The very first blogging I did was in 2007 when I covered the trial involving a public records request for voting records of Pima County elections. Sitting in the courtroom beside Mike Bryan, then the proprietor and sole writer on Blog For Arizona, I furiously scribbled down a play-by-play of the proceedings while Bryan, a lawyer, wrote the analysis. By the end of the week, I asked Mike if I could write about education and whatever else I wanted on BfA. After giving me a short grilling to see if I had anything worth saying, he said yes and handed me the keys to the kingdom (Me: “Mike, do you want to look over what I’m writing before I put it online?” Mike: “No, here’s the password. Write away.”)
The specific issue at the trial was the 2006 Regional Transportation election. The results showed the measure passing with about 60 percent of the vote, but some people questioned whether the vote count was legit, and they wanted access to all relevant materials so they could check the results for themselves. During the trial and afterward, I developed a layman’s understanding of the concerns of the local Election Integrity Committee and others around the country who were certain that our elections could be, and possibly had been, stolen.
The local and national work has continued since then, mainly out of the media spotlight. Now election integrity concerns are making the news because people are wondering if Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to put his finger on the U.S. election scales. Last week an article spoke of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s concerns that our electronic voting systems could be vulnerable to sophisticated hackers here and abroad, and Wired Magazine published an article, America’s Electronic Voting Machines are Scarily Easy Targets.
I hope these issues get the national, public airing they deserve. There’s little question that voting machines as well as vote transmission and counting systems can be hacked to change election results. The most pertinent question right now is, how can the systems be made as secure as possible going forward, and how can the results be double-checked to make sure they represent the will of the voters?
I won’t go into the problems with our current voting systems in any detail, but there are lots of areas of possible weakness. The electronic machines people use to enter their votes can be reprogrammed to add votes for one candidate and take them away from another. The computers that tabulate the results from the individual voting machines can also be manipulated to produce incorrect results. And it’s very difficult to detect or stop anyone with sufficient knowledge and access from changing the election tallies. In studies I’ve read where experts are divided into two teams, one determined to hack an imaginary election and the other determined to stop them, the hackers have mostly won.
In places like Arizona where voting machines produce paper ballots, election results can be checked after the fact by counting a sampling of the ballots, though to assure that the vote check is valid, there has to be a scrupulous chain of custody of the ballots and a rigorous sampling procedure. But in states with no physical evidence of the votes, where the machines don’t produce paper ballots, the machine tally is the final word, with no way of checking its accuracy.
Could Putin or another foreign bad actor change the results of our elections? If they were determined enough and the cybersecurity was lax enough, the answer is definitely yes. Could local or state elections be hacked by local, home-grown bad actors? Again, the answer is yes, if they can gain the proper access.
A “No-this-isn’t-voter-fraud” Note: This kind of election manipulation has nothing to do with the paper mache “voter fraud” boogeyman Republicans have created to scare people, where they maintain, with no evidence, that people vote multiple times or non-citizens register and vote. That’s a ploy to justify their voter suppression initiatives like voter ID. This is about changing the results of elections even if everyone who is legally registered and wants to vote is able to do so.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2016.
Forget the Russians, Dump the machines.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34607-will-the-2016-primaries-be-electronically-rigged
We will have to go back to hand counted results that take a couple days.
Anybody could rig this. Where did Wasserman Shultz go to work?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasserman-schultz-immediately-joins-hillary/
Wasn’t she sexist, racist and homophobic, along with shunning the poor and spanking babies? Yes that’s her.
I recall the RTA vote, and to this day, I haven’t met ANYONE who voted for it, yet here we are today, just as ignorant of the results as we were then.
As for Vladimir Putin (can I type his name without some NSA program tagging me?), he’s already got the Republican Party presidential candidate in his pocket for the price of a few compliments.
By the time the dust settles in this year’s presidential election – what with the choice between the lesser of two evils and the party defections to the Libertarian and Green candidates – we’ll be lucky if we can tell who voted at all.
You know there is a reason we see those voters with their ink-stained fingers during overseas voting in war-torn countries. Perhaps it is time for us to give our inked-stained fingers to those running elections in this country too.
What practical goal is this blog post trying to achieve?
It doesn’t seem to be advocating any specific improvement to election security (though, from the information contained here, it would seem using systems that produce paper ballots against which electronic records can be checked and ensuring that we have “scrupulous chain of custody of the ballots and a rigorous sampling procedure” might be important).
The concluding paragraph (before the “no this isn’t voter fraud” note) seems to want to leave us with the thought that yes, our national election results are vulnerable to tampering by Putin and other bad actors, if “cybersecurity was lax enough.”
And I suppose we should draw the conclusion that the Presidential candidate who has been friendlier than some think advisable with Putin and who ran such a loose ship at the Republican convention would be capable of allowing lax enough security that Russia could gain control of our elections if he were elected….?
What’s your point, David? A few blog posts ago we had Trump = McCarthy. Now we have this: Russia could control our elections if Trump were elected? Russia may tamper with our elections in order to get Trump elected? If Trump is elected, Russia will be at fault?
This is a very low form of “connect the dots” commentary and fear mongering.
You should perhaps return to where you actually live — the world of Realpolitik — and admit that you understand that what is going on in this country is not going to follow the plot of some two-bit, poorly written spy thriller. Trump will be controlled by the Republican machine if he is elected. He will need them to get things done. He won’t want to look like a complete “loser” in the office and the Machine will be pulling the strings on their Trump puppet. If you prefer the Democratic Machine to the Republican Machine, say so in plain English and give your reasons for preferring one Machine to the other. But please STOP with the ludicrous conspiracy theory and drawing parallels / hypothesizing conspiracies between Trump and every villain in the last 100 years of American history and world history.
If you want to do something practical to increase voter confidence in elections — critically important for the health of our democracy — start or join a non-partisan, citizen-run election observer program. That would be a constructive and responsible way to address the issues you discuss in this post, but you probably have too many partisan affiliations for the public to take you seriously in such a role.
There is no voter fraud.
http://projectveritas.com/
Non-partisan has no teeth.
You just can’t make this stuff up. The father of the Orlando terrorist that killed 49 stopped by a Hillary Clinton campaign stop to show his support.
http://drudgereport.com/
The Florida DNC sent a rally invitation to the father of the Orlando Pulse Nightclub Terrorist, Omar Mateen.
You might remember all of those pictures of Seddique Mateen in Washington DC meeting with State Department officials and Democrat members of congress.
Well apparently Omar’s father, Seddique Mateen, a full-throated DNC supporter, accepted the invitation and was caught on camera sitting directly behind Hillary Clinton and cheering for her during the event in Kissimmee.
http://downstreampolitics.com/2016/06/15/orlando-killers-father-held-meetings-white-house/
Both major factions in the partisan world are not just fighting with the gloves off, they are down on the ground mud-wrestling with total abandon.
Non-partisan reporting of solid, verifiable fact is what we need from the media (including bloggers like Safier, who, as he helpfully notes in his little anecdote in this piece, had no formal journalistic training and not much vetting of credentials, oversight or fact checking of submissions at the time that he started offering commentary on politics and education to the general public).
What we need to know about Trump and Clinton: all the boring FACTS including the details of their tax plans, whom they would be likely to appoint to the Supreme Court, who their largest donors are, etc. That way we can accurately compare “bad” and “worse,” which is what we’re faced with in this country at this point. (Not “pretty darn good” VS. “the apocalypse,” which is what the partisan hacks on both sides seem to be trying to convey.)
Fear-mongering persuasion techniques are happening and will continue to happen with a vengeance for the next three months, but it would be nice if even the committed partisan mud-wrestlers could recognize that undermining voter confidence in the legitimacy of election results is not a technique that should be used. Problems with electoral process and reporting need to be identified and solved, not wafted about in the form of innuendos intended to undermine the other party’s cause but which may backfire by causing yet more bipartisan voter disengagement than we already have.
(What would you think of factions supporting rival candidates for the captain’s position on a boat, if, when they found holes in the hull with water flowing in, didn’t patch them, but both starting shouting that the opposing team’s candidate had caused them and would cause more if he became captain? Keep up that kind of response to the problem and both teams will find themselves on the bottom of the ocean floor with no boat to captain. There are some kinds of problems that undermine the integrity of the vehicle all factions depend on for their existence, and in a democracy any kind of problem with the legitimacy of election results falls in that category.)
I was happy to see Wasserman-Schultz go, but let’s set the record straight on this one: Daily Kos: “Being an honorary chair of a campaign—a position that involves no responsibilities, no employees, no budget, and no duties—is not a promotion from being chair of the DNC.
Being an honorary chair does not mean that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is “in charge of” Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It doesn’t mean anything. That is, unless you think President Obama’s 2012 campaign was run by actress Eva Longoria; or former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee; or high school guidance counselor Loretta Harper—all of whom were among 24 people who served as honorary co-chairs of Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Being an honorary chair is not a job. It’s a courtesy. It’s the associate producer of politics. It’s an empty title handed out to help ease Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of her chair and make it slightly more palatable for her to leave a job she’d done (badly) for five years without putting up a fuss.
It’s a face-saving sop.”
Sigh, another one. Anything you take from the Drudge report means you’re desperate for dirt. The Clinton campaign, unlike the Trump campaign, does not blacklist reporters or hand pick who appears, and this man had a ticket and so he sat and was seen and tea partiers got all excited about drumming up another scandal. Was he a terrorist? Did he kill anyone? Did he help his kid plan an atrocity. Nope it’s just more judging someone for something in which he wasn’t involved. Would Clinton have liked him not to be there? Probably, but the last I heard it was a free country and so long as you aren’t handpicking your audience as both Trump and Bush have done, he is perfectly within his rights to be there. Also, there is not a single reliable source that this man visited the White House and Snopes calls foul since she had been gone as SecState when this evidently fake photo was taken. http://www.snopes.com/orlando-shooters-fat… If you aren’t smart enough to check stories you read, you aren’t smart enough to vote.
huh.
would that make him,
vlad the chad impaler?