Another round of federal elections is just months away, and Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford has a bill to guard them against foreign interference.
Provisions of the Secure Elections Act would help push out paperless voting systems and encourage all states to audit their elections after they’re finished. Lankford told CNN states will still be running their elections.
"But where states are not keeping up their equipment, we need to be able to encourage those states and help provide some grants to those states to say, 'Go take care of your equipment,'" Lankford said. "We don't want to have at the end of the next election a guess that the election had fraud in it, that they got into an election system."
Russia targeted at least 21 state election systems in 2016, including Oklahoma's.
The Secure Elections Act includes provisions to award grants so states can upgrade their systems. That includes states showing where new equipment and software came from.
"So, it's real basic systems about upgrades and security, but if states don't do that and if they haven't done that in awhile, you lose trust," Lankford said on MSNBC. "And at the end of an election, the last thing you want to have is a close election and a loss of trust on what actually happened."
The Secure Elections Act also calls for the federal government to promptly share its findings and information on possible cyberattacks with state and local election agencies.
"So, if there's a problem in one of the states, somebody from the FBI can contact them quickly and say, 'There's somebody trying to probe your system,'" Lankford told Fox News. "And let's also make sure the state systems are auditable. Twelve state systems right now can't audit their election systems after the election."
The bill is co-sponsored by three Democrats in the Senate — Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Kamala Harris of California and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico — and two Republicans — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine.
