and one of the things we re learning is it s always good, it s old fashioned but it s always good to have a paper backup system of voting. it s called paper. not highly complex computers. paper. and a lot of states are doing that. they re going to a paper backup and i think that s a great idea. all right. so can i just say something? sure. i completely agree with the president there. paper is a great backup and the reason why is you know, it is one of the things that have that i ve had a little comfort in when we ve talked about all of the ratings of the russians, the voting, i ve completely lost my mind this morning, is we re so inefficient. right. this is one system for like for instance in florida there s 67 counties. there s 67 supervisors of elections. they have 67 systems for the
one of the things we re learning is it s always good, it s old-fashioned but it s always good to have a paper backup system of voting. it s called paper. not highly complex computers, paper. a lot of states are doing that. going to a paper backup. and i think that s a great idea. we re studying it closely. various agencies, including homeland security, are studying it carefully. but are you worried about russians frying to meddle in trying to immediate until the mid-term elections? president trump: no, we ll counteract what they do, and we are having strong backup systems. we have been working, we haven t been given credit for this but we ve been working very hard on the 18 election. and the 20 election coming up. thank you very much. mr. lofven are you on the same page when it comes to the threat from russia when it comes to meddling in elections, do you
security analyst and a senior fellow at the policy institute and a former fbi agent, as well. mr. watts, welcome back to meet the press. thank you. let me start with the basics here. about a year ago you were on this show. we talked about the russian interference and you sort of talked about things that needed to be done. has anything been done to protect future elections? no. they ve worked on the critical infrastructure designation, but the number one thing we got to do is ensure the integrity of the vote. you just said designation, which means they were just trying to decide what should we try to protect? we haven t even started any actual protection. exactly. this is the feds reaching out to states and locals who don t have the resources in cyber security and probably can t detect a hack to help them protect the vote. right now we can t ensure the vote is accurate or not changed. we need paper backup to always ensure the vote is correct. we learned this week there had
that voting tallies had been changed in one or the other of the states. it would have really been a blow to our democratic process. all right. wou with some of the states so close like pennsylvania as one of them, it actually seems to me important, whether we knew of the russian meddling in our election, when we knew it. did we know it last fall? last summer? and what efforts were taken? because, you know, that makes a difference to me or did we just learn recently? did we just figure it out recently? no, there was a report, because it came out in sort of the middle of the campaign, it didn t get as much play, but october 7th, the intelligence community, the leaders of the intelligence community, issued a report which said the russians are trying to interfere with our elections, we know that they re trying to get into our state election systems. that was in october. and what we need to learn from that is how do we protect the state election system, things like don t attach voting m
if they were into our system and attempting to make technical changes so that they could change votes, that would be, i think, something that we ought to react strongly against. but i can t see in what the fbi says, anyway, that there is any evidence that that is what happened. it could happen in circumstances in which we are having a recount, and for a quarter of the voting machines in the country, they use only touch screens. and they don t have paper backup. we should have learned back in 2000 in the year of the hanging chads and so forth that you really have to have paper backup in order to be able to check something. if some of these alleged actions by the russians had transpired with screens that were only touch screens and you couldn t have a paper trail, i think one would need to be very