“The department said it has completed on-site risk assessments of election systems in just nine of 17 states that have formally requested them so far. It has pledged to do so by November for every state that asks.”
Gonna be tough to do when you have just one part-time employee assigned to this (can’t have a full-time person - cost of benefits, you know), who has no IT degree, but who does have some major experience playing video games.
“We are trying to be as prepared as we can possibly be with our existing partners,” Merrill said. “We want to keep every option open that we have.”
He added “We think we can rely on the traditional, time tested Alabama solutions to restricting the votes of the - - - those people. We don’t need to import technology from - other places.”
From time to time you get stories about how vulnerable electronic voting systems are, including vulnerabilities in Pennsylvania that were not repaired after a widely publicized stunt. Of course, vulnerable is only important to the loser of the election. Now that every election is subject to the cheap, effective and fully deniable hacking of social media, protecting the legitimacy of the vote requires 1) an auditable paper trail (paper ballots), and 2) some metric of the siloing of the population. A sure sign of siloing is when you see people who otherwise seem to have exposure to similar experience in the real world, nevertheless behave in wildly different ways with an election’s approach.
Of the other states holding primaries on Tuesday, the traditional battlegrounds of North Carolina and Ohio said they had received on-site reviews by Homeland Security. The fourth state, West Virginia, declined to say when asked by the AP.
Because Deep State, right? Oy…
Two of the states targeted in 2016 — Alabama and Oklahoma — have yet to request a DHS security review.
Their GOP administrations aren’t worried: the Russians were pro-Trump, right?
No point in fixing things that already work the way you want them to.