The Midterm Elections Are in Serious Danger of Being Hacked, Thanks to Trump

[babylonsister]

The Midterm Elections Are in Serious Danger of Being Hacked, Thanks to Trump
Why has the White House and its GOP allies in Congress done so little to combat the threat?
AJ Vicens and Pema LevySeptember/October 2018 Issue

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According to an analysis by the group Verified Voting, 15 states still use paperless ballots for some voters, five of them statewide. In a world where even sophisticated systems are routinely penetrated, 41 states use voter registration databases that are more than a decade old, and 43 states use equipment that is no longer manufactured. Only Colorado mandates the sort of postelection audit backed by most cybersecurity experts.

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Republicans have chosen not to tackle the threat, congressional Democrats say, in part because the subject upsets the president and his base, a decision that looks ever more disastrous as Trump continues to downplay the attacks and refuses to confront Putin over them. Democrats have introduced a number of bills to strengthen election security—and found precious few Republicans willing to sign on. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, agreed to co-­sponsor the PAPER Act alongside Langevin, to encourage the creation of nationwide cybersecurity recommendations while pushing paper ballot trails and postelection audits. But the bill, along with a similar Senate measure backed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), still awaits a hearing, and there’s no reason to expect either will move forward; while Langevin continues to push the measure, Meadows has been mum. In the Senate, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to back legislation distributing security grants to local jurisdictions and closing a loophole allowing private election software and hardware vendors to keep attacks on their products secret. But the bill remains bottled up.

Left to go it alone, House Democrats put forth a bill in February allocating $1.7 billion to elections, including funding for paper ballots, audits, and new machines. That same month, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats came to Capitol Hill to say the threat was ongoing and likely to get worse: “Frankly, the United States is under attack.” Russia and others, Coats warned, “are likely to pursue even more aggressive cyberattacks.” Weeks later, Rogers joined the chorus, telling a congressional committee that “Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there’s little price to pay here and that therefore ‘I can continue this activity…’ What we have done hasn’t been enough.” Despite such warnings from Trump’s own intelligence advisers, the overwhelming majority of Republicans have declined to engage.

“We have over 100 co-sponsors now,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, says of the Democrats’ February bill. “To date, there’s not a single Republican.” Most Republicans won’t touch such legislation, Thompson says, because of their “absolute fear of being on the wrong side of Donald Trump.” In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee—which has been extensively briefed on Russia’s 2016 actions—encouraged states to use paper trails and urged funding to help implement postelection audits. That same month, Congress finally made $380 million available for election improvement, but lawmakers failed to require that the paltry sum actually be spent on security.

“Probably the decimal point was in the wrong spot,” Quigley, the Illinois Democrat, deadpanned during an interview with Mother Jones. “It should have been more like $3.8 billion.”

Some Republican senators, in line with the views of many secretaries of state, insist the federal government has no business getting involved in elections. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) disagrees, arguing that foreign attacks make protecting our elections a matter of national defense: “You wouldn’t say to the state of Iowa or Minne­sota, ‘Well, why don’t you fund an aircraft carrier just in case someone comes into Lake Superior?’” Republicans agreed to put the $380 million toward the problem, Klobuchar says, in part because some realized election hacking could affect them too. During a March 2017 Senate hearing, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) revealed that his presidential campaign staffers had been targeted from suspected Russian IP addresses.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/the-midterm-elections-are-in-serious-danger-of-being-hacked-thanks-to-trump/

[samnsara]

1. i love my state! Paper ballots...all mail in...legal pot....

...Patty Murray..Maria Cantwell and.... ta da...Jay Inslee!....and ...sigh....the seahawks.

[mythology]

2. None of that would do anything meaningful

Russia didn't change actual votes. We have hand recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan that demonstrate that.

What Russia did was hack the electorate. They used psychology to target specific demographics to prime them to either vote Trump or at least not Clinton. That is what should be targeted for greater defense. Targeting the counting machines is a red herring. Maybe better protecting registration systems would make the targeting harder, but Facebook etc has more than enough data to give people very precisely targeted ads anyway.