Senate Intelligence report finds 'extensive' Russian election interference
The bipartisan report found that the U.S. election infrastructure was unprepared for attacks and offers proposals to shore up the system ahead of 2020.
Breaking News Emails
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
SUBSCRIBE
July 25, 2019, 1:13 PM PDT
By Leigh Ann Caldwell, Heidi Przybyla and Kyle Stewart
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan report Thursday on Russian election interference that found the U.S. election infrastructure was unprepared to combat “extensive activity” by Russia that began in 2014 and carried on at least into 2017.
The report was issued just one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned U.S. lawmakers that he believes Russia will seek to interfere again in the 2020 campaign and that “many more countries” are also developing similar capabilities.
“In 2016, the U.S. was unprepared at all levels of government for a concerted attack from a determined foreign adversary on our election infrastructure,” Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
The 61-page report — based on interviews with state election officials, Obama administration officials and government and intelligence community officials — is just the first volume of the findings of the committee's investigation. It includes eight pages of recommendations to shore up the country’s election infrastructure to prevent future interference.
The report found that the Russians took advantage of the nation's decentralized voting system, “exploiting seams” between federal oversight and state election systems. It also found that election cybersecurity was “sorely lacking” in 2016 and that federal attempts to warn states about potential security breaches "did not provide enough information or go to the appropriate people."
Election databases weren’t as secure as they should be, according to the report, and aging voting machines with no paper trail were vulnerable.
why does the republican party deny this?