We’ve seen it all over headlines and social media posts over the past two years—Russian agents interfered with the 2016 presidential election. They infiltrated 39 state election systems, sent spear-phishing emails to 120 election officials, and hacked seven states’ websites or databases. But the obsolete nature of American election security doesn’t end there—remember Florida’s hanging chads in 2000?
The way American elections are run just isn’t efficient or accurate. Over 40 states currently use voter registration bases that are more than a decade old. Voting machines utilized by twelve different states leaves no sort of paper trail that would allow someone to confirm whether or not the votes were counted correctly.
According to Time, however, Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that.
The Massachusetts Senior Senator has laid out plans for revamping election infrastructure if she is elected President that includes cutting-edge equipment, a security firewall that locks all federal voting technology, and uniform election ballots. She also plans to mandate automatic same-day voter registration, early voting, and vote-by mail as well as deem Election Day a federal holiday. Additionally, she wants to keep states from disenfranchising eligible voters by claiming they died, moved, or otherwise without “objective evidence” that they are no longer eligible to vote in that state.
“Our elections should be as secure as Fort Knox. But instead, they’re less secure than your Amazon account,” Warren wrote in a Medium post. “State and local officials take their jobs seriously, but they often don’t have the resources to secure their elections.”
Warren also plans to combat gerrymandering by requiring states to enlist independent redistricting commissions that draw those congressional district lines.
If she were able to implement such a plan, it would need to allocate about $20 billion over 10 years, which would be funded by her tax on ultra-millionaires: a 0.2% wealth tax on Americans with assets over $50 million.
“We have a solemn obligation to secure our elections from those who would try to undermine them,” Warren writes in the blog post. “That’s why the Constitution gives Congress the tools to regulate the administration of federal elections. It’s time to pick up those tools and use them.”
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