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This five-page report has been shelved for inexplicable reasons.
And even though the “time-sensitive” urgency of its original delay has passed — no similar urgency has sprung up, to re-instate and complete the mission …
A five-page list of recommendations focused on two gaping holes in the U.S. election system.
by Greg Gordon McClatchy, Washington Bureau / August 30, 2017
[...]
In the summer of 2016, a cluster of volunteers on a federally supervised cybersecurity team crafting 2018 election guidelines felt compelled to do something sooner. Chatting online, they scrambled to draw up ways for state and local officials to patch the most obvious cyber vulnerabilities before Election Day 2016.
Their five-page list of recommendations focused on two gaping holes in the U.S. election system. It warned that internet voting by at least some citizens in 32 states was not secure and should be avoided. And, critically, it advised how to guard voting and ballot-counting machines that the experts knew could be penetrated even when disconnected from the internet.
But the list was stopped in its tracks. A year later, even as U.S. intelligence agencies warn that Russian operatives have their eyes on 2018 and beyond, America’s more than 7,000 election jurisdictions nationwide still do not have access to those guidelines for shielding the voting process.
[...]
In the online cybersecurity working group, several experts prepared guidelines for a formal committee led by the EAC [Election Assistance Commission] and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which provides cyber expertise to federal agencies.
[...]
But three weeks later, on Aug. 30, NIST pulled the plug. No distribution would be formally considered in 2016 because it was too close to the election, NIST official Andrew Regenscheid told Susan Greenhalgh, a watchdog at the nonprofit Verified Voting who shepherded completion of the recommendations in the working group. Greenhalgh, who said she was stunned, confirmed the decision a couple of days later in a phone call with the head of NIST’s voting unit.
“I told them I thought they were making a big mistake,” Greenhalgh said.
From that moment until Election Day, Russia completed what one computer security expert privately described as a “cyber Pearl Harbor.”
Election day 2018 about a year away — and that short targeted list for improving Electronic Voting Security — has still not found it’s way to America’s more than 7,000 election jurisdictions nationwide.
How can this be?
Are there any Google-sleuths out there — up to this civics challenge?
Where oh where is that five-page list of recommendations put together by cyber-experts — to help our very vulnerable Electronic Voting Systems, at a local level?
If we weren’t allowed to overhaul the Voting System so close to an Election — What is wrong with fixing them right NOW?
Let’s not let another election cycle pass, where we wake up on the other side — simply stunned by the poll-shattering results.
Please help. Help track down the Doc.
And then help see it implemented, too. While we still “have the time” enough to act.