. I am not for that. I also think it is hard to make the 
case that it would secure elections.
  In case you think it would, another one was to require every State to 
have online voter registration. I am pretty sure that this would make 
elections less secure.
  We have talked about all of the infiltration of bad information out 
there on the internet, and one of these provisions to secure elections 
would require States to have online registration.
  One was for there to be automatic voter registration, and another was 
for there to be same-day registration.
  In the nonurban part of our State of Missouri, we didn't have voter 
registration in all elections until 1975 or so. The view was, well, in 
small towns and school district elections and all, they are going to 
know everybody, so they really don't need to have registration. Yet, 
finally, it occurred to somebody that one might just think one knows 
five people, and the bond issue might be decided by five people, so we 
would have voter registration. In fact, not only would we have it, but 
we would have it enough in advance that anybody could look at those 
voter rolls 28 days in advance and see if there were any question as to 
whether one were registered or not.
  Other States have decided to have same-day registration, but one of 
these bills that would secure our elections would allow anybody to 
register to vote that day who would walk up to vote. If you think that 
works in your State, I am not really arguing you shouldn't do it, 
because if that is what the voters of that State believe to be the 
case, maybe it does. I am pretty sure it wouldn't work in every State. 
In revisiting that online voter registration again, I am sure that 
doesn't secure elections.
  There was one proposal that was rejected in these bills to secure 
elections, that being, for every $1 contributed at a certain level, 
there would be $6 given to that campaign by the Federal Government. 
That is one of the secure election things that was rejected, that 
wasn't accepted by unanimous consent.
  At this point, it does seem to me, if you are not willing to accept 
all of these things--there was sort of this ``hair on fire'' moment--or 
are not willing to accept anything somebody else says will secure 
elections, then somehow you are undermining the elections system. Yet 
we really undermine the system when we say this kind of thing helps it. 
Frankly, I have been watching this for a while, and that list of things 
I gave you has been on every Democratic wish list for about 20 years of 
what would be of advantage to them in the elections. Never before have 
they purported that these things have made elections more secure. They 
have just said it was a better system and more fair. It was obvious to 
them it would help them, and it was obvious to us it would help them. 
We haven't done it, and we are probably not going to do it right now.
  There are people in this building who simply will not accept the fact 
that there is not a Federal solution to every problem. Sometimes if 
there is a Federal solution, it is not the best solution. Frankly, I 
think the diversity of the election system that we have is one of the 
strengths of the system. I may get back to that later, but that is what 
President Obama said in October of 2016. In fact, he said that we 
didn't have a Federal structure and that it made it really more 
difficult to impact our elections than if we had.
  I believe everybody here clearly knows that State and local officials 
faced a significant threat from the Russians, particularly in 2016, 
that they had not faced before. One could probably add that the 
Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, and the Iranians could do 
very disruptive things for not much money. There is no question that 
the Russians affected our elections, but they have been trying to 
impact elections in Eastern and Western Europe for well over a decade. 
Why this would be a surprise to us is shocking to me and why, in 2016, 
we acted like we were totally flatfooted that, oh, the Russians would 
actually interfere with the elections just because they interfered in 
elections in a couple handful of countries in the previous decade. The 
world is pretty small when you get to that internet world we live in 
now.
  A critical infrastructure declaration came from the Obama 
administration in October whereby, frankly, it terrified most State 
election officials that, suddenly, the Federal Government, with about 2 
weeks left before the election, was going to Federalize a system that 
they were personally responsible for.
  As for the Intelligence Committee that started this process--the 
Presiding Officer and I were both on it, and I am still on it--it 
released some key findings about what the Russians had done. The 
committee found that the Russians had worked hard to find the seams 
between which the Federal Government could be helpful to State and 
local governments. They found that the FBI's and Department of Homeland 
Security's warnings to local officials came way too late in the process 
and were not well thought out. It scared the wrong people and confused 
more people when the FBI and the DHS did what they did. While there is 
no question that both of those agencies have redoubled their efforts to 
build trust with the States and deploy resources to help secure 
elections, we have to remain vigilant to see they continue to do that. 
Even when the Presiding Officer and I worked on a bill together last 
year, the local officials continued to have some problems with it. I 
know I said at the time that I had believed we had been doing 
everything this bill would do. I am not sure we would still be doing it 
10 years from now, so we need to memorialize that. I haven't 
significantly changed my view on that, but I haven't changed my view, 
more importantly, that we are doing what we need to do now.
  Congress needs to be vigilant. We have to insist that State and local 
officials have the clearance levels they need. Frankly, let me say this 
too. On that topic, I am not sure you can legislate that. I am not sure 
you can legislate ``here is what you have to be willing to tell State 
and local officials.'' I am not sure you can ever put that in writing, 
but you can ask them what they are telling people. I talked to one of 
our State election officials just last week.
  I asked: How is this going?
  He said: Well, everything we request seems to be one level above the 
security clearance I have.
  Too many of the things we ask meet that criteria. We are going to 
have to insist that this not be the case. While this is not likely to 
be solved by legislation, I think it can be solved by congressional 
oversight and inquiry.
  The Intelligence Committee also found that Russian activities demand 
renewed attention to vulnerabilities in the U.S. voting infrastructure. 
I certainly agree with that. We even said in that report we should 
replace out-of-date machines with improved ways to vote and improved 
cybersecurity. I think that is happening.
  Election officials have been taking this threat very seriously. DHS, 
the Department of Homeland Security, has reported that all 50 States 
and more than 1,400 local jurisdictions have signed up for the cyber 
threat information sharing program. We have had reports to the Senate 
on that, and the Committee on Rules and Administration has had hearings 
on that. The Committee on Intelligence has asked repeatedly about that. 
The monitoring sensors that help to detect malicious activity have been 
deployed to election infrastructure in most States.
  Remember that, in 2016, we had a cyber defense, but we didn't have a 
cyber offense. Early in the Trump administration, I remember people 
being asked in an open hearing: Do you have

[[Page S5220]]

any direction now to be fighting out there--to have a cyber offense? 
That was about 5 months into the Trump administration.
  The person said: No.
  You would think that, somehow, the old cyber offense had been turned 
off. In fact, there had been no cyber offense.
  Sometime in 2017, the cyber fighters were given what they needed, and 
they are out there helping. They are fighting back too. We had a report 
on that just recently of which all of the Senators are aware.
  One of the chief State election officials in terms of that cyber war 
said that in their system there are about 100,000 attempts every day to 
scam the voter registration system and see if you could possibly get 
in.
  I don't know how many thousands of those might be from foreign 
actors. I suspect a majority of them are from people who just say: 
Let's see if I can get into the system. But we should assume all 
100,000 are from somebody who wants to do something wrong, and I think 
the States are getting the help they need to fight that back.
  We have seen States use equipment that didn't have a backup so that 
when the election was over, you could count something individually and 
that the voter would have been able to look at and get their hands on 
and recount. As a matter of fact, if you ask me, the best proof you can 
have is a backup, a ballot that could be counted--a ballot where if I 
vote in Missouri, my voting machine generates something that I look at 
and then I put that in the ballot box and it is counted at the polling 
place. But if it ever had to be counted again, if there was any 
question about that precinct counter, they can go back and open that 
ballot box and count them again.
  On election day in 2016, and even in 2018, there were still four 
States that didn't have that system anywhere in their States. There are 
a couple of other States that have a partial system and four States 
that didn't have it. Delaware has it in place for this year's election. 
Georgia announced just last week that they had awarded a contract to 
replace their equipment that will be in place for the 2020 elections 
and have an auditable ballot trail. South Carolina made a similar 
announcement last month. The fourth State, Louisiana, is working 
through a contracting bidding process right now. Whether they are in 
place by 2020 or not in Louisiana I don't know, but I know they will be 
in as soon as they can reasonably be in and not confuse voters.
  Congress has to continue to move States to do that. We need to look 
and see what happened with the States that were given $380 million. In 
2018, 49 States took the money immediately. One State, Minnesota, has 
some glitch with their legislature so they don't have their money yet. 
But of the $380 million that States have, they have only spent 25 
percent of it. So there is still $285 million for which States have to 
do the kinds of things that the Congress thinks States should be doing.
  Now, there may be some States that have already spent all of their 
money and need more. That is something that, in the appropriations 
process, I am sure we will look at again, just like that $380 million 
came through the appropriations process.
  As I recall, the Presiding Officer was pretty involved in that 
discussion at the time.
  The Federal Government's role isn't to run elections for the State, 
but it certainly has a place in trying to be a valued partner, ensuring 
that the States have all the help they need.
  In fact, I believe that a larger Federal role requiring a one-size-
fits-all approach to the election would be a big mistake. I am not for 
federalizing the elections.
  I spent 20 years as an elections official, either as the individual 
responsible for elections in the third-most populous county in our 
State or the chief elections official as the secretary of State. In 20 
years of doing this, I guarantee you that the person on the ground, 
generally elected by the voters for whom he or she is trying to secure 
the election that day, is intensely interested in that election going 
well and people's having confidence in it.
  There is very little kicking the buck up to some Federal official in 
a faraway place and saying: Well, we can't prepare for that because we 
haven't been told we could prepare for that.
  Public confidence in elections is fundamental. It is the central 
thread in the fabric of democracy. Elected officials take it seriously 
when they are elected to do this job or supervise this job, just like 
appointed officials and boards of elections or election commissioners 
do.
  That system would not be improved if it was directed from Washington, 
DC, in a one-size-fits-all world.
  These public servants undertake an important job, and they understand 
it is an important job. We need to support them. We are supporting 
them.
  We need to have oversight. There may be a time when that oversight 
has produced a system that is so finely honed that we are ready to make 
it permanent, but every time you put something in law permanently, you 
reduce a lot of your flexibility to insist that something be done 
differently that needs to be done right now.
  Both the Intel Committee report--and both Senator Warner and Senator 
Burr have done a good job at keeping our committee on a bipartisan, 
nonpartisan track in this report--and former FBI Director Mueller 
focused on the insidious efforts to confuse voters. This is a much 
bigger question than what we could do at the government level about 
elections security.
  Let's not confuse that certain fight about bad information that is 
out there with a fight about whether our elections are secure and what 
happens on election day.
  Frankly, much more attention on what we can do about information is 
out there. Put people on alert. You know, sometimes even your political 
opponent says things that aren't true, and they don't have to be 
Russian to do that. People need to be on alert about information that 
is out there, but they also don't need to be scared to death that 
somehow we are not taking seriously the important moment of democracy 
when people decide.
  I believe we are doing that. I am committed to it. I believe the 
Senate is committed to it. I think this effort to make everything that 
might advantage one side on an election security issue is something 
that people need to be thoughtful about, and it needs to stop.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.