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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.
"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.
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
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.
It's not just the rural counties of South Carolina. I live in a fairly urban area that is over 50% minorities. Our wait time to vote in a Presidential election is typically 3hrs. Never enough voting booths. Lots of people don't vote because the wait is too long.
People on the other side of town where it is mainly white and affluent tell me how they were in and out in under 10 minutes.
Why does one side of town have 10 minute waits every election and the other side of town has 2-3 hour waits to vote? I don't believe it's a coincidence.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
Then there is the question of exactly why a candidate who loses the popular vote is winning via the electoral college.
I think you have to dig deeper and start to look at geographical political divisions and ask if even a majority vote winds up being "fair" if deep divisions exist between rural areas and the West Coast/NE Corridor.
It starts to come down to some basic constitutional-level questions of governance structure, like the reasons why we have bicameral legislature -- to prevent populous states from dominating low-population states.
"Have been drained of all power, so the majority party (right now the republicans) is pushing their agenda"
If you've been paying attention, you would not write this.
Despite the President being elected as a Republican, the Republican Party, especially the leadership, wants nothing to do with him. the bureaucracy is actively undermining him daily. The opposition, of course, is engaged in preventing him from implementing his policies, and this is both expected and tolerable.
But the clearly active soft coup is an actual threat to our nation. If this is successful, as much as 40% of the electorate will abandon the process and subvert it, having been shown that 'playing by the rules' doesn't work any more. This will happen across all level of government and will be nasty.
The majority party, right now the Republicans, is in fact pushing their agenda. Their agenda is to depose the current, lawfully elected President. It will be interesting to see if this is actually tolerable, that is, if they can 'get away' with this by 'playing by the rules'. Their rules. The intelligentsia's rules. The governing class rules.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's hard to make claims one way or the other about voter fraud when voters need not present reasonable identification. It's impossible to know if there were fraudulent votes if you can't identify legitimate voters.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?