Wednesday, June 21, 2017

GOP votes to kill Free Election Recounts confirming Election Integrity; don't care about Election Hacking at all.

Anyone think the following seems a bit odd for a party obsessed with voter fraud and clean elections?

1. If Republicans care so much about voter confidence in the integrity of our elections, then why are they trying to block free voter recounts paid for by losing candidates. It's backs up their claims, doesn't it? 
AP: The state Assembly is set to vote on a bill that would make it far more difficult to request election recounts in Wisconsin ... amid anger from some Republicans that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was able to request a recount in Wisconsin last year even though she finished a distant fourth ... only candidates who trail the winner by 1 percentage point or less in statewide elections could petition for a recount. Gov. Scott Walker has signaled his support for the measure.
2. If Republicans care so much about voter confidence in the integrity of our elections, then why aren't they worried about having a hacked voting machine system? Seriously, they've never mentioned it, not once. Could there be another reason for their voter ID laws?

Even if most voting machines aren't connected to the Internet, says cybersecurity expert Jeremy Epstein, "they are connected to something that's connected to something that's connected to the Internet."

A recently leaked National Security Agency report on Russian hacking attempts has heightened concerns. According to the report, Russian intelligence services broke into an election software vendor's computer system and used the information it gained to send 122 election officials fake emails infected with malicious software. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that Russia might have attempted to hack into election systems in up to 39 states.

University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman says it's just the kind of phishing campaign someone would launch if they wanted to manipulate votes. "That's because before every election, the voting machines have to be programmed with the design of the ballots — what are the races, who are the candidates. So as a remote attacker, I can target an election management system, one of these ballot programming computers. If I can infect it with malicious software, I can have that malicious software spread to the individual machines on the memory cards, and then change votes on Election Day.”
Anti-Government Lunacy: The biggest reason for letting the hacking continue, maybe even get worse?
FBI Director James Comey has warned that Russia will try once again to influence U.S. elections, possibly as early as next year. To prepare, the federal government has declared elections to be a part of the nation's critical infrastructure that demands special attention.

But the federal government's focus has state and local election officials, who are very protective of how they do things now, extremely nervous. They're mainly concerned that the federal government will tell them how to run their elections — even down to where polling sites should be located — in the name of security.

While two states — Arizona and Illinois — had their voter registration systems infiltrated last year by Russian hackers, no records were deleted or changed. And no actual votes were affected, despite signs that Russia had scanned election systems in at least 20 states. "The voting process itself was not hacked, manipulated or rigged in any way."

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