Is our election system secure enough to produce the true result?

November 5, 2024

Today is election day. Voting is a sacred right and a critical duty of eligible voters. And although this is the day that Americans traditionally have gone to the polls to cast their ballots, tens of millions have already voted, either through early voting, or by mail-in ballots.

This election is a critical one. It will determine who our next president will be, how the two houses of Congress will be controlled, who the governors in many states will be and which party will control state legislatures, and many municipal and county leadership positions will be decided. It is a very important day.

The country is more politically and ideologically divided than it has been in many, many years. That divide will not be significantly changed by the election results.

And while most of us are hoping for a clean, secure election with few problems, the nature of the current election processes virtually guarantees that there will be some potentially serious problems of errors, ballot tampering and fraud.

Mailing ballots to voters, no matter how valid the reasons are for doing it, provides opportunities for problems. Delays in the postal system may cause deadlines to be missed. Ballots can be stolen on their way to and from voters. And drop boxes placed on streets for voters to return ballots after voting are targets for mischief.

Already in Washington state hundreds of ballots were recently destroyed by fire in one drop box. And, a drop box in Oregon was also set afire, although the loss of ballots there was small. Still, hundreds of voters’ choices were lost.

The Associated Press reported that “[s]ix states have banned ballot drop boxes since 2020: Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and South Dakota, according to research by the Voting Rights Lab, which advocates for expanded voting access. Other states have restricted their use, including Ohio and Iowa, which now permits only one drop box per county, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.”

Other election problems have accompanied the introduction of computer voting devices, which can be, and have been, hacked when connected to the Internet. These devices also may have been programmed by the people that produced or installed them to make changes to election numbers as ballots are counted.

In the 2020 election, there were allegations supported by evidence that people who delivered ballots to voters who were in care facilities or who were cognitively impaired coached the voters on how to vote, or actually marked the ballots themselves and managed to get voter signatures on them before submitting them.

And 26 states and Washington, DC allow military personnel to vote by email or an online portal, and seven states allow voting via fax. Some states allow voters with disabilities to use some of those options to vote.

On the latter topic, National Public Radio warned late last year that “advice from cybersecurity experts is clear: Widespread internet voting at this point is a bad idea.”

Clearly, the variety of voting options available presents many opportunities for election tampering and fraud. Our elections are too important to allow the sorts of insecurities present in the current voting methods.

University of Michigan computer science and engineering professor J. Alex Halderman is considered one of the nation’s foremost experts on election security. He offers tips that can help us ensure that votes are recorded accurately and securely, among which are these: 
* Avoid voting methods that don’t have a paper trail.
* If you use a ballot-marking device at the polls, review your printout.
* Don’t vote online.
* Encourage your state to do a risk-limiting audit in future elections.

Digicert, a company that refers to itself as “The global leader in digital trust,” recommends three requirements of a trustworthy voting method:
* Fraud prevention: Ensuring every vote is legitimate.
* Privacy: Protecting voters' choices from prying eyes.
* Cost-effectiveness: Making elections affordable for everyone.

And Bloomberg online offered the following advice prior to the 2020 election: “Election voting is the cybersecurity industry’s most difficult challenge, and casting ballots on paper is the safest option against any digital disruptions, says CrowdStrike Holdings co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer Dmitri Alperovitch.”

“Voting is the hardest thing to secure when it comes to cybersecurity,” Alperovitch said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The only way we know how to do it well and safely is by using paper.” He also said that in-person voting and ballots that are either mailed in or dropped off at collection sites are the best ways to ensure that a digital hack won’t happen.

Secure elections are a requirement. However, many of the aspects of our elections today are to make registering to vote easier and voting more convenient. 

But election security must not be weakened just to make it easier for people. Other things can be done to improve the election process without opening it up to tampering and fraud.

Every voter must have proved eligibility and produce a photo ID or other form of proof of identity, and have paper ballots that can be kept on file and referred to when needed. If these security measures cause problems, then we must just buckle up and deal with them.

America’s election system has serious security issues

April 2, 2024

One of the great things about being a citizen of the United States of America is being able to participate in determining who will serve us in important governmental positions.

The right to select our governments’ public servants from a list of candidates selected by the people through a voting process is a highly valued one, and governments at all levels have a solemn duty to protect that right, and assure us that the voting process is as safe and secure as possible.

That means using only those elements of voting that are the least likely to be misused.

We were assured that the 2020 election was very safe, and that may be true. But we also have seen evidence of irregularities and illegalities, some of which were implemented due to the COVID virus, and may have been done with the best of intentions. However, in some states, changes were made to the election process without the direction of the state legislature, which is required by the U.S. Constitution.

Plus, we know from history and human nature that there are people who will do anything to win elections, and there are problems and actual improprieties in many elections. 

The question is: To what extent do these problems and improprieties affect the outcome of local, state and national elections?

Where the 2020 election is concerned, there are two opposing storylines on that question.  The purpose here is not to argue for or against one or the other of those storylines. Election integrity is the focus.

The first step in securing elections is making sure that only eligible people can vote. The best way for doing that is a system in which voters prove their eligibility to election officials, and then have a photo ID that must be used when voting.

At one time many years ago, votes were cast on a paper ballot at a polling place by eligible voters who could prove their identity on election day. Ballots were hand counted and kept on file.

Since that time, that secure system has been weakened by the addition of elements that are more easily corrupted. One aspect of that is the idea of making voting easier or more convenient, which has increased the opportunities for problems. 

But voting is a critical element of our constitutional republic, so keeping the process secure is much more important than making it easier or more convenient.  

Voting by mail/absentee voting, and machine voting have entered the process with both positive and negative results.

The idea of absentee voting is beneficial for voters who have a very good reason for not being able to get to the polling place. Perhaps they serve in the military and are stationed away from their permanent address, or are attending school away from home. Perhaps they are elderly, ill, or disabled and unable to move about. 

But sending thousands or millions of ballots out in the mail to all voters to be returned by mail is begging for trouble. Likewise, having ballots returned by placing them in unsecured bins is dangerous, as is ballot harvesting.

Some voting machines do not use or produce paper ballots that can be checked. Machines used in ballot counting or voting can be hacked or programmed to affect vote totals. 

The Associated Press website warned that “Election officials face a long list of challenges this year, including potential cyberattacks waged by foreign governments [and] criminal ransomware gangs attacking computer systems.”

And a discussion on the National Public Radio website added this: “Basically, every election security expert agrees that we should not have lots of people voting over the internet. The DHS, FBI, the National Academies of Sciences - they've all agreed on this point. And there's really more agreement on this point than almost anything else in election security.”

According to the Brookings Institution, a paper trail is necessary. “Election security experts from Harvard, Stanford and the Brennan Center for Justice all recommend the phasing out of paperless voting, and twelve of the thirteen Democratic candidates who have declared a position on election security support mandating the use of paper ballots,” an article on the Brookings website states.

The idea of every eligible voter having to show a photo ID to vote garners complaints that this is discriminatory. But consider the long, long list of everyday things that require a photo ID. Things like buying alcohol, applying for a job, renting or buying a house, renting a car, applying for government assistance like welfare or unemployment, getting on an airplane. This is a precaution that must be taken.

Questioning election results is an American tradition, with many elections having seen challenges. The more election security is the focus, and the more limits we have on the election process to make it more secure, the fewer opportunities for irregularities and problems there will be, and hopefully fewer challenges to the results.

Any process that puts voted ballots at risk of being stolen or changed, or ballots falsely created, must not be allowed. We cannot make voting easier and more convenient if doing that weakens the security of the election process.

Abolishing honest elections and re-imagining legislative procedures

Deceptively called the “For the People Act of 2021,” H.R. 1 and S. 1 should more accurately be named the “Act to Encourage Cheating and Vote Fraud.”

Critics of this legislative boondoggle charge that it federalizes and micromanages the election process now administered by the states. It also imposes unnecessary, foolish, and even unconstitutional mandates on the states, and puts the federal government in charge of elections, which is a reversal of the decentralization of the American election process as created by the Founders to protect our liberty and freedom. 

The Founders established a federalist system that deliberately did not cede all power to the federal government. 

Furthermore, it interferes with states and their citizens in determining qualifications for voters, ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls, securing the integrity of elections, participating in the political process, and determining district boundaries for electing their representatives.

States will be forced to implement perilous methods such as early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and no-fault absentee balloting. The latter is the tool of choice of vote thieves.

Early voting is convenient, but voting early can put those voters at risk of casting their ballot before late-breaking developments occur that might affect their decision.

Same-day registration prevents election officials from verifying the eligibility of registrants, and allows ineligible voters to register and vote. It also makes it difficult to predict how many voters will appear at polling places, and thus more difficult to adequately staff the polling places.

The bill would also force precincts to allow voting by persons registered to vote in other precincts, preventing adequate steps to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots, or to prevent people from voting more than once.

The accuracy of registration lists will be degraded by automatically registering individuals from state databases, such as DMV and welfare offices. These registrants likely will include large numbers of ineligible voters, including aliens, and multiple or duplicate registrations of the same individuals.

Online voter registration allows for massive fraudulent registrants through actions of cyber criminals if registrations are not tied to existing state records, such as a driver’s license.

These election revisions are a strategy for increasing fraud and abuse and are plain stupid. We must have an honest election system that will reflect the actual choices of eligible voters. The election system already needs to be strengthened; this bill will essentially destroy its security.

Elections are too important to allow foolish mechanisms in the system for no better reason than for a bit of convenience, which is a prominent reason cited for making these changes. Voting is too important to be made too easy.

Those behind these absurd changes also cry out against “voter suppression,” which they term any sensible idea that helps to protect the integrity of the election system, such as photo IDs and signature verification for mail-in ballots. We need photo IDs for lots of normal things we do, but somehow requiring an ID to vote is suppressing voters.

In addition to a clean and honest election system, we need a sensible system for creating legislation. Every piece of legislation offered should focus on making things in America better for the American people. Not some of the people; not a political party, but things benefitting the nation at large.

Bills should be limited to one topic and be only long enough to describe that topic. Having more bills of such a limited nature is far simpler, therefore better, than having a few gargantuan bills of hundreds or thousands of pages with multiple issues addressed.

Legislative language should be as brief as possible to get the concept of the legislation across, not written so as to make the intent difficult to understand. Most bills should be no longer than about 50 pages, which still is a significant read for legislators, particularly if there are more shorter bills to study.

Passage of legislation that affects the nation should be passed by a 60 percent or 67 percent majority. A truly beneficial bill will be able to gain that level of support. If it doesn’t gain enough support, it wasn’t a good enough bill.

No cheating! A good piece of legislation that benefits the entire country, and has broad bipartisan support, should not be a mechanism that members can load with pork-barrel items or items to benefit partisan goals. 

Trying to get a pork feature passed by tagging it onto a very good piece of legislation, hoping it will slide through if people are afraid to vote the good legislation down to prevent the bad feature from getting through, is blackmail.

No riders or amendments should be allowed that are not directly related to the topic of the legislation.

And while we are improving things, we need to remember that whatever the job is, the best qualified people are who deserve that job. If they are all men or all women, or all black, or all Asian, or all Latina, or all white or any combination of those groups, those who have displayed the highest level of competence and actual ability for the job in question are who should get the job.