GOP, Democratic state officials push to secure election systems: report

Democratic and Republican state election officials are working to beef up the security of their voting systems amid concerns about Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential race.

Some states, like West Virginia, are bringing cybersecurity experts onto their teams, according to a New York Times report published Saturday. Delaware is preparing to replace a decades-old electronic voting system.

And two other states, Rhode Island and Colorado, will implement a system to verify voting results using a statistical method used to identify whether the reported election results were correct.

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The push to update and secure aging voting systems and databases that predate the advent of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is only part of the battle. Efforts are also focused on fighting the spread of false news and social media posts intended to disrupt and influence elections, the Times reported.

The bipartisan push for election security follows the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a far-reaching hacking and influence campaign. 

That meddling has also become the subject of a special counsel investigation, as well as multiple congressional probes. 

While federal officials have said that the 2016 election results were not altered, the fact that hackers were able to enter state election systems has sparked concern and shaken confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections. 

In Congress, Republicans and Democrats have been relatively unified in the push to secure election systems, and have said that such foreign interference will almost certainly happen again if steps aren’t taken to combat it.