Comment on How America’s Election Machines are Vulnerable to Foreign Manipulation

Election security has garnered a lot of attention in the wake of Russian’s 2016 influence operation. In particular, concerns over the reliability and integrity of voting machines—long a subject of considerable attention in hacker and tech circles—has made its way into the mainstream, prompting many states and local jurisdictions to upgrade equipment. There is “almost no federal regulation of the vendors” that facilitate voting. But the vendors who make, sell, and service the equipment that make elections work—the voting machines, voter registration databases, ballot programming software, and electronic poll books—largely fly under the radar with little oversight, according to a new report from the Brennan Center, leaving United States elections unnecessarily vulnerable to foreign interference. “There is almost no federal regulation of the vendors that design and maintain the systems that allow us to determine who can vote, how they vote, or how their votes are counted,” write coauthors Larry Norden, Christopher Deluzio, and Gowri Ramachandran in their new report, “A Framework for Election Vendor Oversight,” published Tuesday.