WASHINGTON (TNS) The first primary in the 2020 presidential race is a little more than 250 days away, but lawmakers and experts worry that elections will be held on voting machines that are woefully outdated and that any tampering by adversaries could lead to disputed results.
Although states want to upgrade their voting systems, they dont have the money to do so, election officials told lawmakers last week.
Overhauling the nations election systems would mean injecting as much as $1 billion in federal grants that would then be supplemented by states, but top Senate Republicans have said they are unlikely to take up any election security bills or give more money to the states.
The deadlock could mean that even as federal government and private companies spend tens of billions of cybersecurity dollars annually to protect their computers and networks from attacks, the cornerstone of American democracy could remain vulnerable in the upcoming elections.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat and 2020 presidential candidate who last week proposed new legislation to address election security, laid out the state of affairs at a recent hearing. Forty states rely on electronic voting systems that are at least 10 years old, Klobuchar, who is the top Democrat on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, said at a hearing last week. Twelve states have no or partial paper backup.
The consequence is if something happens in one county in a close state or in one state, the entire presidential election could be up in the air, Klobuchar said. We then wouldnt be able to prove what happened if we have no paper ballot backup.
Its not just the age of the machines. A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 45 states use voting machines that are no longer manufactured and therefore lack maintenance support, which could leave local officials scrambling for spare parts.
The report also cited a South Carolina election official who said the state continues to use Windows XP software, which Microsoft first released in 2001 and discontinued support for in 2014.
Still, Microsoft released a security patch on May 14 noting that the old software, which is used by about 3.5% of computer users globally, had a severe unrectified gap that could allow an invasion by malware similar to WannaCry.
That malware spread across the globe in 2017, shutting down all kinds of computer systems, including many hospitals in the United Kingdom. It is highly likely that malicious actors will write an exploit for this vulnerability and incorporate it into their malware, Simon Pope, Microsofts director of incident response, said in a statement accompanying the fix.
Of the five states that held 2018 elections with no paper ballot backups, Georgia and Delaware are moving toward systems with paper backup by 2020, leaving Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina in the paperless camp.
Nine other states Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas held 2018 elections with many jurisdictions operating voting machines without a paper backup.
Pennsylvania has said all its counties will have paper systems by 2020. To get all states to use some type of a backup either ballots that are marked in paper and scanned, or digital vote recorders that produce a paper trail would require the federal government to provide $300 million in additional grants, said Edgardo Cortes, election security adviser at the Brennan Center for Justice.
REPLACING decade-old systems across the country would require another $700 million, said Cortes, who previously served as Virginias commissioner of elections.
