Election security ahead of the 2020 Primary Election that takes place in eight months – that is what U.S. Senator for Oklahoma James Lankford spoke to the Senate about this week.

While no votes were changed in the last elections, Russia still attempted to find election system vulnerabilities to probe in America.

According to Sen. Lankford, the Russian Federation has attacked every single NATO country's election - all of them. They just so happened to attempt to tamper with America's elections last, and the Senator has no doubts that it is not the last time the Russians are going to try to interfere with the nations elections.

Sen. Lankford said the Muller Report made clear that the Russians were working with social media entities to try to create fake American accounts. They did this to put out fake information online in as many different places as they could to create confusion and chaos.

21 different states had their election systems probed by the Russians. That means electronically the Russians went in to be able to check in and see if the door was locked.

Sen. Lankford said if they found that the door was locked and they could not get into the system easily, they would move on and try to get another state to see if they could find a way to get to it. He said the good news is that in the process, the Russians were not able to get a single election as far as affecting any of the votes.

But there is a potential threat. The Senator said there is no reason for the federal government to tell each state how to hold their local elections. He added that they do need to have a system in place where they can audit and verify results.

To help strengthen election security, Sen. Lankford has introduced the Voting System Cybersecurity Act of 2019 and the Secure Elections Act.

The VSC Act would ensure that a cybersecurity expert from the Department of Homeland Security would be involved in crafting the voluntary system guidelines established by the Election Assistance Commission voting system that manufactures use when creating their products.This was introduced last month.

 As hearings continue, Lankford will keep pushing for the U.S. to put in place a policy for responding to cyberattakcs.