Warner: Congress has dropped the ball on election security
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) took Congress to task Wednesday for not passing any substantive election security legislation since Russia's digital assault on the 2016 presidential race, warning that Moscow could launch a new offensive in the weeks before Election Day.
"While our systems have partially improved, we as the Congress have not legislated any guardrails," Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the 11th annual Billington Cybersecurity Summit. "I think that leaves us vulnerable."
He noted that Russia waged an online disinformation campaign in 2016 aimed at inflaming racial divisions in the U.S.
"I'm very, very concerned in these last 50-plus days whether Russia could try to exacerbate those kinds of racial divisions again," Warner said. "Russia at the end of the day wants to sow chaos."
A recent POLITICO review found that social media giants are already behind on keeping racially charged posts off their platforms.
Warner also pointed to the Trump administration's warnings that other nations, specifically China and Iran, have taken the Russian playbook from 2016 and are working on improving it.
The good news: Some people have taken steps to better protect U.S. elections, he said.
Social media companies "are doing a slightly better job. They’re still reactive but at least they’re aware of the manipulation and misrepresentation that takes place on their platforms," Warner said. On the other hand, Facebook "has a long way to go," particularly on removing right-wing content.
He said CISA has "done a pretty good job of improving the overall security of our election machinery" and has "most election officials recognizing that this is a threat." But when it comes to electronic poll books, observers have noted "that as technology moves ahead there continue to be vulnerabilities." (Read this recent POLITICO story for more on that topic.)
And on the overall threat of foreign nations or intelligence services hacking into key networks and weaponizing information, as Kremlin-backed operatives did in 2016 to the Democrats, "at least our intelligence community is more aware of that."
Still ... bad news: "We have not passed a single piece of legislation" to bolster protections for the vote, Warner said, even though the Democratic-controlled House passed several election security bills. Warner faulted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying he "has not let any of these bills come to the floor."
Warner plugged his FIRE Act, S. 1562 (116), which would require presidential campaigns to report attempts by foreign nationals to interfere in elections — and which was recently stripped from the Senate’s bipartisan Intelligence Authorization Act — and the Honest Ads Act, S. 1356 (116), which would update transparency and disclosure rules for online political advertising, as "low hanging fruit" that could pass in the upper chamber.
