- The Critical Issue
With all of the concerns about the Trump Administration, from Russian influence to Mob connections to manipulations of social media; the biggest concern to the United States is the least exciting. The Critical Issue: what is the state of our electoral infrastructure, and beyond that, the state of the rest of our energy, industrial and transportation controls.
Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear through testimony that the Russians were attempting to “hack” our voting system. That’s no easy task: not only is the US electoral system divided into 51 separate entities, both most of those entities are further divided into counties and parishes. In Ohio there are 89 electoral systems, one for each county, and a statewide interface. Multiply that by all of the states and the District of Columbia, and we have some security through diversification.
In addition, the states are highly jealous of their powers when it comes to elections, and as former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said last week, are very concerned that any Federal “help’ would come at the price of loss of control.
To my disappointment, the reaction to a critical infrastructure designation, at least from those who spoke up, ranged from neutral to negative. Those who expressed negative views stated that running elections in this country was the sovereign and exclusive responsibility of the states, and they did not want federal intrusion, a federal takeover, or federal regulation of that process.
http://kpvu.org/post/security-state-election-systems-focus-dueling-capitol-hill-hearings
Conservatives view this as a serious intrusion of the Federal Government. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank financed by the Mellon and Coors families among others, outlines the concern:
Given the lack of a credible threat of a cyber-attack, there could be another explanation for what DHS is doing. But designating election systems as “critical infrastructure” could grant Secretary Jeh Johnson, Department of Homeland Security officials, and officials at the Department of Justice access to any and every election and to any and every voting location they “deem” threatened. The government would be able to police the systems, and could demand changes be made to election and voting systems regardless of the views of local officials.
Given all of this, it is known that the Russians attacked in at least twenty-one states (and probably more) and gained access to at least two systems, one in Illinois and one in North Carolina. While it is stated (over and over) that there is no evidence that actual votes were changed, it is certainly not clear that the necessary investigations have been made to find out. The current Department of Homeland Security will not disclose the states where hacks were attempted (other than already known North Carolina and Illinois.) Their argument is they don’t want to “embarrass” those states and perhaps restrict future cooperation.
So, here’s what we have: the biggest possible threat to US infrastructure – a real and credible threat – election hacking. A system so scattered as to be difficult to attack, but even more difficult to defend. Every state (and county) jealously protecting their own power to control voting procedures, and a Federal Government afraid to embarrass those jurisdictions. And, the knowledge that two states and one software producer for multiple states (VR in Florida) were hacked. We know Russians had access to voting registration programming, we don’t know (though it seems very possible in North Carolina) whether that access created damage.
Here’s what we don’t have: we don’t know what the Russians were able to do, and we aren’t going to find out if we are afraid of someone being “embarrassed.” We also don’t know, because there is a lot of power vested in not “disturbing” the current system. If, for example, it was found that Russians hacked voter databases (or worse) in three critical states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan; then it would call into question the Trump “mandate” from the electoral college. It is also true that the majority of state election officials are Republican, and are not excited about finding information which would call the election into question.
In a less partisan sense, we need to know what the Russians did, how they did it, and what effect it had nationwide. The foundation of our democracy is that election results are valid. Even more than that, we need to know that our other infrastructures: power, transportation, communication, stock and commodities markets; are protected from this same kind of attack. We can’t do that by closing our eyes or worrying about the legitimacy of the Trump Presidency; we need to know, and we need to fix what’s broke. That’s the critical issue.
