The Senate majority has blocked three bi-partisan election security bills, overriding concerns of the intelligence community and the bills’ sponsors that foreign interference in the upcoming presidential elections has already begun and will escalate.
Despite warnings from Federal Bureau of Investigation director Christopher Wray that Russian hackers have already launched an information warfare campaign to disrupt the November 2020 elections, the Senate denied a request for unanimous consent for the three bills. Under Senate rules, a bill proposed by any one senator can pass without a floor vote if it moves with no objection from any other senator.
In the procedure on Tuesday, February 11, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) opposed requests for each bill. Blackburn invoked the state’s rights vs. federal government argument, accusing Democrats of trying to move the bills through the Senate aware that Republican lawmakers would block them. The states each control their own voting infrastructure.
“They are attempting to bypass this body’s Rules Committee on behalf of various bills that will seize control over elections from the states and take it from the states and where do they want to put it? They want it to rest in the hands of Washington, D.C. bureaucrats,” Blackburn said.
This Sounds Familiar
Last year, the Senate majority three times blocked election security bills. This time around the objection stopped the Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE) Act, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-OR) that would require states to use paper ballots as backup and mandate post-election audits. The bill would also set federal election system cybersecurity standards.
A second bill proposed by Sen. Mark Warner, (D-VA), the Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, would require political campaigns to r ..
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