Weak election security “is a national security threat,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote Tuesday, and “three years after a hostile foreign power literally attacked our democracy, we’ve done far too little to address it.” Naturally, she has a plan for that, and for making it easier to vote.
Warren names one major election security concern after another, from the 8,000 different election jurisdictions with radically different standards and strengths to the fact that “Forty-two states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old” and “Twelve states still use paperless machines, meaning there’s no paper trail to verify vote count.” All this makes the U.S. system(s) vulnerable to hacking, by Russia or whoever else.
To fix this, Warren would institute a consistent federal standard for federal elections, with new voting machines and uniform ballot design, all locked “behind a security firewall like it’s Fort Knox.” Federal elections would get automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting, and a federal holiday for Election Day. Voter purges and gerrymandering would be prohibited.
State and local elections wouldn’t have to be conducted according to the federal rules—but they would get incentives to use those standards. And “where racist or corrupt politicians refuse to follow the law, the federal government will temporarily take over the administration of their federal elections to guarantee the fundamental right to vote.”
This proposal comes against the backdrop of congressional Republicans refusing to pass even the most basic election security measures despite Russian hacking in 2016—or because they expect to benefit from it in 2020.