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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
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.
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
because big government is incapable of doing anything successfully other than fucking up
did you even read your link? it's not free. also, that's just for one state. and who wants to talk to dhs under any circumstances?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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!”
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.
Freedom requires that people have the right to not vote, while also having the right to vote.
Not to mention there are indirect costs involved - such as taking time off work to waste half a day waiting at DMV.
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.
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.
Every election we hear about one or two cases. This election we have seen literally Millions of cases of election fraud, and everyone says we have toi focus on making sure Trump doesn't win.
What people who make idiotic arguments like yours are oblivious to are the many frauds that ALREADY happen through mail-in votes. Why do you think conservative states are all about mail in voting? Shutins in nursing homes get ballots. People who haven't had a connection to reality in years are sent ballots, which their AIDS complete in their stead and return. No one asks for an ID because it's not needed, right?
Election fraud is all around us. Voter fraud has been repeatedly been shown to be statistically irrelevant. Arizona denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of legally registered voters is not.
You can't get a job without an ID
Want to bet on that?
You want to know how many times I've shown ID or a SS card in the last thirty three years I've been employed?
Exactly zero.
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.
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.
Do you have an ID card to show if needed?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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
If you are not a liar then you are either working on a 1099 basis or illegally. The I-9 form is required, and has been required, since 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My money is on Liar, because that tends to fit the progressive left trend. Facts are evil right?
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.
You mean voter fraud like this? Or this? Or this?
Since you say that voter fraud is "well known" and "documented every goddamn election", perhaps you can share some of these documented cases that have been investigated and found to be true and describe the prison sentences the criminals who committed this fraud received.
But anyway, if you wanted to steal an election, I don't think voter impersonation would be the way to do it. Attacking electronic voting machines that have lax, minimal, or no security would probably be less risky and harder to prove if you attacked whatever logging mechanism was present.
No, I'm a W-2 employee, I'm a US Citizen, and it's my recollection that I've never presented an ID to work - and I know for a fact that I've never shown an SS card, because I lost it in the 1980's and never replaced it.
Are people paid on 1099's somehow fit for disenfranchisement?
*I* do - but concerned with *other people* who don't have the means to obtain one.
No, I'm a W-2 employee, I'm a US Citizen, and it's my recollection that I've never presented an ID to work - and I know for a fact that I've never shown an SS card, because I lost it in the 1980's and never replaced it.
Are people paid on 1099's somehow fit for disenfranchisement?
You are either a liar, or your employer is breaking the law.
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.
Then your employers after 1986 have been in violation off federal Law. After 1986 every eemployer is required tossubmit an I9 which requires enough types of ID to qualify for voting inevery state I am aware of.
wel, unless you have had the same employer for 30 years.
Don't count your blessings before they hatch.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not 1099, the I-9. Page 9 lists the documents that "Establish Identity and Employment Authorization". Items like a passport, school ID with a photograph, voters registration card, Social Security Card, birth certificate, etc. Your recollection is pretty bad, your just trolling, OR all your employers are in direct violation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986:
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)
Pub. L. 99-603, 100 Stat. 359
Prohibits employers from knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens and hiring individuals without completing the employment eligibility verification process. This Act led to creation of Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification. All employers must use Form I-9 for all employees hired on or after Nov. 6, 1986, who are working in the United States. This Act also established prohibitions against national origin and citizenship or immigration status discrimination with respect to hiring, firing and recruitment or referral for a fee.
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.
Don't you guys have voters lists? ID by itself only proofs that you have ID with a picture of yourself on it. Drivers licenses and such are as easy for a non-citizen to get as a citizen and I'd assume State ID is similar. Just go to the right bar and pay $20 and you'll have ID that is good enough for the volunteers at the polling station.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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
That's the problem, the rumors of voter fraud as the polling stations have spread so often that the a lot of people just accept this as fact, enough so that a state run by fiscal conservatives was willing to waste a huge amount of tax payer money to investigate. Today they're probably still convinced that voter fraud is rampant and that they must have done the investigation wrong.
How are they voting? They're not on the voting lists. If they ARE figuring this out then we should be seeing stats of how many times someone shows up to vote only to find that they're already checked off the list. All this is just fear mongering, and you hear it over and over, some nutcase will swear he saw several buses of illegals showing up and filed through the polling booths, and then the idiots believe it, repeat it, and it turns into accepted truth.
Have you ever been to college? Fake IDs are trivial to get. The election poll workers are barely trained as it is, they're never going to spot fake IDs. And if the Democrats are as evil as you say they are then they'll get the fake IDs shipped in on crates.
I'm not saying Democrats don't cheat, of course they do. But Republicans cheat too. BOTH parties are full of dishonest people and both of them probably have the same proportion of cheaters. When someone points to one party as the only cheaters then that makes them a partisan and thus not to be trusted to be fair.
What? Where?
There are many examples around the world of successful measures against voting fraud. One interesting example in India is very cheap voting machines with a very low maximum vote count. If someone steals a machine and spams the result it's a drop in the bucket. The simple design and price makes the Diebold shit look like the pork it is.
Personally I like the idea of paper ballots with electronic scanners to read them. It has the advantage of multiple methods to count and check results.
There is voter fraud. It is wide spread. But it's not something solved with voter ID laws. The Daley machine did not have each of those 100 people go into 1000 voting booths. There are vastly easier ways to steal an election than by having someone pretend to be someone else and walk into a voting booth where they could potentially check an ID. Fraud by people pretending to be someone else at a voting station is just a blip compared to the total fraud that goes on.
We weren't speaking of them. Until this article showed up today.
If purely fair in all possible ways, it's still very likely The Donald will lose. But he'd take it as proof of fraud because he spends half of his campaign speeches declaring how high his poll numbers are.
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.
Funny, I've heard from DAs tales of people who don't exist or did but are very, very long-dead who are (were?) on the voting lists, and every so often it hits the news that a cat/dog/dead-for-a-looong-time person got found out as being on the voting lists. I know distinctly that the cat was supposedly registered to vote simply to show how little effort is made to ensure that, well, the individual is a living person old enough to vote--and it ought to have been painfully obvious that the cat was, in point of fact, a cat. (When somebody processes the voting registration of a Mittens, I think it's safe to say that there is a problem--and it was only ever found out because the cat was called for jury duty.)
Remember the old joke about Chicago, where the living and the dead vote.
In the US, IDs are issued by the individual states, so pretty much all programs are going to be for one state, assuming the state itself doesn't just already waive fee if you provide evidence that you can't afford the money.
Politically, though? If requiring having one to vote is what it takes to get states to agree to act like people have a right to one...then it's what we should do, because in the US there's a lot of things you need an ID to do that you ought to have a right to one already. (So yes, this means I do think the fee for the most basic one should be $0, and every effort made to ensure people can get one if they don't have one.)
Simpsons did it ...
I had to show my SS card when I got my first job and I was a W-2 employee there. If you've had a new employer since the 80s, then yeah, they are in violation of federal law--and you might want to find or replace your SS card if you're thinking of switching jobs & will remain a W-2 employee despite the change of employer.
Photo ID is rather useful if you need to cash a check, though, since most banks require you show one even if you've got an account with them--as long as you're getting cash during the transaction.
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.
If you look at past Presidential results, G W Bush and Obama's victories were resoundingly pedestrian (with their opposition getting electoral votes like 266 or 173) compared to Reagans landslide of 525 electoral votes to 13.
The margin does matter, not because it overtly means anything, but it changes political landscapes. If the Hillary-Trump battle ends up with a narrow margin for a Clinton victory, it means that Trump didnt need to do a lot more to win and that his style of politics *works*, so future campaigns can be run in the same way. Trump needs to get annihilated in order for the Republicans to actually enact meaningful change to guarantee they dont have another Trump style candidate.
called paper. Then count them. By hand. Publicly. And it shouldn't ever matter how long the count takes, FFS.
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.
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.
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.
Do all voter ID laws accept all of the IDs above? It's been a long time since I last showed my passport to an employer, but I had several choices for proving citizenship and identity, and I don't know what voter ID laws require.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's not necessary in the case of voting machines that have a paper trail. If they're connected to the internet, and there's doubt about whether they were hacked, the paper ballots can be used to see.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The requirements vary from state to state, and many of them have injunctions against them by various lawsuits. It's pretty fluid, and not all states even have hard-core "ID laws".