Sorry guys, simply having your voting systems off of the internet won’t protect you from Nation-state caliber hackers. It’s called crossing the “air gap”… malicious software hitching a ride on USB drives, etc during updates or whatever. Governments like our own do this every day. Google “STUXNET” for a case study, and secure our systems accordingly.
Hint: A lot of paper and pencils aren’t a bad idea, and MANDATORY hand recounts of the paper to “certify” an election are a must.
These data breaches are the equivalent of pissing in the communion cup at church. If we can’t believe in what we are taking part of, even through one cycle, we wind up with Dump’s vision of a president-for-life. I wonder if Mitch and the GOPuke secretaries of state who opposed ballot security to get their man selected can enjoy it at this point.
Thank goodness they jumped right on this problem as soon as they could. They don’t let the grass grow in Illinois, do they? /s
Let’s just go back to everything being done with a paper trail…ballots, voter rolls in paper books, paper, paper, paper…and probably a lot of No. 2 pencils.
At this point, I’m starting to look back at paper chads with nostalgia for the good ole bad days. At least we had actual human beings looking at those stupid things to determine some kind of intent…and boy-howdy was that fucked up by those people in Brooks Brothers suits. I don’t know. Right now we’re at the mercy of people that aren’t being given adequate resources to combat this shit, and some, probably willing to look the other way if it benefits their own personal party preferences.
All technology lends itself to potential chicanery. The voting systems seem to have advanced beyond some strict legal measures to deal with actual problems of interference when they arise…but mostly out of complacency, political monkey-business, last minute fixes, and a serious lack of will by people attempting to corrupt the system to gain advantage in the first place.
I really think few people understand what we’re up against in the grand scheme of things. Those that do, that could determine a viable solution, are rarely getting the kind of important attention needed as to how menacing this problem is in determining election outcomes. Most people in the general public don’t have a very good understanding of how fraught all these systems are, or how easily they can be hijacked on a multitude of levels, at all stages of the process, from voter registration to actual casting of a ballot. A lot of people ignored any serious concern over actual voter tallies going back to the days when Diebold was in the news. Its so much worse now with Russia’s meddling (and a few too many American plutocrat billionaires) in our elections. Now that its at the registration level and the actual voter rolls being altered, we are sure to experience a far greater fuckup, with no relief in sight.
Republicans are scum in allowing this to continue without serious attention being paid to this problem.