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Forget the Russians: Corrupt, Local Officials Are the Biggest Threat To Elections (securityledger.com)
chicksdaddy writes: Do you think that shadowy Russian hackers are the biggest threat to the integrity of U.S. elections? Think again. It turns out the bad actors in U.S. elections may be a lot more "Senator Bedfellow" than "Fancy Bear," according to Bev Harris, the founder of Black Box Voting. "It's money," Harris told The Security Ledger. "There's one federal election every four years, but there are about 100,000 local elections which control hundreds of billions of dollars in contract signings." Those range from waste disposal and sanitation to transportation."There are 1,000 convictions every year for public corruption," Harris says, citing Department of Justice statistics. "Its really not something that's even rare in the United States." We just don't think that corruption is a problem, because we rarely see it manifested in the ways that most people associate with public corruption, like violence or having to pay bribes to receive promised services, Harris said. But it's still there.
How does the prevalence of public corruption touch election security? Exactly in the way you might think. "You don't know at any given time if the people handling your votes are honest or not," Harris said. "But you shouldn't have to guess. There should be a way to check." And in the decentralized, poorly monitored U.S. elections system, there often isn't. At the root of our current problem isn't (just) vulnerable equipment, it's also a shoddy "chain of custody" around votes, says Eric Hodge, the director of consulting at Cyber Scout, which is working with the Board of Elections in Kentucky and in other states to help secure elections systems. That includes where and how votes are collected, how they are moved and tabulated and then how they are handled after the fact, should citizens or officials want to review the results of an election. That lack of transparency leaves the election system vulnerable to manipulation and fraud, Harris and Hodge argue.
How does the prevalence of public corruption touch election security? Exactly in the way you might think. "You don't know at any given time if the people handling your votes are honest or not," Harris said. "But you shouldn't have to guess. There should be a way to check." And in the decentralized, poorly monitored U.S. elections system, there often isn't. At the root of our current problem isn't (just) vulnerable equipment, it's also a shoddy "chain of custody" around votes, says Eric Hodge, the director of consulting at Cyber Scout, which is working with the Board of Elections in Kentucky and in other states to help secure elections systems. That includes where and how votes are collected, how they are moved and tabulated and then how they are handled after the fact, should citizens or officials want to review the results of an election. That lack of transparency leaves the election system vulnerable to manipulation and fraud, Harris and Hodge argue.
Surely the cities would be more corrupt by virtue of having more money.
REALLY?
Par for the course around here.
The 2000 presidential election shined a harsh spotlight on this in Florida.
And they don't even think of gerrymandering at this level.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
"Forget Threat A! Focus all your attention on Threat B!"
Nice try, every scoundrel ever. I think we can comfortably stand to worry about two things.
I live in a rural city in South Carolina and I can say first hand that there is total election fraud going on in this state. I was an election observer during the 2016 Presidential election - that is - for about 20 minutes.
From the get-go, election officials repeatedly turned away minority voters for "technical issues" with their voter registrations. They only provided provisional ballots to those who absolutely demanded them. Not a single white person was turned away or had "technical issues" during the time I was observing, which lasted until I was escorted out by police for trying to bring this to the attention of the higher ups. I was threatened with charges for interfering with an election and given a trespass warning until the end of the day.
South Carolina is corrupt through and through. It would probably be a blue state were it not for corrupt election officials in the rural counties making sure that whites and republicans won.
Surely the Slashdot editors wouldn't publish this piece of drivel? Must be a slow news day...
Ask the folks who were in Athens, Tn,. who were around just after World War 2 ended.
Hint - GIs came home and kicked ass over election and voting issues.
http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/at...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Most of the people involved in the election process are essentially volunteers who get a minimum-wage pittance for a 16-hour day. Understaffing is already a problem. You can present theoretical arguments about improvement, but you can't make the strictures too severe, or you will have no local poll workers.
And, Gerrymandering means you vote probably doesn't count for much anyway.
Study recent 25 years history of Russian election. You'll find a lot of lessons of corruption, administrative pressure and so on yet to be learned by American politicans.
Where I live, the Democratic party has a total lock on municipal government. No elected official has been a Republican in 30+ years. The last Republican mayor's term ended in 1961. I think the last non-Democratic elected official was the city councilor for my ward in the early 1990s, and he was an "independent".
When one party controls the city government, you don't need to cheat at the ballot box to have corruption because the party already controls who can get elected. Even without criminal intent, you wind up with a narrow group of people who ultimately control an awful lot of resources without much oversight.
And it's not like the outcome would be any different had the party roles been reversed, it's the lack of active competition that's the problem.
The system is corrupted by wealth, there is no democracy, free enterprise or justice
most people are economic slaves and owned by their employer
I've worked in elections and I can say that our local system is excellent. Poll workers are well trained and management is responsible and trustworthy. There may be other states/counties where management is less dependable (I'm thinking of Florida handing the election to Bush), but the reality is that hundreds of volunteer workers are not going to tolerate any shady practices. Furthermore, in an election with a number of candidates and issues, is it reasonable to believe that one of those can corrupt the entire process?
Our new president has made a major effort to find election irregularities and so far has come up empty.
...omphaloskepsis often...
They are working hard to keep the system that way.
Local corruption just doesn't happen. LA county has a 144% registration rate. With political awareness like that, it can't happen there.
Poll workers are paid for there time as well!
I did a few times and it's an long day but you can take an 1 hour lunch break in the middle.
The election itself can be completely honest. It is the people getting elected that is the problem.
And who knows how they are corrupted. Where they corrupt before entering office or afterwards?
I think professional sports stadiums are the most visible in terms of local political corruption. It amazes me that even though it's been proven otherwise, billionaire sports teams owners have a knack of getting local governments to pay for the stadium with the line of "it'll boost tax revenues and pay for itself"; which never happens.
Only the dumbest of liberal voters didn't already know this.
That's true. On the other hand, even the smartest conservative voters are clueless about this issue.
How do you get them? Donate to politician's re-election campaign or hire their friends or relatives. Just look at how many companies bidding for public contracts, had their owner donate. One of my former employer was a far right republican and he donated money to then sitting democrat major. He ended up getting few city contracts in the end.
The poster has no idea what they are talking about.
Just blah blah blah.
The Russians are trying to hack every state, every district, chage voting records and throw the result of elections into doubt to sow chaos and induce civil conflict causing a failure of governance.
This included buying a President who will also question the voter roles that the Russians changed.
Compared to a corrupt boss who throws a corrupt election, no contest.
The posters narrative supports the framework of the Russian hack so I'm suspicious of a partisan influence, but he is probably just a low level gopher who is trying to sell security software and paying slash dot for the priviledge.
These parties lock third parties out of elections and debates. They have a hold on who does and does not have a chance to run. We seen this with how Bernie Sanders got locked out in the last election. Expect more of the same.
I find much to disagree but there is some room for improvement.
I think some oversight or setting standards and best practices and maybe a little of what NGO's do for underdeveloped countries where they don't control the election but have some federal officials which "witness" what is going on. And maybe not in *every* district just problematic ones or random ones to see if there are issues.
The risk is that if you set up a federal election system then you *can* have control and fraud on a national scale. Right now it is so disconnected with different structures and voting booths, etc it would be practically impossible to do coordinated fraud. We have local city, county and state governments for reasons and there are reasons to not have 100% central control of government. An analogy might be the school system. Do we want or require the federal government actually run all the schools in the country? Likely not, but they might be able to help do some oversight and help without actually taking full control. Side observation is that people (parents) seem a lot more motivated to make sure *their* child is being educated well than the average person is involved with voting and local government.
IMHO, the current POTUS doesn't have the proper respect for data and nuance of collecting all the voting data from across the country to be the right person to do the job. The initial missteps of the voter suppression commission he created seems more about throwing something together quickly than really doing a good long term job. It seems like they are going to throw a lot of data together than should be carefully handled and might take years to properly merge. The commission will end up with lots of dups and anomalies which will be taken as evidence of the fraud and abuse they want to find and used to justify a bunch of voter suppression laws.
And most of the conservatives don't realize they are the victims of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Describe these "technical issues" in more detail. Be very specific.
Things like not having any ID at all, or presenting ID with incorrect name/address information, or presenting ID that has expired, or presenting ID with somebody else's photo on it, or presenting out-of-date ID, or presenting ID that isn't among the accepted types are "technical issues" that absolutely should prevent somebody from voting.
In an electoral system where one person is entitled to one vote, it's essential to make it as difficult as possible for people to vote more than once. The very integrity of the election itself depends on this. Checking for ID is a very reasonable way of doing so.
What's unreasonable about this? If somebody has just presented questionable, or even no, identification, the electoral officials shouldn't be going out of their way to allow such people to vote.
It's also very reasonable to expect the voters to know and understand the electoral process they're engaging in.
You seem to want to make this a matter of race, but you neglect to consider that these people could very well just have been better prepared. Of course people who have the proper ID to begin with will have an easier time voting.
How were you behaving? Were you making a loud public disturbance that was in fact interfering with the electoral process? If so, it's very reasonable for them to have removed you.
Based on what you describe, it sounds like nothing more than a case of some voters being totally unprepared and totally ignorant about the electoral process they wish to participate in. It's not the fault of "whites" or "Republicans" or "corruption" if there are certain other people who aren't willing to properly prepare for voting. So you got angry at the responsible people, instead of the irresponsible ones, and you were removed from the voting premises for being a disturbance. And now you pretend to be a victim.
Otherwise you would publicly demand that the laws were changed.
And vote only for politicians who at least promise to do something about it.
But you don't.
So it is your own fault.
The problem with Florida, was Algore, or his "group" wanted to hand pick counties to recount. Instead of recounting the entire state, he wanted to pick only areas they knew would be heavily democratic. Plus, had Ralph Nader not run, Al Gore more than likely would have been elected, just as Bush 41 would have been elected, had Ross Perot not run in 92. Personally, I'd like to see ALL electronic voting of any kind, done away with. Every ballot should be paper, with an X or similar to denote who you pick. Plus, I'd like to see everyone that votes, have their index finger dipped in that hard to remove purple ink you see in a lot of 3rd world countries, along with everyone that votes, should present a government issued photo ID. (for those that have a hardship, the ID should be given at no cost). Sometimes, I think the corruption in elections is a backhanded way to make people think "what difference does it make" to the point they don't bother voting, so our soft tyranny we have now, can be transformed into a hard tyranny, or dictatorship. If you look at it now, we already have 2 classes of people. The politicians and the surfs (citizens). How many laws are on the books now, that WE as citizens must obey, but, those elected, do not. Obamacare, Social Security, insider trading and what not. They make laws for us, but then exempt themselves from those same laws.
Was this submitted by Trump himself?
AC comments get piped to
Brain+mercury=you
I want an open and fearless look at the integrity of our voting system. I want surprise audits, investigations, and tests along the lines of AT LEAST what we do to test the effectiveness of the TSA. If the FBI can get bombs through a TSA check point... I think some fbi agents can probably get a bag of illicit votes through all the checks.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"There's one federal election every four years. No there is one federal election every two years. There is an election for the US House House members every two years. The President has four year term and Senators have a six year term.
I very much doubt the delays were due to there being "never enough voting booths", like you claim. The voting booths are used for 30 seconds to a minute at most by each voter. In fact, the election officials and observers will get suspicious if somebody spends more time than that completing their ballot.
Most of the time the voting booths themselves are empty, because it's the check-in process (i.e. identity checks and ensuring that the person can vote in the jurisdiction in question) that is the real bottleneck. These processes typically take much longer than the time it takes to actually complete and submit a ballot.
This becomes clear when you look at where the lines are. The lines to use the voting booths are small, if there even are any. It's the lines at the check-in desks that are the longest. Why is that? Because the check-in booths are the bottleneck!
Go look at the video footage and photographs from American elections if you don't believe me.
Like we determined earlier, it's the check-in process that's the bottleneck.
If the people in one area tend to come well-prepared, with proper and valid ID, and they're voting at the right place, then of course their lines will move quicker. They won't spend as much time at the check-in station, and they won't block other people from checking in. Collectively, they're able to vote much quicker.
On the other hand, if the people in another area tend to come ill-prepared, without proper and valid ID, then of course their lines will move slower. When they're fumbling to find their ID, or arguing when told their obviously-invalid ID is invalid, or filling out affidavits or registration paperwork, or trying to vote in the wrong district, or otherwise taking a long time at what should be a simple process, of course there will be delays.
It's not a matter of race or "corruption", like you're trying to pretend it is. It's a matter of some people being more prepared, and thus the process moves swiftly for them. Other people don't come prepared to vote, and this unfortunately introduces delays that affect all subsequent voters.
How many of that is valid? People move and they could be registered with two different addresses within a county. And you have to imagine LA county draws in many people coming out there for work who also register to vote. Some of those people move away but they still are registered there.
LBJ during his political ascent in Texas has long been suspected of violating the integrity of the 1948 Senate election.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-57xl...
Robert Caro writes about this extensively.
It was roossian haxx0rz that are fibbing this fake news to stay out of the limelight. Obviously.
I have a relative who works as a sysadmin for a local water district. Technically these things are run by a publicly-elected board. In this particular district, the board was long ago populated by a bunch of contractors who primarily get their business from... the water district. So now, the "public election" means that there's a tiny classified ad buried in the back of some newspaper to advertise the election, the board members vote themselves back in every year, and they've got an understanding with the district employees that as long as the right contractors (the board) keep winning the bids, they'll generally vote for whatever budget items are requested by the staff.
Corrupt as hell, but it's local, and there aren't hardly any journalists around to report on things like that, and if there were the story probably wouldn't get any news time because it's more important to talk about the Kardashians or something.
..."drain the swamp".
Strictly speaking, the practices described are not "corruption". To speak of corruption implies that a system has been subverted and is not working as intended and designed.
In the case of Western "democratic" political systems, that is untrue. Those systems were intended and designed to work they way they do. It is only the naively igenuous who believe that election rigging and similar practices are "corrupt".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Electronic-only ballots make keeping audit-able records nearly impossible. You can only audit what the computer recorded as the vote, not the voter's intent.
Having said that, computers can take photographs of the ballots and compute and publish hashes of a "concatenation" of all of the pictures it took in a given election PRIOR TO the ballot box being opened and the ballots being removed, as well as a hash of the vote totals.
This will make it much harder to tamper with an election after the fact without a high risk of the tampering being uncovered later.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This sounds like fear mongering. Anyone can monitor election counts. Also this propaganda push to have the federal government oversee elections is not about making elections more fair and less corrupt.
Citizens United is the biggest threat to US politics. Politicians' greed and corruption comes close second.
No, I don't think I care to "forget the Russians", comrade.
Nice try.
A friend of mine with a business in the desert southwest knew about my engineering background, and asked me to review some high-efficiency air conditioning units that were manufactured locally. The city was considering installing them in the city buildings, so she figured they might be good for her business as well. She sent me scans of the brochures and specs.
The power consumption and cooling capacity didn't match up with any known air conditioner. Its power consumption was simply too low for it to be thermodynamically operating as an air conditioner (heat pump). It was a spot-on match however for a swamp cooler (evaporative cooler). Except these units cost 10x more than a swamp cooler (they were priced high for air conditioners too). Curious if there was something else I was missing, I went to the manufacturer's company website to scour it for more technical info. I didn't find anything, but the homepage had a short blurb about the company's founder.
Next I went to the city website to see if I could find anything about the selection process for these air conditioner units. That's when I learned that the city mayor had the exact same unusual last name as the company's founder. Some further researched turned up that they were brothers. Mystery solved. Company manufactures swamp coolers, prices them at 10x the normal cost of a swamp cooler and markets them as high-efficiency air conditioners. Brother who is mayor convinces the city council to buy them "to support local businesses."
My son lost an election to an (IMHO) unqualified candidate who was backed by a local union here in Chicago. They spent more than $500,000 on a election where the total salary for the term was $160,000. Clearly they want influence on the budget and contract process. It is their money to spend and their right to free speech that defends their actions, even if it horrible public policy. There are no simple solutions.
Without common sense campaign finance rules, corruption is defined by the highest bidders.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I live in a rural city in South Carolina and I can say first hand that there is total election fraud going on in this state. I was an election observer during the 2016 Presidential election - that is - for about 20 minutes.
From the get-go, election officials repeatedly turned away minority voters for "technical issues" with their voter registrations. They only provided provisional ballots to those who absolutely demanded them. Not a single white person was turned away or had "technical issues" during the time I was observing, which lasted until I was escorted out by police for trying to bring this to the attention of the higher ups. I was threatened with charges for interfering with an election and given a trespass warning until the end of the day.
South Carolina is corrupt through and through. It would probably be a blue state were it not for corrupt election officials in the rural counties making sure that whites and republicans won.
There are plenty of avenues for reporting this kind of thing: the ACLU, the state-level party apparatus, the DNC, the NAACP, etc...
Reporting it that day is most effective.
The problem with IRV and Condorcet voting is information overload. In order to choose between all the candidates you need to have some idea of what they all stand for. Even with the current system I often don't know anything about the Judges or school board members I'm supposed to vote for. Either IRV or Condorcet voting would make this worse.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
General rule of thumb, smaller = more corrupt.
You have 10 million people as a base, it is not hard to find 1000 honest people willing to volunteer, and everybody has someone else looking over their shoulder.
You have 10,000 people as a base, you can find 1 honest person willing to volunteer and have to hire 3, and all of them are on their own some of the time.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The reason so little seems to get done is because Trump has focused almost entirely on health care. The Republican leadership -- and the vast majority of the Republicans in Congress -- have in fact supported him. So your statement makes no sense.
If they wanted to "depose" Trump it is very simple. There are already multiple credible arguments for drawing up Articles of Impeachment, and maybe for acting under Amendment 25. If they did so, Trump would be gone. Do you see a SINGLE Republican even hinting at the possibility of this? You do not.
John McCain
Lindsey Graham
Harry Reid
Nancy Pelosi
Diane Feinstein
Barbara Boxer
Mitch McConnell
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
Chelsy Clinton
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
Eric Holder
George Soros
Michael Bloomberg
These and many more are the people most directly responsible for a coup against the United States of America. They are the ones trying to help establish a one world government, a one world currency, all under control of a few.
I see what you are saying HiThere, but you could still just listen to your well informed friends if you don't want to keep up on all the nitty gritty. I know when I fill my mail ballot out I sit and read the book about each and every proposition. Regarding the officials, I become more lazy and if I don't know any of the people will go along party lines. If my party doesn't have a candidate I sometimes just won't vote on that particular office.
IRV would be nice for the small amount of us that are informed. We'll be sure to fill our spouses shit out appropriately and tell our friends to do the same. People that care about politics will prioritize it and those that don't, will continue to do as they do now, not bother.
As usual, Australia does it better. The Australian Electoral Commission is in charge of all federal elections, and there's state bodies bound by the same rules that run the state and local elections. Their funding isn't subject to any political process, and elected officials have no ability to manipulate electoral boundaries or the election process itself.
For all you big government fans, here's evidence that the government isn't here to help you. No, in fact, it just came in your mouth, and you continue to thank it for doing so.
We need term limits, and we need to get the money (lobbyists) out of action.
Just another day in Paradise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud
Casteism
You might also want to look for news stories about dubious use of absentee ballots in St. Louis City elections. Either people who vote absentee have a natural predilection for voting for the status quo, or somebody has some 'splaining to do.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=st.louis+city+election+fraud+absentee.ballot
Some of that explaining happened in court. It did not go well for the accused.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.