[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5450]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           VERIFYING OPTIMAL TOOLS FOR ELECTIONS ACT OF 2016

  (Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. JOHNSON of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, there is a grave threat that is 
facing the American electoral process in 2016, and that is the 
soundness and the dependability of our voting machines and the 
integrity of our voting process.
  Nationwide, authorities are tabulating crucial voting results using 
faulty, out-of-date electronic voting machines from the era that 
predated the smartphone. These outdated machines are prone to crashes 
and screen freezes that can cause unacceptably long wait times. 
Additionally, old voting machines remain vulnerable to being hacked and 
elections can be stolen.
  My bill, the Verifying Optimal Tools for Elections Act of 2016, 
otherwise known as the VOTE Act, would allocate millions of dollars to 
assist States in replacing these aging voting machine dinosaurs. The 
VOTE Act would also allocate millions of dollars in grants to assist in 
developing new technologies to assure accuracy in the voting process, 
to protect voting machine source codes from being hacked, and to train 
election officials.
  The aim of the VOTE Act is simple: the safeguarding of elections by 
ensuring the very integrity of the voting process, while protecting 
access to the ballot box.

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