DHS plans urgently needed to address identified challenges before 2020 elections [pdf]

when viewed from a sludge-money lens (a la the F35) electronic voting and election security seem largely working as intended:

- we know paper works (Canada/UK) so there must be an ulterior motive for pushing on tech solution so hard

- money gets sent to various entities under the guise of tech, security, freedom, etc. (contracts for voting machines, contracts for software, etc.). this basically gives some limited air cover for transfer of funds to entities

- it nicely feeds into itself: defensive work always needs to keep up with (real or imagined) offensive threats so basically unlimited amounts can be spent without too much eye rolling

- it is basically a get out of jail free card for both political parties in the future: "elections were hacked" is bipartisan and can be a useful tool to defeat/deny access to popular party outsiders on both parties, as opposed to a genuine candidate blowing up the system (Sanders?)

- any foreign entity can be conveniently used if e.g. need to get a quick war going to distract the plebs from, say, medical parasitism or offshoring jobs

It's about keeping non-citizens who don't have the right to vote from voting. Not implementing these laws diminishes the enfranchised.

Nope, just another form of Poll tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...

The discussion over paper vs. electronic ballots tends to miss many of the largest issues in election security. DHS is correct in pointing out that we need a focus on the larger landscape of election support infrastructure. Notably, electronic pollbooks are a very important part of the voting system which cannot readily be replaced with a non-digital solution. Simply switching to paper ballots reduces the problem, but does not by any means eliminate it.

Calls for paper ballots also tend to get muddled up in the realities of how ballots are counted. When paper ballots are used, they are virtually always still counted by computer using an OMR. A precinct tabulating solution, which is widely used in the US right now, simply moves the OMR from the central election office out into the polling place, and is broadly equivalent from a security perspective to what most people would call a "pure paper" solution except that the environmental exposure of the OMRs is higher because of their presence in field voting locations. However, security measures used to protect centralized OMR in jurisdictions without precinct tabulators are not necessarily any better than OMRs out in the field. In fact, precinct tabulators are generally built with significantly improved anti-tamper mechanisms compared to the older central tabulators. These measures aren't perfect of course, but it is a matter of tamper seals, cryptographic signatures, and audit tapes used by precinct tabulators as compared to absolutely no anti-tamper measures in many centralized tabulators used by jurisdictions with what many people would call "completely non-digital" voting.

While it is possible to tally the ballots by hand without the assistance of OMR, and there are organizations which advocate for this, it is an extremely expensive proposal and it's actually fairly hard to argue that it is superior to a well operated OMR approach - even in the case of hand-tallying of ballots, audit recount should still be performed to ensure accuracy and integrity in the (recently recruited online, poorly paid, minimally trained, and very hurried) election officials.

Judging from Iowa, I imagine that some primary Sanders wins will claim to have been hacked by Russians. Democratic Party operatives were already doing false flag “Kremlin” stuff during the Doug Jones race in Alabama:

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/23/how-new-york-times-scott-...