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Ask Slashdot: Should The DHS Designate Elections As Critical Infrastructure? (politico.com)
The Department of Homeland Security is reportedly looking at designating elections as critical infrastructure, on par with the electricity grid or banking system, to help protect against cybersecurity threats. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said during a breakfast with reporters on August 3rd, "We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure. There is a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others as critical infrastructure." Demerara writes: I'm fascinated to hear the opinions of Slashdotters on the practical implications of any decision to designate "elections" as critical national infrastructure. For those of you who have worked on systems that are already under this regime: given that there are just over 90 days to the November elections, what can be achieved with respect to elections and in particular to electronic voting machines (whether direct-recording electronic (DRE), touch screen etc., or precinct ballot scanning machines)? What might the designation require of state and county boards (the buyers of these systems) and what would the vendors have to do?
I'd be all for it. I just don't take DHS as being competent enough to actually make a real difference. In fact, I suspect they'd just add layers of policy and procedure that would further interfere with making sure our elections are fair.
Yes, elections are critical, but NO, DHS isn't the right people to try to make it any better.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
this is more like DHS wants more funding to get more power. as it is most poll workers are part time because voting is one day a year. sounds like the DHS wants to hire people to sit around most of the year but to make the bosses more powerful.
I have to say, I'm seriously worried about vulnerabilities in voting machines. The first line of defence, of course, is to make sure all voting machines have a permanent paper record of each vote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/27/by-november-russian-hackers-could-target-voting-machines/
https://followmyvote.com/us-electoral-process/voting-system-vulnerabilities/
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/16/399986331/hacked-touchscreen-voting-machine-raises-questions-about-election-security
Not only should voting be considered critical infrastructure, it should be mandatory and a national weekend holiday.
Seems like an organization controlled by the current executive party administration, which has been given extreme anti-liberty wartime powers, and has proven to be incompetent and more inclined to go after intellectual property violations, would be a great organization to control elections. Thumbs up!
If it just means one more place for TSA agents to stand around and pat me down, than no thanks.
I am sure that is all that it means coming from this administration as well. I mean its the DOJ under this admin that has been basically pushing to prevent any voter id laws from staying on the books, and suing an states that try to restrict vote by mail ( a security hole you can drive a truck thru ) at all. They then insist there is not voter fraud ignoring the fact that they have pretty much prevented the implementation of any effective audit mechanisms that might detect it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
DHS involvement? If it has to be, it should be one single obvious, and common sense task.
Unplug all voting infrastructure from the Internet. Permanently.
They can designate all they like. The problem, just like how the DHS handles airport security, border security, and every other kind of security that comes under their purview is that they will not have the capability / talent to figure out the problems, create a solution, and propagate it against political stupidity that a real fix requires.
The model of government today in the US is to outsource every bit of work that needs to be done to contractors who have to get their margins and aren't interested in sharing their technology/code, making it smart, scalable, and maintainable, and who want to maintain profits into the future. And this is why we have voting machines designed by Diebold, airport scanners (and TSA staffing) that's designed and run by the lowest common denominator, and an electric grid that isn't robust against anything (though this also falls in the lap/blame of NERC/FERC/and 50 different state regulators).
Take the choice of election technology, ballot design, and security out of the hands of 5,000 different jurisdictions, and replace it with well-designed, thought-out, and implemented hardware+software that a dedicated, concerned group of experts is responsible for -- that's what this would take. And is impossible.
They are incompetent and incapable.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Have DARPA hold one of it's challenges for companies to come up with a process and/or system to validate election procedures. Have the Air Force, the NSA and the State Department vet it. Open source the whole thing and make it available to any municipality who wants to use it.
I'm *not* talking about E-voting, by the way, but the process and/or software used to tabulate votes. It shouldn't matter what method is used to cast the votes. E-Voting could be included in the design, but it should be input agnostic.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
What's the point? Polling places can't even require a photo ID to verify voter identity. With fraud so easy, it doesn't matter.
So long as the States elect Presidents, Senators, and Representatives, they are responsible for their election processes.
To enforce any Federal controls or processes beyond the civil rights of access is an overreach, and time to stop these. Examples of possible DHS overreach I would oppose are:
- Mandating electronic or paper-based polling.
- Supervision of vote counting and or a requirement of approval by federal officials of any sort. Court appeals are already conducted, and are tolerable.
- Federal handling of voting materials.
We've let the Federal government reach into too much already. If there is a groundswell of concern over federal elections, perhaps they should focus on the most recent Presidential election, and the glaring irregularities seen there. Plenty of work to be done in those limited instances, before usurping state management and control of THEIR OWN ELECTIONS.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Hello? You want to let the federal government control the process by which its own executives are chosen? Hasn't anyone ever done any game theory, AT ALL?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is interesting timing. A few years ago I might have thought that the details of election machinizations were rather important, maybe even "critical".
Now I know that the election itself will only decide "by how large of a margin will Hillary win"? That doesn't seem so critical. She's been in politics since 1976 and I don't remember a time that it was particularly important whether she won by four points, six points, or eight points.
Did you even try?
because big government is incapable of doing anything successfully other than fucking up
If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the mornin'
I'd hammer in the evenin'
All over this land...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No thank you... We can't even agree on ID requirements
It is critical but
The big "but" is what laws would they enforce that are not well served today.
Voter fraud has yet to be shown to be a real problem.
Perhaps because all the metrics are measured by German VW engineering services.
The current laws on computer hacking make the breaches of HC and the DNC servers
totally illegal. But wait the hackers were from off shore and the US has no jurisdiction.
Flaws in systems and applications are not getting fixed because TLAs at times see their
knowledge of flaws a bits of power and are unwilling to disclose to vendors for repair.
https://www.newamerica.org/oti...
Flaws that are seen as power by domestic TLAs are in fact national risks that need
prompt and aggressive repair. To some degree the Win10 roll out seems to be
a strong move to fix some issues but the anniversary update is changing some rules
that are effective contract issue from a year ago perhaps managed by John Deer and CAT.
In some cases the allegations are more politics than anything.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07...
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
and never spoken of again.
As long as the GOP backed diebold can make the rules
Hillary has rigged it and the illusion of choice is finally coming to an end. Hopefully people will get pissed and start sharpening their pitchforks.
Freedom requires that people have the right to not vote, while also having the right to vote.
Make it like flying or taking Amtrak - require a federally-issued (passport, military ID), or state-issued but federally approved photo ID.
If it's really critical, you just don't want anyone getting in.....
We should stick with paper ballots. They are more secure, we understand all the security and fraud issues around them. They are also harder to do fraud on a massive scale with reasonable process put on them.
An recent opinion along these lines:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/28/dnc-emails-wikileaks-paper-ballots-election-rigging-hack-russia-putin-column/87617928/
Don't worry guys, DHS will take over all federal elections to make sure that everything is done in accordance with DHS policies. Oh and Jeh Johnson would also like to announce his candidacy for President in the 2020 election cycle.
Freedom requires that people have the right to not vote, while also having the right to vote.
Freedom has a price. Voting is a small price to pay for your freedom. If you don't want to vote, there are many dictatorships in the world that will take you in as a non-voter.
As I understand it diebold systems which are vulnerable to negative vote preloading are still used in the major population centers for voting. So 3 party registered independent verification of wiped and clean state prior to elections both in the general and primaries would be a start.
So, we all like to hate the NSA for all of their spying, but they really have a very high level of technical competence, and they are actually quite good at carrying out their mission (or what they perceive their mission to be). If the president were to issue a directive requiring the NSA to treat the integrity of US elections as a national security issue, and ask them to do a thorough evaluation of the systems and processes and to issue recommendations for how to fix or mitigate any perceived problems, I expect they'd do an excellent job.
Of course, if we're concerned about the integrity of the 2016 election, it's far too late for something like this. It would need to have been started at least a year ago, and the recommendations would have to have been issued a few months ago. We'd need to be in the phase of verifying that the fixes and mitigations were properly deployed.
It's too bad, really, because Trump seems to be positioning himself to claim the election is rigged if he loses. That could get very ugly, especially if some of his more extreme supporters decide to get violent. Even if that doesn't happen, he could manage to create huge legitimacy questions for Clinton. I don't care about her (in fact I strongly dislike her), but I don't think it's good for the country to have a president whose legitimacy is questioned by a large percentage of the voters. We saw some of that with Obama (the birther "controversy") and Dubya's first term (Bush v Gore), but this could be much worse.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You can make people check a box but you can't force them to educate themselves about the issues and find out where the candidates stand on them. There's enough people that blindly vote for the party because their family always have or because X looks better or votes for Y because Z is a woman/black/etc. Now you want to add a bunch of people who will go in and just pick the best sounding name? Please don't bring in mandatory voting.
There are lots of people that want to vote, especially in the US, but are being prevented. Bring in reforms that make people think their vote actually means something. Get rid of first past the post. For the US bring in an independent body to determine electoral boundaries instead of the politicians. Go back to making an X on a paper ballot. It works and doesn't need to be improved. Make it law that employers have to give time off for people to vote. Make the rules consistent across the country. Fix campaign financing.
I served in the goddamned military for six years. If I don't want to vote, I figure I paid for my freedom already.
Like the US?
DHS is a big waste of taxpayer dollars as it is. No reason to go giving it more justification to continue to expand.
You can make people check a box but you can't force them to educate themselves about the issues and find out where the candidates stand on them.
If people have skin in the game, they will take voting seriously.
If the Feds declare voting as critical infrastructure, that opens the door to taking away more states rights and processes to the fed government and assuming complete federal control over the election process. So the people you're trying to vote out of office are now in complete control the election process used to keep them in power. Those crazy Preppers may be onto something here and not so crazy after all.
Like the US?
Trump isn't president yet.
The touch screens we use here are cool, but what is the point? There is no real audit trail and there is no way in hell to really know who or what your vote was counted for. Most of the rush to automated voting has been media driven. There is no requirement for elections to be decided by the morning news, and it is too important to leave something like this to us geeks, and yes I do consider myself one from WAY back. I am holding a copy of Running Wild: The Next Industrial Revolution by a Mr. Adam Osborne. If you don't know who he is look him up. He was one of the founding fathers of microcomputers. In his this book Chapter 7 is titled Powerful Tools or Powerful Weapons . The second sentence in the second paragraph says this, "Nevertheless, computers should be excluded by legislation from three important applications: the tabulation of election results, the transfer of large sums of money between banks, and the central operations of stock exchanges."
Too late for number two and three, but number one is probably the most important anyway and is by far the most difficult to audit in case of chicanery. WHY do we need computers to vote? What is the rush in getting the totals? My guess is that having real time or near real time election returns is driven mostly by the media and has been from the beginning. Newspapers wanted the scoop (remember Truman vs Dewey?) and the 24 hour cable news channels live for election night so they can "CALL" the election before the polls close.
Call me a Luddite if you wish but the more people actually involved in the voting process, and especially the counting of votes, the less chance there is that one or a few people can put their thumb on the scale. My vote is to go back to PAPER ballots counted by people from EACH party or person in the election in an open counting room with live coverage. It might take a few days to know who won, but it isn't a ball game, it is an election and knowing who won or lost in record time is not the point. The point is that the vote MUST be honest and counted HONESTLY.
Tesla auto-pilot requires a human paying attention 100% of the time. This is FUD, get classy CNET
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
No shit...
I 'liberated' the Kuwaitis, I 'liberated' the Iraqi, figure I've done enough for 'democracy' without someone forcing me to vote against my will.
"Though, really, in-person vote fraud is likely to be peanuts "
Indeed, given the kind of fraud progressives want to think about as "in-person vote fraud", which is John Doe pretending to be John Smith to he can vote twice, mwah-hah-hah.
A far bigger and rational concern, given the number of people potentially involved, is non-citizens, especially illegal aliens, voting. I mean, the DNC has a number of known illegal aliens active on their Party committees, and even had them on stage during the convention. I won't be holding my breath waiting for anyone there to be prosecuted under Title 8, U.S.C. 1324(a) (e.g., domestic transportation of unauthorized aliens, concealing or harboring unauthorized aliens, encouraging or inducing unauthorized aliens to enter the United States, and engaging in a conspiracy or aiding and abetting any of the preceding acts). But I imagine that the DNC Party illegals will be right up a the front of the line to vote come election day. What would prevent them from voting?
Is it really asking too much that only legal citizens be permitted to vote?
At least in certain circumstances.
"Effective July 1, [2015] AB 1733 requires county recorders to issue free birth certificates to any person who demonstrates he or she is homeless. On Jan. 1, the law also will require the Department of Motor Vehicles to issue a free original or replacement identification card to anyone who can verify homelessness.
No need to ask anything: they don't post the answers.
cf https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/18/1542246/interviews-ask-security-expert-mikko-hypponen-a-question
Protect elections as strategic infrastructure? Hell yes!
Don't count your blessings before they hatch.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Funny how you changed your statement from "I have not ever" to "I don't remember", so I was correct that you are a liar. I gave you the link to the form, which requires presenting ID to companies when being hired. It is illegal for a company to take your word for it, and almost every company I have worked at since 1986 has made photo copies of my IDs and put them on file to comply with Law. You don't have to a Lawyer to read and comprehend the few pages that make up the whole I-9, and if you are illiterate ask your HR rep to read the damn thing to you as they are required to by law.
If you knew any damn thing about working 1099 you would know that you have to report EXTRA information with multiple IDs every year because you are responsible for your own deductions (FICA, STATE TAX, FED TAX, etc...) and even if you don't have to pay you have to file or go to jail. In fact Government agencies will strongly recommend that you file every 3 months working on a 1099.
Disenfranchisement is your brain with reality, not an ID for a citizen. Retard says "HILLARY 2016" right?
does not make it true.
Automated voting too?
I've done enough for 'democracy' without someone forcing me to vote against my will.
Voting is a civic obligation. Serving in the military doesn't cancel that obligation. If anything, serving in the military should have reinforced your obligation to vote.
We have the solution, but it's too antiquated for anyone to think it's still good and doesn't feed the 24-hour news cycle like our current process does:
Step 1: Distribute absentee voting ballots. Can be done either through USPS or at a sanctioned facility
Step 2: Fill out ballot
Step 3: Have witness sign ballot
Step 4: Mail in ballot
Step 5: Count votes - can be done either electronically or manually
Step 6: Count votes again - manually
Step 7: Count votes again if Step 5 is statistically != Step 6
Jeh Johnson can suck a fat dick. Spies are trying to justify their oversight instead of the public here.
Just list the 270 electoral college reps prior to the election there Jeh suck a dick Johnson. Nobody knows who the actual reps are? No list.
This is a secret sham election. Somebody in those circles needs to leak a list before you are walking over dead prostitutes in USA.
Electronic voting machines or DREs have several problems. They are known to be insecure and easily hacked; there is no way to know if they recorded results properly; there is no way to verify the results.
Paper ballots are secure and can be recounted and verified. Even if an optical scanner is used, the ballots can still be counted by hand. It long past time to outlaw DREs and move to paper ballots
The reason I specified a 1099 is to cover the self employed, just in case the person was being pedantic to be correct and was his own employer. The I-9 was linked already, we know what it is. You on the other hand should get a grasp on the full subject matter before attempting to look smart, because as is you look like an infant. Perhaps just a troll.
What might the designation require of state and county boards (the buyers of these systems) and what would the vendors have to do?
Step number one, obviously, is to ensure that no voting machine is ever connected to the internet, nor is ever connected to anything that's connected to the internet.
All users of voting machines should fall back (if necessary) to the procedures to be used in case the voting place does not have a working internet connection.
DHS can't piss without getting their socks wet. Why would you want them? Look at the outstanding job they have done with the TSA, 50% of the employees have complaints on file or the FBI and their DIY terrorist plots. Now you ask if they should have a chance to fuckup our election process. Don't you read the news at all?
In places with compulsory voting it's perfectly valid to leave the paper blank. Of course they don't have long lines, piece of crap Diebold machines and make people do it on a Tuesday.
If too few people vote that freedom you paid for goes away.
I came from poverty and worked my dick off to get out of poverty, and guess what I was required to have in order to go to school, and have a legit job? MORE THAN 2 FORMS OF ID! I had to have photo ID (State License for Driving), I had to have a SSN card, and I had to have a Birth Certificate. SO DID YOU!
Need more people for NAWBO to bribe.
They want to further obfuscate and restrict observations and reporting of the process, the people, the companies, the machines, the software, and the flaws and exploits and unresolved issues.
They have already gone to great lengths to silence reporting and brush issues under the carpet and pretend everything is fine when multiple independent observers and investigators have revealed major problems that SHOULD have us all questioning the whole process.
By making it a critical infrastructure, they will shove it all behind a wall and merely promise us all is well. When they have done this before, they have LIED. We have no reason to trust them and every reason to doubt every single thing they say.
Sig for hire.
Since congress rushed to mandate electronic voting (despite warnings from all the experts that it would increase vulnerabilities) it is clear voting just isn't considered all that important.
Given that it seems quite appropriate to give responsibility to the useless and incompetent DHS.
What makes you think the Gov can protect elections?
called paper. Then count them. By hand. Publicly. And it shouldn't ever matter how long the count takes, FFS.
That the White House still feels compelled to employ semantic stratagems and ruses to masquerade the fact that it wants to nationalize state and local governments. At this juncture it wants to treat elections like other (fascist, socialist?) "critical infrastructure" like other public-private "partnership" ventures like energy, banking, telecom, and so on, under the aegis of the KGB/FSB., er...Gestapo...er.. yeah, yeah, that's it, the DHS (aka Department of Continuity of Misgovernment) . Because, "cybersecurity". Wow. Just, wow.The Alinskyites owe the Neo-Cons big time on this one. And "conservatives" like my state's Senators, will go for it, especially since O is distancing himself from it using his mouthpiece at the Department of Homeland Contractor Subsidies, Johnson.
I'm fascinated, too, by game boys who act like paid White House shills, when they should probably be off serving in the Peace Corps or something, given their lock-step promotion of corporate-government double-speak. But that's grist for another mill.
As for elections, there is already a Federal authority overseeing them. It's called the FEC. Largely a rubber-stamping body for voting machine vendors at this point, but nothing uncorrectable. To the extent that anything is, in this corrupt, dysfunctional, mendacious, hypocritical, and meritricous society.
There are ways to have far more secure, and far more transparent and accountable elections, but I'm not taking that bait or serving OP's cause by outlining them here.
The thing about that is that Republican leaders ALREADY don't like Trump and his style. Yes, he got a chunk of voters, because the reasonable people were split up between the reasonable candidates, but most elected Republicans have made it clear they don't like him. I'm not sure what they could do next time to avoid another reality show star getting the votes.
I supoose they COULD switch to a super delegate system like the Democrats, in which the primaries don't really matter, the super delegates pick the nominee as long as they get *some* votes in the primary. Paul Ryan has been pretty clear that he's very much against that, though, that the nominee should be picked by primary voters. If Ryan's sentiments reflect other Republican leadership, the party will continue to get the nominee who stands out from the rest for whatever reason - a Kardashian perhaps, as the other, more similar candidates will split the "Never ______" vote.
Maybe the IRS could take it over, they are not bias... oh wait, Tea Party members would not be allowed to vote.
The league of women voters do an ok job, but there have been boxes of lost ballots.
There should be prison time for those who screw with the ballots.
Counties spending their own money makes them watch it more. It also means that there are many different systems,
so a group would have a harder time subverting the election as a whole.
Professionals running the elections, would make them liable to be subverted at the top. (IRS)
We REALLY don't need another million people on the government payroll.
I already hate dealing with these assholes at the airport. I shouldn't have to deal with them to engage in the political process.
The first line of defence, of course, is to make sure all voting machines have a permanent paper record of each vote.
For that to be an effective defense, you also need to make sure that the electronic vote matches the paper vote. Since paper ballots are easily human- and machine-readable and more difficult to discreetly tamper with, what advantage do electronic voting machines bring to the table?
Over optical scan ballots, no advantage other than an interface that can be more easily adapted to accomodate disabled voters. Over traditional hand-counted paper ballots, the advantage of fast counting.
If hand-counting ballots takes too long for our ADD society, we should standardize on a ballot layout and let many companies offer ballot scanners to speed up the process.
I believe we are in agreement here.
for everyone. Just like they do in other countries such as Germany and China
As soon as you use machines for voting, you're screwed unless there's a human-verifiable paper trail.
I can't believe we've learned nothing about computer security. Namely, that they are not and cannot be made so.
Of course it's critical infrastructure. More critical than the electricity grid or road network. Urgency is the difference. A compromised election system isn't likely to be as urgent a concern. Therein lies the problem, and the reason it hasn't been addressed, similarly to climate change: people only get serious about urgent concerns. DHS??? As far as I can tell, the USCG is the only competent organization under than umbrella.
You are putting the cart before the horse. Managing ID's can be expensive, and they are still not guaranteed to prevent fraud since they can be faked.
Perhaps the money would be better spent on investigations, inspections, auditing, etc. We want the most fraud prevention with the least amount of tax dollars and voter hassle. Whether ID's are the best solution or not hasn't been determined.
There is more known voter fraud in vote-by-mail than poll-center misrepresentation, for example. But Republicans don't focus on that because their base tends to be elderly, who prefer vote-by-mail.
Table-ized A.I.
It is vitally important that the illusion of our participation in ideological beauty pageants is safely maintained. Definitely critical infrastructure.
Should the DHS be used to track down operators of IP infringing websites?
I fear that treating the election process as "critical infrastructure" will push that infrastructure closed (like other critical infrastructure) rather than open it up. The ability to audit electronic voting machines, for example, I think is *absolutely critical* to ensuring the integrity of the process. I know voting machine manufacturers certainly don't agree with my position.
you need to change the whole system and take it away from states if you do that since right now every state regulates their own elections, the only thing that the federal government has jurisdiction over is to make sure that the process is non-discriminatory.