Christopher A. Wray Quotes

Despite the intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in our presidential election, President Donald Trump and Republican leadership seem wholly uninterested in examining how and why Russia targeted us - and what we must do to prevent it from happening again.

I think it's important for people to believe their elections are on the up and up and they aren't being tampered with by anyone, and in this particular instance there's a large body of evidence that at a minimum Russia tried to tamper with our election.

If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.

Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to get to the facts and learn lessons to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.

My view is that, if any public official or member of any campaign is contacted by any nation-state or anybody acting on behalf of a nation-state about influencing or interfering with our election, then that is something that the FBI would want to know about.

Instead of debating whether or not Russia attempted to influence the 2016 elections - in ways that ranged from encouraging incorrect voting methods to promoting fake rallies to sharing false election stories - Americans should be debating how to counter this activity.

I do not have any firsthand knowledge of foreign interference in the 2016 election.

I think we need to start with Philadelphia and make sure that we actually get some election reform in Philadelphia. Actually, a recent election was thrown out by a federal judge because of corruption with the voting process in Philadelphia.

It is not just software glitches and corrupted memory cards that should be on the minds of election officials. Hackers pose another very real problem whereby an election could be tilted towards a favored candidate.

Widespread use of online voting will create the potential for abuse that will make the problems inherent in e-voting pale in comparison.

In my precinct, every person who showed up got to vote. I had to hack into the machines so that they could, but it was not hard to do. The scary thing about it is that I could have just as easily changed votes or allow people to vote multiple times. The machines are not very reliable, and they are easy to tamper with. I’m not even a computer expert. But my job was to ensure that everyone who showed up could vote, and that’s what I did. People all over the county were being denied their right to vote, but not at our precinct.

No election in the United States is wholly free from human or machine error.

No matter which party is in the White House, doubt in America's democratic institutions rattles our nation to its core. This should not be a partisan issue for any reason, as any candidate or party could be on the receiving end of a hack at any time.

There is no evidence at all that a voting booth was hacked or one person's vote in America was taken from Trump candidate to Clinton candidate.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.

Yeah, I would not want a foreign entity to meddle in our election; you know, a government. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want that; I'm American.

We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election.

The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.

I'm very concerned about the integrity of the vote and the ballot, and that's why we've got to secure our cyberdefenses.

Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.

Let's say we were a peacekeeping force in some small country that most people had never heard of. And we were there to host a peaceful election, and we then found out a bunch of stuff was hacked. We probably would push to have another election to make sure that would be fair.

We have to remember that at the center of all of this is the hacking, is what the Russians did during our election process, their absolute targeting our democracy. And there's President Donald Trump laughing with them. Sergey Lavrov said they did not talk about the charges against Russia. And you still hear President Trump talking as if this may not be true, others may have hacked, as well.

Though pundits and politicians, weary of the story, are happy to omit facts about voting systems and their private contractors running our public elections, such omissions impair voters and democracy itself.

It's the concept of having a computer voting machine that bothers me, more so than the specific poor implementation that we have from Diebold.

Strong efforts have been made in Ohio to curb the authoritarianism of our Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, as he has purged people from lists in our State in particular precincts where voters are heavily minority.