We’re looking forward to the 2018 elections. Democrats seem energized. Turnout in Virginia was huge for Democrats, anemic for the GOP. We’re outperforming expectations in special elections all over the country.
Jon Ossoff has a lead over Karen Handel in the Georgia special election to replace Tom Price, in a district that only went to Trump by a point. He’s campaigned impressively, backed by progressive money and enthusiasm from all over the country. But there’s a huge fly in the ointment. It might have been a factor in 2016 and we can’t be sure it won’t rear it’s ugly head in 2018 and in other elections in the near future. The problem is, our software (as many have complained for years) and other election infrastructure may not be at all secure.
Charles Pierce in Esquire laid out an absolutely frightening case against the security of Georgia’s elections, in his usual hilarious form, he’s made gallows humor into an art not unfitting our present predicament; here he quotes Tiger Beat on the Potomac:
When he learned that Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems tests and programs voting machines for the entire state of Georgia, he searched the center's website. "I was just looking for PDFs or documents," he recalls, hoping to find anything that might give him a little more sense of the center's work. But his curiosity turned to alarm when he encountered a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used to hack an election. Lamb wrote an automated script to scrape the site and see what was there, then went off to lunch while the program did its work. When he returned, he discovered that the script had downloaded 15 gigabytes of data."I was like whoa, whoa. … I did not mean to do that. … I was absolutely stunned, just the sheer quantity of files I had acquired," he tells Politico Magazine in his first interview since discovering the massive security breach.
SO….
As Georgia prepares for a special runoff election this month in one of the country's most closely watched congressional races, and as new reports emerge about Russian attempts to breach American election systems, serious questions are being raised about the state's ability to safeguard the vote. Lamb's discovery, which he shared out of concern that state officials and the center ignored or brushed off serious problems highlighted by his breach, is at the heart of voting activists' fears that there's no way to be sure the upcoming race—which pits Democratic neophyte Jon Ossoff against Republican former Secretary of State Karen Handel—will be secure.
www.esquire.com/…
This is not reassuring is it, especially in view of the Russian hacking which we’re supposed to believe resulted in no actual damage to the vote per se.
Guys, I dunno. I don’t want to be seen as a tinfoil hat-wearing paranoid person. However, the more we learn about our so-called election system the more nervous it has to make us. It’s fantastic, awesome that we have so much enthusiasm on the Left, that #Resistance has been so vocal, that we’ve managed so far to mitigate the damage in Congress and call attention to the viciousness of GOP policies.
But, we’re counting an awful lot of chickens when it comes to the special elections and to 2018 in particular. That’s understandable because we live in a democracy and voting is how the people decide what government should do.
In fact it seems to be the only way out of a nightmare scenario in which the far right led by Donald Trump has near-absolute power in Washington, power they’re using to actively try and harm our country and our environment, our allies and our lives. Trump’s closest advisers brag about “deconstructing the administrative state” which is shorthand, obviously, for destroying the country from within. And they are doing a good job so far. Our national prestige has suffered. Environmental and civil rights protections are eroding. Health care and human services are under assault. So the vote is the only, and the appropriate, way to fix this.
Because after all we live in a democracy in which the power resides with the people, and they express it through their votes, and the vote reflects the will of the people, and —
Right?
G*d I hope so.