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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.
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.
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
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.
Oh I don't know. I think parts of the country are fairly far along in that regard. Take the 11 California counties which have more registered voters than citizens eligible to vote: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
In one particular county that was at 144% registration a 66% turnout means we got 99.3% of the citizenry to turn out to vote. Quite the miracle...
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.
Corruption isn't correctly measured by the amount of money involved. It is best measured by the impact on individuals.
Wasting millions on failed urban renewal or public housing is a tragedy and a crime. Taking the guns of an elderly veteran because of a mistaken Social Security number is a tragedy also, and a crime. Denying a farmer the use of their land to establish a pond for irrigation and livestock is a crime and a tragedy. Choking a man to death, even inadvertently, because he was selling cigarettes one-at-a-time, without a license, on the street, is a crime and a tragedy.
It's never really about the money. It's about the people who could have done something else, productive or not, with that money. It's about the people who live diminished lives and who are broken in spirit. It;s about people killed, killed, because power corrupted those in power.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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.
Your rationale doesn't hold up - statistically, we would expect conscientiousness to be randomly distributed throughout the populace with no real geographical bias - so why would there magically be a lot of people with registration problems on only one end of town? And, if there are, then the election committee should preferentially allocate resources to that end of town to get things moving faster.
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.
"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?