Category Archives: christy mccormick

Election Assistance Commission pleads for more money in Senate hearing

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The Election Assistance Commission is straining to secure elections in advance of the 2020 cycle with its current level of funding, the organization’s leadership told lawmakers Wednesday during a hearing on Capitol Hill. EAC chairwoman Christy McCormick said during a Senate Rules Committee hearing on election security that the commission has seen its budget halved from where it was in 2010, despite the fact that its responsibilities have greatly increased since the 2016 election. “That’s unbelievable,” Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said of the cuts. “That’s like cutting the budget of the fire department in the middle of a five alarm fire. We’ve never had such a serious attack on our political systems that we’ve had in the last three years and your budget is 50 percent what it was.” All four EAC commissioners who testified Wednesday agreed that information sharing with local election officials needs to improve in advance of the 2020 elections. Two […]

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EAC reassures lawmaker regarding security of voting systems

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The top federal authority on elections is seeking to reassure a security-focused lawmaker that it is doing everything in its power to provide state election officials with all available resources in order to secure equipment and computer systems. The heads of the Election Assistance Commission were responding to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote to the EAC in June asking how the agency is coordinating with them about security amid ongoing concerns over foreign election interference. In the response letter obtained by CyberScoop, EAC commissioners Thomas Hicks and Christy McCormick lay out the many ways the commission works with states on election security, including developing testing requirements and voting machine standards, offering guidance for spending federal grants and informing states about services available from other agencies. Earlier this year, Congress allocated $380 million to be split among the states for the sake of improving the administration of elections under the […]

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First-of-its-kind forum on election security gathers state and local officials with feds

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A top U.S. election official says that the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election came with a silver lining: At least we’re now focusing on election security. Christy McCormick, a member of the Election Assistance Commission, told a crowd of state and local election officials from across the country on Wednesday that the events of 2016 jump-started a focus on election security that was not as prominent before. “I know that election officials have always focused on these problems to some degree. Not so laserly focused on election security but I think this has brought this to the forefront for us in the last couple of years. So if there’s a good consequence to what happened, that is one of them,” McCormick said Wednesday at a public forum the EAC hosted in Miami to allow the state and local officials to discuss their election security plans ahead of upcoming […]

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New EAC chairman will continue to focus on election security

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Thomas Hicks has been tapped to chair the Election Assistance Commission, an agency that is considered central to protecting the U.S. election infrastructure from cyberthreats, the commission announced on Friday. Reuters reported on Thursday that Republican House Speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan, decided not to recommend former chairman Matthew Masterson for a second term as one of the EAC’s four commissioners. Commissioners are recommended by congressional leadership, nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. According to Reuters, some state officials were surprised that Masterson was not considered for a second term as commissioner, given that he has focused much of his tenure on cybersecurity. Hicks’s term as chairman began on Feb. 24, the day after the announcement. Hicks has served as an EAC commissioner since December 2014. He previously served as chairman from February 2016 to February 2017. “I was working on [Capitol] Hill when the Help America Vote Act was […]

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