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Representative Sandy Salmon was the lone Iowa legislator who attended all three days of Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls. She exchanged information with Virginia State Sen. Amanda Chase, who is spearheading the Election Integrity Caucus.

“I think Mike Lindell’s heart is in the right place,” Salmon told The Iowa Standard. “He loves our country and he, along with his team, put forward their own time and money to investigate the 2020 election. I think that says a lot about his motivation and intent. I was really impressed with that.”

Salmon said the biggest thing she was hackers having the ability to gain access wirelessly from a remote location, even though it is said by some that voting systems are not connected to the internet.

“That’s my biggest concern for us here in Iowa,” she said. “We addressed a lot of different issues in the last legislative session dealing with lessons learned or loopholes found in the 2020 election, but one area we didn’t address was the issue of the voting machines. So, I think that’s still a big issue that we need to address.”

Meeting legislators from across the country with similar concerns regarding the election allowed for the framework for the Election Integrity Caucus. Salmon called that development really important.

“We could see how they’re responding in their particular states and some of these states have had a lot of visible fraud issues it would seem,” she said. “So how they go about addressing those is something we can take back here in Iowa and see what applies to us. And that’s what I’m hoping to get out of being a part of that group.”

The presentations done by Arizona’s legislators made the biggest impact on Salmon. Hearing how Maricopa County is fighting the audit of the election and how it conducted it raises real concerns.

“They’re still getting resistance from the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Dominion Voting Systems to respond to a subpoena to turn over their routers,” she said. “It was just a fascinating story and the attitude of contempt that they said came from Dominion towards them as the people’s representatives and the voters of Arizona is just incredibly horrible. I think to myself – why do we want to deal with a company like that in our state?”

Dominion machines are used in certain Iowa counties – including one in Salmon’s district.

“I think it’s a real concern,” she said. “Questions exist in peoples’ minds about these machines and whether they’re really secure or not. There were several solutions put forward by some of the cyber experts to be able to address that issue and I think it’s something we need to seriously consider here in Iowa.”

Salmon said there shouldn’t be an abundance of concern over the potential cost of correcting election concerns.

“If we don’t have what we know is a secure election, what we know is going to be a fair election, we can’t have confidence in our leaders and our government,” she said. “It’s really basic to be able to function as a republic. You have to have elections that you can count on. That’s why I went. That’s why I think it’s so important. So, I hope that we can be able to persuade legislators to adopt these measures. Some of these things that they want to adopt are already being proposed by the Texas governor. They’re moving forward with these things. I think, well, you know, there’s no reason why Iowa can’t move forward with getting some secure machines as well.”

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