On June 6, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center published Securing American Elections: Prescriptions for Enhancing the Integrity and Independence of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election and Beyond, a report with an urgent call to action directed at the country’s political leaders, of all political affiliations.

“We haven’t had a 9/11-style report investigating what went on in the 2016 election, with proposed solutions,” says Stanford Law Professor Nate Persily in a recent interview for Stanford Legal, co-hosted by Professors Pam Karlan and Joe Bankman. Persily is one of the report’s authors and co-director of the newly-launched Stanford Cyber Policy Center. “Leaving partisanship aside to deal with the problem of foreign interference in the U.S. elections is vitally important. We really haven’t grappled with this as a country and we certainly haven’t passed the necessary laws and regulations to address it.”

Persily explains Russian interference in the 2016 elections, which was confirmed by Special Counsel Mueller’s report, but not fully investigated, was a playbook for the 2020 election. But because of political partisanship, leadership focus on solutions in Washington is sorely lacking.

“It’s clear from the Mueller Report that the Russian strategy was principally to sow division and doubt about American institutions,” he says. “Through propaganda, you can degrade confidence in the election result. And there is a real concern that Americans are losing confidence in their democracy. But one problem is that election reform is now seen through a partisan lens.”

According to Persily, there is a lot the government can do, including gaining greater transparency for political contributions and regulating political advertising where, he says, it has been a “Wild West where regulations that we have for television really don’t apply to the internet.”

In addition to measures to prevent Russian-style cyber security risks to the U.S. 2020 election, Persily also discusses the more “old school” threats to American democracy, including voter registration.

“There’s more that we can do at the state level to deal with things like the election machinery—making sure that there are paper trails for auditing. But we still don’t have the regulatory environment or authority that we need as a government,” he says. And there is evidence that the Russians tried to penetrate voting systems in Florida. “That’s concerning because you could see how at each stage of the process you could, if not change votes, make it more difficult for some people to vote or mess with the number of names that are on the voter registration system.”

But, as with much of American infrastructure, the U.S. voting infrastructure is in need of attention. And while some cities and counties are updating their voting systems—Persily points to the County of Los Angeles where they are developing a voting machine with a paper trail—many are not.

“It’s not just the security, but also the functionality of a lot of these machines. Very few of them even use iPad technology. Some of them run operating systems that no one services anymore, like Windows NT. So we need another infusion of money like we had with the Help America Vote Act to replace some of these aging voting machines.”

Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, is an expert in American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. An expert on gerrymandering, he has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

To read additional coverage, go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/technology/ftc-rules-cyberattacks.html and https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/securing-our-cyber-future

To read the full report, go to: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/securing-our-cyber-future

This episode originally aired on SiriusXM on June 6, 2019.