House Democrats have released a list of 18 states, including Arkansas, with potential election security problems. Arkansas is on the lower end of the risk scale.
A key problem in many states is the use of machines that don’t create a paper audit trail, a shortcoming being fixed in Arkansas, though it isn’t likely to be completely corrected by November.
Here’s the rundown from the Washington Post:
The report’s authors grouped states into three “tiers” based on the types of vulnerabilities they identified. Here’s how committee Democrats broke it down:
Tier 1: Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and New Jersey were identified as the most vulnerable because they relied exclusively on voting machines that don’t produce an auditable paper record.
Tier 2: Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin “may not be planning on using federal assistance to address their biggest vulnerabilities,” which included a lack of post-election auditing and the use of paperless voting machines in some jurisdictions.
Tier 3: Arkansas, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Washington had some of the same vulnerabilities as “Tier 2” but were putting money toward fixing them.
The report listed recommendations for what each state should do to fix its vulnerabilities, and said that all the states needed additional financial assistance to make upgrades.
Needed: Republican support for money to address the issues. But that would require heightened concern on their part about Russian election interference.