Security News > 2020 > August > Days after President Trump suggests pausing election over security, US House passes $500m for states to shore up election security

The US House of Representatives has passed a spending bill which includes a $500m election security provision.

Specifically, the half-billion goes to the US Election Assistance Commission and will give states money that will be used to replace electronic voting machines with ones that provide a paper trail of results.

The bill declares that states will "Replace voting systems which use direct-recording electronic voting machines with a voting system which uses an individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballot which is marked by the voter by hand or through the use of a non-tabulating ballot-marking device or system."

Election security has become a partisan argument over what should be a universally accepted idea that more should be done to make sure hackers cannot tamper with vote tallies.

Matt Blaze, McDevitt Chair in Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, is making election security the subject of his keynote address to the Black Hat security conference later this week, and the Department of Homeland Security's CISA is also giving a talk on the topic.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/03/us_election_security_house_bill/