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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
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!
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.
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.
Or, you know, do what Canada does. Keep the voting process pencil and paper and count ballots by hand. Canada typically has the results in from a general election within 4 or 5 hours of the polls closing, and recounts rarely change the results by more than one or two ballots. Every ballot is counted at the polling station, and every candidate has the right to have scrutineers present to witness that counting.
Yes, Canada has 1/10th the population of the US, but on the other hand this is a problem that scales linearly. You have 10x the population, so you have 10x the polling stations, 10x the returning officers, scrutineers, etc... It works, it's reliable, and is pretty resistant to any kind of interference. Any "attack" (in the computational sense) would have to be carried out on a widely distributed basis.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
why settle for one day? Just use the advance polls. And get rid of the "registered democrat" or "registered republican" bullshit. If you have valid ID, you vote. Simple.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
DHS is a big waste of taxpayer dollars as it is. No reason to go giving it more justification to continue to expand.
Party affiliation only matters for states with closed primaries where only those with a stated party affiliation can vote in that party's primary election. Which is sort of reasonable if you accept that political parties are private organizations that can regulate who votes in their primary.
Of course, there are larger problems with this process -- like why does the state sponsor an election for a private organization's leadership? Why do the winners on the Democratic and Republican side automatically advance to the general election?
I'd like to see a primary election that was party neutral and where the top 3-4 polling candidates advanced to the general election, regardless of party. In many cases, the runner-up in one party is actually a more desirable candidate than the winning candidate in the other. In districts (municipal all the way to state level), a single party may dominate so thoroughly that there's no good way for a rival bearing the banner of another party to successfully challenge the dominant party, especially if they're forced to adopt unpopular stances of the rival party.
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.