Senator wants $160M to buy auditable voting machines

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) sent a letter to Senate Appropriations leadership Tuesday calling for $160 million to supply states with voting machines that provide a paper record. 

“Rational analysis concludes that our voting equipment will certainly be subject to sophisticated cyberattacks that are likely to change election outcomes without detection,” King wrote in his letter to Sens. John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.). 

Many of the digital voting machines that were purchased to help disabled and hard-of-sight voters do not provide a paper record of votes. That makes it harder to audit vote tallies if hacking or other tampering is suspected. Paper records cannot be altered by malware. 

{mosads}There is no evidence that voting machines were hacked in the 2016 presidential election. And since election machines are purchased locally and are vastly different from locality to locality, hacking a national election without being detected would be a daunting task. Hacking state and local elections, however, would be more realistic.

“A simple and effective solution to the cybersecurity vulnerability of our voting systems is available immediately: audit the results of elections instead of trying to secure computer systems,” King wrote in his letter.