Some state election officials argue that the federal government should stay out of election administration, but Sen. Ron Wyden said that years of controversies pointed to the need for more robust security rules. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Cybersecurity Wyden lambastes voting machine makers as ‘accountable to nobody’

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Thursday attacked the small but powerful group of companies that controls the production of most voting equipment used in the U.S.

“The maintenance of our constitutional rights should not depend on the sketchy ethics of these well-connected corporations that stonewall the Congress, lie to public officials, and have repeatedly gouged taxpayers, in my view, selling all of this stuff,” Wyden said during the Election Verification Network conference, a gathering of voting integrity advocates and election security experts in Washington.


Wyden has been a leading voice among lawmakers who have criticized the voting machine industry as too opaque and not subject to enough oversight from Washington, especially as concerns grow among U.S. intelligence officials that elections will once again be a prime hacking target in 2020.

“We’re up against some really entrenched, powerful interests, who have really just figured out a way to be above the law,” he said. “There is no other way to characterize it.”

Furthermore, Wyden said, voting machine vendors have “been able to hotwire the political system in certain parts of the country.” He noted that newly elected Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp picked the top lobbyist for the voting giant Election Systems & Software as his deputy chief of staff.

The companies, he said, “are accountable to nobody.”

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In a brief interview after his keynote address, Wyden told POLITICO that as scrutiny of the industry increased, “my hope is that we will see more and more vendors go in the opposite direction.”

Wyden also used the event to rally support for a new version of his PAVE Act , which would require states to use hand-marked paper ballots processed by optical scanners — which experts consider the most secure type of election systems today — and to conduct post-election risk-limiting audits.

The forthcoming revised bill will add incentives for states to comply, including $500 million to pay for new voting equipment and guaranteed full federal funding for post-election audits. Additionally, the legislation would give states $250 million for voting machines that better accommodate voters with disabilities.

Wyden asked EVN attendees to “build a grassroots juggernaut here in the next few months for my legislation.”

“Bodies at rest stay at rest, especially in the United States Congress,” he said. “You’ve got to come along and give it a push.”

Speaking to POLITICO, he added, “Political change doesn’t start here. It starts at the grassroots.”

Some state election officials argue that the federal government should stay out of election administration, but Wyden said that years of controversies pointed to the need for more robust security rules. He said some officials see election security vulnerabilities as “features that help them win, not serious, fundamental, good-governance issues that Americans are entitled to have addressed.”

Also at the conference Thursday, a senior aide to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), an early contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, said the senator will begin pushing for more intense scrutiny of the voting technology industry and its practices.

"You're going to see us doing a lot more work in this space," said Lindsey Kerr, Klobuchar's chief counsel on the Rules Committee. “I think there’s an agreement, at least with folks in our caucus, [that] there needs to be more oversight of the vendors,” said Kerr.

In addition to ES&S, the other two major voting vendors are Hart InterCivic and Dominion Voting Systems.

"Ninety percent of Americans vote on a machine manufactured by those three," Kerr said. "The market seems to be broken. There's no innovation. The barriers to entry are very high."

