2 U.S Senators Submitted a Bill to Protect Election Systems from Intruders

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The U.S Senators Martin Heinrich and Susan Collins have submitted a bill in the U.S Senate. This bill would protect the voting infrastructure of the United States from foreign intervention. The SAVE (Securing America’s Voting Equipment Act) has been considered the latest attempt by the U.S Senators to avoid interruption in the elections from foreign powers. The new law is especially designed to push the Director of National Intelligence to share out pieces of classified information with election officials in every state in the United States. Then, those officials will be tasked with empowering the infrastructure and equipment of each state against expected threats from both domestic and foreign intruders. The new law would also enable a hacking program and bug bounty. It encouraged researchers and vendors to look for and close holes in critical software. Future elections will only be conducted on devices that had been audited and passed fit for use according to specific criteria.

The proposed bill would hand out grants to specific states. It would enable them in upgrading their hardware in an attempt to prevent expected future hackings. It would also be supported by the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). In January 2017, DHS marked election technology as Critical Infrastructure. The current move might create anger to the same swing states that violently pushed back against having their voting machines protected in this regard. Point to be noted that Pennsylvania and Georgia rejected the proposal of DHS in the last summer to protect their machines against possible hacking. The decision of DHS was mentioned as a push back against vast federal overreach by Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp. The DHS officials believe that election hardware in 39 states was breached by Russian hackers, including voting systems, voter database, and finance campaign.