Sen. Mark Warner: “The continuing chaos in Iowa is illustrative of our overall failure to take sufficient steps to protect the integrity of our election systems”

From Sen. Mark Warner’s office:

STATEMENT OF U.S. SEN. MARK R. WARNER

~ On the Iowa caucuses ~

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and co-chair of the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus, issued the following statement regarding the Iowa caucuses:

“As the Department of Homeland Security has said, there is no indication that the failures associated with the app from last night’s caucuses were the result of malicious cyber activity. 

“But the continuing chaos in Iowa is illustrative of our overall failure to take sufficient steps to protect the integrity of our election systems.    

“We need to look holistically at protecting the security, integrity, and resiliency of election systems – from registration systems, to e-poll books, voting machines, tabulation machines, and election night reporting systems. As the Senate Intelligence Committee has repeatedly emphasized, paper ballots are the least vulnerable to cyberattack, and at a minimum, all voter machines should have a voter-verified paper trail. What happened in Iowa last night underscores the necessity of all these measures were election-night systems to face a devastating hack. 

“But what we’ve also seen that this chaos has created an environment where misinformation is now running rampant online, further undermining confidence in the democratic process. As we’ve seen in the past, foreign actors like Russia and China won’t hesitate to latch onto this kind of content in order to add to the domestic discord and distrust in our elections. 

“As we get further into the 2020 primaries, what happened in Iowa is an early warning sign that Congress, local officials, and the social media platform companies have much more work to do to ensure the integrity of our elections.”