—
As I have reported in previous posts, our electronic voting system(s) are far from secure. They are easy to hack, easy to infect with malware, and are already under attack in many States. If Votes were stolen, and Voter rolls were tampered with in 2016 — only God (and the Hackers) know.
This should rise to the level of a national security crisis. This should be a call to action for more robust Voter Security — as Job One. That is, if we actually lived in a healthy democracy. But given our current circumstances, that “priority” ranks more like Job 37.
Would you be willing to go to an all paper-ballot system, with regular systematic Audit Checks every step of the way, to ensure accuracy — to detect any intrusions?
Would you be willing to wait a week, for ALL the ballots to be counted and verified as genuine and accurate, before the Winner is announced?
Would you be willing to invest our Federal Taxes into spearheading — and implementing — the Quality Standards, that we as a People expect our Voting system to live up to?
Well as cyber-security expert, J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan explains, our current “Quality Standards” for Electronic Voting Machines — leaves a LOT of room for improvement: [from thinkprogress.org]
Insecure voting systems are the norm, not the exception
“These machines are just so poorly engineered, the only real way to secure them is to destroy them and start over,” said the University of Michigan’s Matt Bernhard.
[...]
“Every current e-voting system has serious, exploitable vulnerabilities,” concluded the University of Pennsylvania’s Matt Blaze and Sandy Clark, while presenting the results of their portion of the EVEREST study at the 2008 Hackers on Planet Earth conference. “Serious, practical, undetectable attacks can be carried out by individual voters and poll-workers.”
No attempt that Blaze and Clark’s team made to breach the ES&S DRE, optical scanner, and batch scanner failed. The locks could be picked with paperclips (though the keys were identical for every machine). The “tamper-proof” seals could be removed and reapplied using liquid nitrogen, lighter fluid, or steam — or they could be bought online and replaced. No password was required to recalibrate touchscreens in such a way as to make some areas of the screen, such as those required to vote for a particular candidate, unresponsive.
[...]
The U-Penn EVEREST team discovered in the ES&S machines they attacked that the removable media that stored both the ballot information and the votes was unencrypted. Most importantly, it could be used without a password to alter firmware and upload a virus that could propagate through the Election Management System to affect results for the entire county. Either a poll-worker or a voter could enter a voting booth, bypass the tamper-proof seals, spring the lock, and introduce a virus that could re-tally results for the entire county.
[Emphasis added]
Who would have done such dastardly deeds, you might ask.
I don’t know, who would betray their country for $$$, and spy for foreign entities — it happens.
Who would mess with Voter Rolls, and “cage the names” of certain demographies and ethnicities — it happens.
As current breaking news should inform us, our nation’s ELECTRONIC voting infrastructure is under attack by foreign intruders. So why is the average cynical voter in this country so unphased by the implications? Even if the intruders were just “casing the joint” — that should raise alarms, and calls to action, and Congressional hackles. But instead what we get is, a “whistling walk by the graveyard.”
There is a low-cost, low-tech way of standardizing our Audit Control of our Voting Tallies — while continuing to use our decrepit, hackable E-voting systems — to at least detect Vote Tampering when and if it occurs. Call it the ‘Most Bang for your Buck’ solution. At least THEN, we would know WHERE to hold the Recount, or perhaps even a Re-Vote — we’d at least know for-sure “that we had been hacked”.
Once again J. Alex Halderman explains the urgent need to the “graveyard keepers” in DC:
• Second, we need to use the paper to make sure the computer results are right. This is a common sense quality control. It should be routine. Using what’s known as a risk-limiting audit, officials can check a small random sample of the ballots, to quickly and affordably provide high assurance that the election outcome was correct. Only two states, Colorado and New Mexico, currently conduct audits that are robust enough, to reliably detect cyber attacks.
• Lastly, we need to harden our systems against sabotage and raise the bar for attacks of all sorts, by conducting comprehensive threat assessments and applying cyber security best practices to the design of voting equipment and to the management of elections.
These are affordable fixes. Replacing insecure paperless voting machines nationwide, would cost $130 million to $400 million dollars. Running risk-limiting audits nationally for Federal elections would cost less than $20 million a year. These amounts are vanishingly small compared to the national security improvement they buy.
Sounds like chump-change to me (and not President Chump-change). Especially considering that we as a nation, deal with Billion-dollar disasters, Billion-dollar wars, and Billion-dollar bailouts — all at the drop of a Congressional deal-maker’s hat.
Isn’t protecting the Security of our Votes, worth at least a fraction of those expenditures?
If we are to ensure an ongoing, free and open and representative democracy — one less vulnerable to foreign hacking — then yes, YES by shear will of the people, it is worth it.
So why are Trump’s Cyber-security experts quitting in protest? Why aren’t Congressional party-leaders sounding the alarm, commissioning the panels, and calling for Voting System reform?
Well, because if the Party in power, benefits from the interference, who are they to ‘call foul’?
Well, and because We the People, seem to be just fine with our current state of affairs — because to question the “declared the outcome” of any given election — is really to question the sanctity and the sovereignty of “our very form of government” Itself.
And as a tolerant, accepting, hope-for-the-best citizenry, we are not accustom to challenging the very pillars of our Democracy, nor its Outcomes. We just learn to live with it, instead — ‘with all its beauty, all its imperfections.’
But if your very Vote is being denied, or worse yet possibly flipped — such a citizenry had better wake up, and start to seriously ask:
Is the will of the American People being eclipsed, by forces unseen, unknown, and as of yet undetected?
The Democratic Party would be wise to pick up the populist call for increased Voter Security Protection, and run with it. The time has come. Their civic duty here is plain as night and day.
Trump’s silence on Russian hacking hands Democrats new weapon
by Cory Bennett, politico.com — 06/17/2017
[...]
Even as the president lashes out at the series of Russia-related probes besieging his administration, Democrats say Trump has yet to express public concern about the underlying issue with striking implications for America's democracy — the digital interference campaign that upended last year’s presidential race.
The president missed a self-imposed 90-day deadline for developing a plan to “aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks,” stayed silent after Moscow-linked hackers went after the French election and publicly renewed his own skepticism about the Kremlin’s role in the digital theft of Democratic Party emails during the presidential race. Privately, the president questioned a senior NSA official about the truthfulness of the conclusion from 17 intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered with the election, according to The Wall Street Journal. On Capitol Hill, Trump and his team have declined to support a Republican-backed effort to hit Russia with greater penalties for its digital belligerence.
[Emphasis added]
Putin grudge matches should no longer interfere with the “defining quality” of what it means to be an American. Not on our watch. Their cyber-intrusions into OUR Elections must stop here.
The future of our “by, of and for the People” Democracy depends on it. Those Hackers aren’t getting any “dumber” you know ... and Vladimir Putin — not any less emboldened.
I would expect the opposite in fact, given his recent success in sovereignty-tinkering exercises overseas.