On Thursday, June 27, 2019, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 2722, an election security bill aimed at strengthening the nation’s election system.  Introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D. Calif.), the Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act authorizes $600 million to update voting equipment to comply with new standards.

• The SAFE requirements mandate that voting machines be manufactured in the United States, stay disconnected from the Internet, and produce paper records; 
• The SAFE bill provides an additional $175 million biannual appropriation for “sustainment” funds for maintain election infrastructure and
• a $5 million grant program administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research accessible paper ballot verification methods. [The Hill]

The bill passed the House floor in a near party-line vote 225 to 184; Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) was the only Republican to vote for the bill. [Washington Post] In a party conference before the vote, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the bill as an effort to “further strengthen the defense of our democracy.” At the same conference, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, “We’re standing with our House colleagues today—we’re standing with the American people today, to protect the integrity of our elections.” Much of the Democratic support stems from the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report finding foreign political influence in the 2016 presidential election.

Though legislators from both parties have acknowledged the need for increased election security, the parties disagree how to achieve this goal. While congressional Democrats view the bill as a safeguard against foreign interference, their Republican counterparts view the bill as a form of federal encroachment into an area (overseeing elections) traditionally regulated by the states. Rep. Rodney Davis (R.-Ill.), the ranking Republican of the House Administration Committee, stated that the bill “focuses on forcing states to restructure their election systems through federal mandates and ignores states’ rights to choose the election system that best fits their unique needs.” [The Roll Call]

The bill faces steep opposition in the Senate. On Thursday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) deemed the bill a “nonstarter.” Citing Congress’s previous grant of $380 million to states for election security, McConnell believes additional funding unnecessary, as reported by the New York Times. On Tuesday, June 25, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tried to force a vote on a measure that would require backup paper ballots and authorize $1 billion in grants for states to improve election protection until Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) blocked the move. [The Hill]  In the week prior, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.) similarly blocked Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-Va.) attempt to bring forth a bill requiring campaigns to report to the Federal Election Commission any foreign nationals who make donations or provide election assistance. [The Hill]

Criticizing Republican opposition to the bill, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) emphasized how Democrats would spend the upcoming July 4th holiday “fanning out all across the country” to advocate for election security measures. “We’re going to have a simple message: pass legislation with provisions of the SAFE Act, and tell Mitch McConnell that the future of our democracy is too important for him to stand in its way,” Sen. Wyden expressed. [The Roll Call]  Speaker Pelosi announced that election security officials would brief Congress on July 10 in an effort to further increase pressure on Leader McConnell. [The Hill]

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, joined the growing number of high-profile individuals demanding that the U.S. government step up its regulation of big tech companies. In a June 2019 interview at the Economic Club of Washington, DC, Gates said, “Technology has become so central that governments have to think: What does that mean about elections?” Gates focused on the need to reform user privacy rights and data security.

This concern comes following the details of a Russian-led social media campaign to “sow discord in the U.S. political system through what it termed ‘information warfare’” outlined in Volume I Section II of the Mueller Report.  According to the Mueller Report, a Russian-based organization, known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), “carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.” As early as 2014, IRA employees traveled to the United States on intelligence-gathering missions to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts. After returning to St. Petersburg, IRA agents began creating and operating social media accounts and group pages which falsely claimed to be controlled by American activists. These accounts addressed divisive political and social issues in America and were designed to attract American audiences. The IRA's operation also included the purchase of political advertisements on social media in the names of American persons and entities.

Once the IRA-controlled accounts established a widespread following, they began organizing and staging political rallies within the United States. According to the Mueller Report, IRA-controlled accounts were used to announce and promote the events. Once potential attendees RSVP’d to the event page, the IRA-controlled account would then message these individuals to ask if they were interested in serving as an “event coordinator.” The IRA then further promoted the event by contacting US media about the event and directing them to speak with the coordinator. After the event, the IRA-controlled accounts posted videos and photographs of the event. Because the IRA is able to acquire unwitting American assets to contribute to the events, there was no need for any IRA employee to be present at the actual event.

Throughout the 2016 election season, several prominent political figures [including President Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn] and various American media outlets responded to, interacted with, or otherwise promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA. By the end of the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA had the ability to reach millions of Americans through their social media accounts. The Mueller Report has confirmed the following information with individual social media companies:

1. Twitter identified 3,814 IRA-controlled accounts that directly contacted an estimated 1.4 million people. In the ten weeks before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, these accounts posted approximately 175,993 tweets.
2. Facebook identified 470 IRA-controlled accounts who posted more than 80,000 posts that reached as many as 126 million persons. IRA also paid for 3,500 advertisements.
3. Instagram identified 170 IRA-controlled accounts that posted approximately 120,000 pieces of content.

Since the details of the IRA’s social media campaign were publicized, big tech companies have been subject to heightened levels of scrutiny regarding their effort to combat misinformation and other foreign interference in American elections. However, many members of Congress were pushing for wide-ranging social media reform even before the release of the Mueller Report.

In April 2018, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified over a two-day period during a joint session of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. These hearings were prompted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica—a political consulting firm with links to the Trump campaign—harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 election. Zuckerberg explained that, when functioning properly, Facebook is supposed to collect users’ information so that their advertisements can be tailored to a specific group of people that the third party wishes to target as part of their advertising strategy. In this scenario, the third-parties never receive any Facebook users’ data. However, Cambridge Analytica utilized a loophole in Facebook’s Application Programming Interface (API) that allowed the firm to obtain users’ data after the users accessed a quiz called “thisismydigitallife.” The quiz was created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian American who worked at the University of Cambridge. Zuckerberg explained to members of Congress that what Cambridge Analytica was improper, but also admitted that Facebook made a serious mistake in trusting Cambridge Analytica when the firm told Facebook it was not using the data it had collected through the quiz.

Another high-profile hearing occurred on September 5, 2018 when Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey was called to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss foreign influence operations on social media platforms. During this hearing, Dorsey discussed Twitter’s algorithm that prevents the circulation of Tweets that violate the platform’s Terms of Service, including the malicious behavior we saw in the 2016 election. Dorsey also discussed Twitter’s retrospective review of IRA-controlled accounts and how the information gathered is being utilized to quickly identify malicious automated accounts, a tool that the IRA relied heavily on prior to the 2016 election. Lastly, Dorsey briefed the committee on Twitter’s suspicion that other countries—namely Iran—may be launching their own social media campaigns.

With the 2020 election quickly approaching, these social media executives are under pressure to prevent their platform from being abused in the election process. Likewise, the calls for elected officials to increase regulation of social media platforms are growing stronger by the day, especially since Gates joined the conversation.

[Sources: Mueller Report, PBS, Washington Post, CNN, The Guardian, Vox I, Vox II]

On May 7, 2019, Maj. Gen. Charles L. Moore, the director of operations for Cyber Command, and other Cyber Command officers gave a rare briefing at its new Joint Operation Center.  According to the New York Times:  "American officials deployed last year to Ukraine, Macedonia and Montenegro, and United States Cyber Command officials said that their missions included defending elections and uncovering information about Russia’s newest abilities. Cyber Command will continue some of those partnerships and expand its work to other countries under attack from Russia, officials said Tuesday. The deployments, officials said, are meant to impose costs on Moscow, to make Russia’s attempts to mount online operations in Europe and elsewhere more difficult and to potentially bog down Moscow’s operatives and degrade their ability to interfere in American elections."

In an operation named "Synthetic Theology," Cyber Command took proactive measures to neutralize Russian efforts to interfere with the 2018 U.S. midterm elections by

1. taking offline temporarily the Internet Research Agency, a Russian trollfarm and source of disinformation,
2. sending direct messages to Russians propagating disinformation to identify them, and
3. deploying U.S. officers in Ukraine, North Macedonia, and Montenegro to defend their networks and gather intelligence on Russian activities.  The commander of Cyber Command’s cyber national mission force, Brig. Gen. Timothy Haugh said the U.S. would continue such joint efforts with foreign countries.  [sources: cyberscoop and NYT]

April 18, 2019 - The Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III was released, in redacted form, to the public today.  The Report concludes: "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion."

"As set forth in detail in this report, the Special Counsel's investigation established that Russia interfere~ in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents. The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

Download the Mueller Report here