Sen. Cruz Participates in Senate Hearing on Election Security Preparations

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), member of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, participated in a hearing Wednesday titled, ‘Election Security Preparations: Federal and Vendor Perspectives.’ There, he questioned a panel of witnesses including the Chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Thomas Hicks, and Vice Chair Christy McCormick.

During his line of questioning, Sen. Cruz asked officials what reforms could be implemented by state election officials to ensure the integrity of the ballot process, and whether there was any indication the results of the 2016 presidential election had been altered due to hacking.

Watch Sen. Cruz’s full line of questioning here. Excerpts are below: 

Sen. Cruz: “How significantly do y’all assess the threat of an election being directly hacked in terms of the results at the ballot being altered electronically?”

Commissioner McCormick: I would say that Senator it would be very, very difficult to do that given the disperse character of our election infrastructure. We have 8,000 jurisdictions; none of the machines are connected to each other. So each machine would have to be hacked individually and that is one of our greatest securities that our election system actually has. So it would be extremely difficult to do that. That said, every system is vulnerable and things can happen. But election officials are extremely vigilant. We do logic and accuracy testing on every single machine before it’s used in an election. That’s open to the public so we can check to see that the machines are actually recording the votes correctly. There’s numerous ways to check it afterwards. We discussed earlier post-election audits. It would be very hard to do that, however, I can’t ever say impossible.” 

Sen. Cruz: “And am I correct, there’s obviously been a lot of discussion about 2016, but am I right that there are no indications that there was any actual hacking of election equipment that altered outcomes?” 

Commissioner McCormick: “We do not know of any outcome that was hacked or changed in any way. What happened in 2016 has been characterized by Under Secretary Krebs as ‘overstated,’ and that it was mostly drivebys and scans. We actually see thousands and thousands of these types of scans every single day, across the nation, against every single system. I would say that we are concerned about security of the system – of the entire election system. Nothing happened in 2016 and the real untold story is that the election officials did their job and they kept the system safe from any sort of hacking.” 

Sen. Cruz: “What would you characterize as the most important security reform that state election authorities should put in place to ensure the integrity of the ballot process?”

Commissioner Hicks: “I would say that we need to make sure that the confidence of the voter remains high. Because if we erode that confidence the voters are not going to come out and actually cast their ballots. So I think from A to Z, basically from voter registration all the way to election night reporting, all those points are valid and important.” 

Sen. Cruz: “Thank you.”

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