While the Senate was blocking legislation to help prevent election interference in 2020, a Senate Intelligence Committee report has found Russians were poised to “delete or change” voter data from 2016 but for some reason decided not to. From the Washington Post 202 column by James Hohmann

“The bipartisan investigation, which took two and a half years, found extensive evidence of an “unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” that began in at least 2014, or possibly earlier. The committee reports with a high degree of confidence that the GRU, a Russian military intelligence agency, probably probed all 50 states in search of vulnerabilities. But its 67-page report concludes, unsatisfyingly, that “the Committee does not know with confidence what Moscow’s intentions were.”

So what were the Russians up to? They could have been leaving fingerprints to show people what they were capable of doing.

The New York Times writes that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by the Russians. “[T]he committee described “an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure” intended largely to search for vulnerabilities in the security of the election systems.“