I think it was former Senator Coats, who is the National Intelligence Director, who has said that, in fact, they are getting bolder.

It should be completely up to the states to be able to run that.

We have worked on together is to be able to form how do we head off this issue from coming at us again.

Senator Klobuchar and I have worked on this, along with Senator King, I see in the room, on our broadband caucus connectivity.

There was not near enough communication between the Federal Government and the states leading up to the 2016 time period.

I have absolutely zero doubt that the Russians tried to influence our elections; that they were trying to engage in any way that they could to bring instability to our democracy.

It is clear to me, Mr. Chairman, these companies want to be gatekeepers of our democracy, but they seem completely uninterested in safeguarding it.

It became very clear that while a lot of the focus on the interference has been about the general election in 2016, it was also going on in the primary.

I am particularly pleased with the work that Senator Lankford and I have done on the Secure Elections Act.

I think the issue, and this is in my broader testimony that I have included for the record, is that oftentimes a local election official, they are so overtasked with all these various administrative duties, they don't have a budget to be…

Of course, we have been talking about the fact that Homeland Security didn't come forward with the information to the state.

But you know, that involved the paper ballot----

I mean, I said I have seen that, and that is well put and must be incredibly frustrating when you are trying to do your job.

The states need to be able to continue to control elections.

Americans need to have paper ballots marked by hand. Until that system is adopted, every election that goes by is yet another election that foreign governments, hostile foreign governments including Russia, can hack.

My legislation focuses on two common sense measures that are backed by the overwhelming number of cyber security experts in our country: Paper ballots and risk-limiting audits.

Congress must do everything we can to defend our elections and bolster Americans' confidence in our democratic process.

It is truly vital that we work together, and this is one effort, but there are so many others going on.