Posted on 02/19/2018 10:12:10 AM PST by Red Badger
WASHINGTON — Hoping to counter waves of Russian Twitter bots, fake social media accounts, and hacking attacks aimed at undermining American democracy, state election officials around the country are seizing on an old-school strategy: paper ballots.
In Virginia, election officials have gone back to a paper ballot system, as a way to prevent any foreign interference. Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolfe this month ordered county officials to ensure new election equipment produces a paper record. Georgia lawmakers are considering legislation to replace a touch-screen voting system with paper.
Top election officials around the country are growing increasingly alarmed about this fall’s midterm elections, with a drumbeat of dire warning signs that Russia is determined to influence them. And many are concerned that President Trump has not focused on the potential for more attacks on America’s election system like the one Russia launched in 2016.
With little leadership from the White House or Congress, they are acting locally, trying to outwit potential hackers by upgrading equipment and enhancing the cybersecurity of systems that contain sensitive voter registration rolls. Secretaries of state and other elections officials around the country in recent months also began applying for security clearances so that federal officials can start briefing them on classified information — and potential threats to election integrity.
Election officials are also turning away from fully electronic systems they fear can be hacked. They see paper as reassuring for voters: Physical ballots can be counted again if anything untoward happens to computerized tabulating systems.
About 30 states allow some form of electronic voting, most for overseas absentee voters. A handful prohibit full electronic voting, including Massachusetts, according to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“I’ve always been in favor of paper ballots, even when it was fashionable to use electronic systems,” said Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin. “You take the card, you mark your choices, you take it to the box. You ensure it’s counted. All the cards are retained. If there’s a question you can go in and count the cards.”
Over the past several weeks, the nation’s top intelligence officials have said that Russians are already at work trying to disrupt the midterm elections, building on their efforts in 2016. In some cases, they are attempting to spread misinformation using social media platforms, while in others they are targeting the American election infrastructure.
“Our democracy is under attack,” Jeh Johnson, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “I believe that the cyber threat to our nation is going to get worse before it gets better. Those on offense, which include nation states, are increasingly tenacious. And those of us on defense struggle to keep up.
“I believe we have yet to learn the full extent of the Russian influence campaign in 2016,” he added. “And they’ve been given little disincentive to do anything different in 2018.”
The risks came into sharp relief on Friday with a detailed indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations that allegedly worked to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election. They posed as Americans, stole identities, and sowed political discord by planning rallies, paying for political advertisements, and engaging in social media activity.
The indictment alleges that the conspiracy began in 2014 and had a monthly budget of $1.25 million, with the aim of conducting “information warfare against the United States.”
Jeanette Manfra, chief cybersecurity official for the Department of Homeland Security, has also stated that Russian hackers targeted 21 states’ election systems before the 2016 presidential election, breaching a small number of them. She noted that there was no evidence any votes were changed.
While states have been trying to upgrade election infrastructure to prevent such problems as hacking, there is an ongoing debate over how to counter misinformation campaigns.
“We have to be careful about injecting the security apparatus of our government into regulating speech,” Johnson said. “Other governments do that. In this country we have to be careful about calling that a national security matter. Governments like ours do not regulate speech, particularly political speech.”
Instead, he said, it may be up to such service providers as Facebook and Twitter to do more to regulate access to their networks.
Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state, says the misinformation is a problem for all election officials — but it’s also something a bit out of their control.
“Are people questioning? Yes. Is the questioning a concern of people like me? Yes. Because it makes it much more difficult for people like me to say, ‘Come out and vote, your vote will count,’” he said.
State officials say the last several months have involved a flurry of activity to prepare for threats.
“At the state level we’re doing everything we can. All the states, red states or blue states, are diligent and focused about trying to protect their systems,” said Vermont Secretary of State James Condos, a Democrat who is the incoming president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. “But it goes back to the top. If the president is not willing to help us, then we’ve got to fend for ourselves.”
The concern, largely, is of the unknown: that foreign hackers are quicker to discover the holes in American cybersecurity than US officials are at plugging them.
“As I say to others, we’re only as good as today is,” Condos said. “The bad actors are constantly evolving, they’re constantly changing. They’re looking for different ways to get in. We’re trying to stay ahead of them, or at least even with them.”
Election experts say the aim of Russia or other foreign forces during the midterm elections is probably not to help one candidate win or to help Republicans maintain control of the House or Senate. Instead, they say, the effort seems driven more toward simply sowing doubt among Americans about the validity of our voting system.
“It is high risk and questionable reward to actually try and change an outcome of an election in the US,” said David Becker, founder and executive director the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “What you can do is a low-risk, high-reward proposition — which is what the Kremlin has been doing — which is be open about your intent to mess with our elections, be discovered, and then let the American people sow their own doubt about their system.
“This is really about whether the voters have trust in our method of choosing our leaders, which is essential for our democracy,’’ he said. “Russia has been absolutely essential in diminishing that trust.”
President Trump has downplayed Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. Congress last year overwhelmingly passed a sanctions package to punish Russia for meddling, but the Trump administration announced last month that it would not implement those sanctions.
“It is a dereliction of duty that the president has not taken steps to punish Russia for its 2016 actions,” said Liz Kennedy, senior director of Democracy and Government Reform at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the co-author of a recent report examining election security in all 50 states. “Clearly not imposing the sanctions that Congress ordered . . . is exactly the wrong signal to send to Russia.’’
While election experts have been generally pleased with the amount of work that state election officials have been doing to improve their systems, there is still a wide degree of concern that states are not getting enough help from Washington.
“I really see this as our current Sputnik moment,” Kennedy said. “If they have these tools they’ve developed, we need to outsmart them and develop better tools. . . . Time is short. It needs to be a real priority.”
I had thought of that but then you would have a band of marauders running around with ink FORCING those they think not voting their way into the ink jar.
Of course Hollywood & ADA would have a kitten because someone with ‘no hand’ wouldn’t be allowed to vote ...
Remember even when local governments agreed to go to ‘YOUR’ home or nursing home and take your picture and give you an ID it was still racist to have to prove who or what you are while HRC, BO, GWB etal will have a BOOK SIGNING and you need a PICTURE, GOVERNMENT ISSUED ID to enter the STORE, much the signing area.(So I have been told, never had the misfortune to be in the same area)
Also find most any function other than MAYBE a soup kitchen where you don’t need an ID.
Best news I’ve had in a long time.
Canada counts the entire country on paper ballots.
You have your local polling place count them at a very local level and then aggregate the counts. It ain’t rocket science.
The election system in Israel is about as fool proof as it can get: Voter ID with a photo required, all ballots are paper, the marked ballots are placed in double envelopes and sealed and then counted three separate time by three separate groups of people. The outcome is announced and all ballots are kept in a secure area until those in the government agree to the election’s integrity. Challenges and recounts are rare.
>>>Optical scanning of paper ballots is the safest way to insure an honest election along with proof of citizenship.
That is what we have in Alabama, yet many folks on this forum are certain that there was massive vote fraud in the recent election.
In any system with proportional representation, those with minority views can still be represented and so have a greater stake in ensuring honest vote counts.
Paper ballots are fine but at some point, the totals get transmitted in some fashion to a state elections center.
Ir results are transmitted electronically, there is still the potential for electronic fraud.
Paper ballots also do not solve the problem of bags of ballots showing up from nowhere in a close race or a runoff.
Then there is the problem of absentee ballots and same-day provisional ballots.
This is why vote fraud investigation is so important. It provides the foundation for election reform.
That’s all well and good, but it assumes everyone wants a true and accurate count, not like Dem lifetime controlled places like Chicago, Philly, Seattle, New York, SF, LA.................
Optical scanning is vulnerable to hacking.
At least they can be examined after the fact. Should be available to both sides, as should the programming.
"Optical scanning of paper ballots is the safest way to insure an honest election along with proof of citizenship."
With all due respect concerning optical scanning WASCWatch, have you seen the following video?
Hacking Democracy - The Hack
The Dems DO NOT WANT ‘ELECTION REFORM’.
The Dems DO NOT WANT ‘IMMIGRATION REFORM’.
The Dems DO NOT WANT ‘SPENDING REFORM’.
The Dems DO NOT WANT ‘WELFARE REFORM’.
The Dems DO NOT WANT ‘___fill in the blank____ REFORM’.................
Yeah, if Jeh Johnson’s happy, we got a problem.
Don’t doubt that. This is a sudden twist to paper, trust them not.
Paper ballots, kept for 90 days.
Photo ID required for all.
Purple permanent ink thumbprint on ballot.
Harsh penalties for all vote inconsistencies.
Non-partisan precinct controllers.
First, the tabulation should occur in the precincts, which was once the standard, and why precincts were constrained to about a thousand voters. Voting and tabulating was observed and executed by volunteers of all parties present, with tabulations recorded and distributed with encryption and biological signatures to officials of all parties, the State AG, FBI and whomever is deemed necessary. The paper ballots are placed in bonded sealed containers, which;, as the Mexicans do, are transparent and in plane view as they are filled during the voting and sealed with signed identifiers from and resident in each precinct. These counts are the official counts unless there is a legal challenge. A count of all ballot containers from each precinct is stored in state and federal databases and sent to each party, encrypted.
Only France and Belgium among European states do not use paper ballots. Electronic counting invites corruption. Audit trails may be claimed, but hackers are far too sophisticated, with exploits that delete themselves after doing their job of selecting an election winner or eliminating one or several candidates. Government agencies required this writer to develop secure audit trail information for manufactured material before they would approve it trials, let alone for public sale.
Bags of ballots that have not been tabulated in precincts are extremely certainly suspect, given that bonded contains are counted before leaving and upon storage into guarded warehouses. If the container count/precinct does not correlate with the count as reported by the precinct the signators are alerted and the tally from the entire precinct is invalided pending investigation. That is the value of an audit trail. (This writer will not forget the trial of O.J. Simpson where two “criminalists” testified that each had signed about half the physical evidence containers but only evidence from one criminalist was offered as evidence. All physical evidence was invalided, correctly, regardless of how many were certain O.J. was guilty).
Absentee ballots will need special scrutiny. As with recent voting on Brexit and secession of Catalonia from Spain, physical presence of voters on the day of the election should be required. Citizenship checks are an obvious requirement, and absentee voters must have verification such as the new biological ID card now being offered in California.
No audit trail no vote! The U.S. may have the least verifiable voting system in the world, and is among a few that haven’t reverted to paper ballots. Who oversees vote tabulation in virtually every state in the U.S.? The SEIU, reporting to state attorney’s general, who were voted into office with lavish campaign funding from George Soros’ “Attorney General Project”. It is no secret that the AG Project collaborated with Acorn while Obama taught them how to be more effective political activists. SEIU tabulation center workers make it impossible, or difficult for observers to monitor their activities. What good would it do? Without paper there is no baseline. No audit trail.
He’s Old School, so of course he’s Happy!...............
I suppose I worry too much, I envision thugs with ink lying in wait for some innocent voter to walk by and "pre-stamp" his hand to keep him out of the polls...
Democrats already know how to cheat using paper ballots. Most of them struggle with using a computer.
Can’t cops be used to deliver the ballots? We also need to insure that the winning results are in a timely manner. I say seniors(retired) vote a day early-8 hours only. That would free up election day for working people. No other early voting.
In the UK, paper ballots are counted by non-political local officials in the presence of the candidates and the media. The local result is announced immediately by the non-political presiding officer. It’s old-fashioned, but it works. It’s very rare for there to be any allegations of serious fraud of the kind alleged in the U.S. It’s only with some recent experiments in postal and electronic voting that a few problems have begun to emerge.
That is what we have in Alabama, yet many folks on this forum are certain that there was massive vote fraud in the recent election.
lol. That is because we lost. Both parties do this thing when the other loses. Suddenly mass fraud is going on. Kinda funny.
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