2020 election – USA Gov Policy

One of the most significant threats to the integrity of the 2020 election can be wholly avoided.

In July, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stressed that there was an immediate need to secure America’s voting systems. Its key recommendations were that states replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems with a voter-verified paper trail and use statistically sound audits.

In August, the Brennan Center reported that:

“The lifespan of electronic voting machines can vary, but experts agree that systems over a decade old are more likely to need to be replaced for security and reliability reasons. We estimate that in November 2018, 34 percent of all local election jurisdictions were using voting machines that were at least 10 years old as their primary polling place equipment (or as their primary tabulation equipment in all vote-by-mail jurisdictions). This number includes counties and towns in 41 states…11 states use paperless machines as their primary polling place equipment in at least some counties and towns… As both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and National Academy of Sciences have noted, we should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible.”

There is a salient question. American democracy did quite well before the advent of electronic voting machines. Why was there a sudden rush to “fix” a system that wasn’t broken, indeed, was actually the envy of every free nation on Earth?

Steve Levy, writing for Fox News, offers one explanation why states rushed to electronic voting. “A cottage industry of electronic voting machine manufacturers swooped in on every state capitol, with ample campaign contributions in tow. Before you knew it, it wasn’t a question of whether states would purchase these machines, but which bells-and-whistles version they would choose… Why would we jeopardize the integrity of our electoral process for no valid reason? Electronic machines were not enough for the tech set. Online voting would revolutionize the franchise, they said. Amazingly, 32 states to this day permit some form of online balloting, despite warnings the systems are not secure. An analysis by Silicon Valley executives warned that “potential criminal electronic attacks on computer software, such as destructive ‘viruses’ or ‘Trojan Horse’ software, create a serious threat to Internet voting.” In 2004, the Pentagon canceled a proposed Internet voting program for overseas military personnel due concerns about hacking. And in 2010, a University of Michigan professor answered a challenge made by the Board of Elections in Washington, D.C., which was testing a new Internet voting device in a mock election. The professor hacked it within 36 hours.”

In a study, Election Defsense.org explained that “The use of computers prevents observation and makes elections vulnerable to fraud in new and profound ways compared to older technologies… When technicians handle systems for non-technical staff, this opens the door to fraud… E[electronic] vote systems are easily corrupted.

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“Computerized elections are a political problem. The Resolution on Electronic Voting, endorsed by thousands of computer technologists, says ‘Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering.’ Every study of electronic voting has said that systems from the major vendors are insecure and of poor quality.

“In spite of all this, few government officials with responsibility for elections are heeding the constant stream of warnings about electronic voting, and the expressed distrust of voters. The major media and many officials are still urging us to convert to electronic voting. In 2004 Americans witnessed an overwhelming incidence of dirty tricks and failures of our election infrastructure, and the use of unverifiable and unverified computers is part of this failure.”

A Stanford University examination of the problem provides information that concurs with Election Defense.

“Opponents [of electronic voting] do not feel that the voting basics can be maintained in an electronic voting system. The arguments have been divided into 3 general categories of complaints: issues with the technology, vast possibilities of fraud, and protection of voters and their votes.

“As Bruce Schneier describes it, technology adds more steps to the process and thus increases the possibility of error with each additional step, all of which are largely unseen by the voter. Put Murphy’s Law of ‘whatever can go wrong, will go wrong’ into play, and one can surmise that technology will most likely falter. Not only does the technology create more errors in the electronic workings, but the voters can also commit mistakes due to confusion with the user interface. The terminology is confusing, different machines produce different interfaces, and even the audio guides to help the disabled may prove more confusing than helpful. With the advent of electronic machine voting also comes the higher possibilities of fraudulent machines and practices.”

Election Defense Suggests returning to lever machines with paper backups, paper ballots and precinct-count optical scanners.

Photo: A voting machine (Wikipedia)

In most elections, voters worry about candidates lying to them. In the 2020 presidential campaign, they should worry about what would happen if some of the Democrat candidates win, and actually fulfill their promises. Some of those candidates are astute enough to realize that the last Democrat administration made a mess of things, and seek to distance themselves from Obama’s record.

A number of those candidates rather openly tout their socialist inclinations. It’s an odd choice, considering the history of economic disaster, mass murder, and human rights violations that characterizes socialist regimes. Despite that, some of twenty or so candidates seeking the Democratic nomination can hardly hide their enthusiasm for the extreme left.

Bernie Sanders is the godfather of the acceptance of socialism in mainstream politics. Many feel sympathetic because he was, to a significant extent, robbed of the 2016 nomination thanks to what can accurately be called the usual dirty tricks of the Clinton machine. A taste of the end result of his policies can be seen in his own campaign: he couldn’t afford to give his workers the minimum wage he wants the nation to adopt, without cutting their hours.

Some flamboyantly endorse extremism. NYC mayor Bill De Blasio has quoted the Cuban Communist revolutionary, Che Guevara. Nigel Jones, writing in The Telegraph notes:

“Guevara was jailer and executioner-in-chief of Castro’s dictatorship. As boss of the notorious La Cabaña prison in Havana, he supervised the detention, interrogation, summary trials and execution of hundreds of “class enemies”…There have been some 16,000 such executions since the Castro brothers, Guevara and their merry men swept into Havana in January 1959. About 100,000 Cubans who have fallen foul of the regime have been jailed. Two million others have succeeded in escaping Castro’s socialist paradise, while an estimated 30,000 have died in the attempt.”

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De Blasio cheered on the Communists in Nicaragua even as the USSR sought to turn that nation into an armed base for its military.

The Middle East is still paying the price for the foreign policies of the last Democrat Administration. President Obama prematurely pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, creating the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to become a significant power. He followed that up with, for reasons that have yet to be explained, a policy of appeasement and open tilting towards Iran, a mistake of epic proportions for which the world continues to pay. Added to the disastrous weakening of U.S. armed forces, and a failure to adequately respond to Russian and Chinese aggression, his foreign policies, largely supported by the current crop of Democrat candidates, made the planet far more perilous.

One doesn’t have to look to world politics to understand how detrimental an impact some of those candidates could have.

The Competitive Enterprise institute analyzed the cost of the environmental policies Democrat candidates espouse on American households: “American households can expect tens of thousands of dollars in higher costs for energy, housing, transportation, and shipping if the Green New Deal is implemented…each household in five model states – Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania – will be on the hook for more than $70,000 in increased costs for electricity, upgrading vehicles and housing, and shipping in just the first year under the Green New Deal.”

A sample of what to expect if the Democrat candidates win can be seen in Democrat-run cities. Baltimore, the focal point of a rather heated and ongoing exchange between President Trump and Rep. Elijah Cummings. was recently described by Tammy Bruce in the Washington Times / as a city that has been “kneecapped by 20th- and 21st century liberal policies reducing it to a hopeless, poverty-stricken, rat-infested, murderous town. But this is not a unique story; this is the trajectory we’ve seen in every liberal-run city in this country. The people of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit and New York, among others, all know what the people of Baltimore are going through.”

An Investors Business Daily review notes that “America is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democratic mayors for decades… When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward… establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster.”

It’s a scenario that would be writ large for the nation as a whole if the Democrats recapture the White House in 2020.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Ukraine’s Frozen Conflict

As we approach winter in the northern hemisphere, the war in Ukraine is beginning to resemble a “frozen conflict” from many perspectives. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently told the media he hopes the war will end faster once President-elect Trump takes over in January. Opinions in Moscow, however, differ from that of the Ukrainian leader. Russian President Vladimir Putin argues that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needs to exclude Ukraine from joining in “exchange” for peace. If it does not, he says, then no end to the war is in sight. So far there is no Christmas solution. Several NATO countries, according to Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation, are tentatively considering “coalitions-of-the-willing” to provide security for Ukraine outside of the formal NATO framework. There is, however, no collective mechanism today under which such an arrangement is viable. According to the NATO Charter, while Ukraine is a NATO partner country, it may not join as a full member since it has not fulfilled the requirements for membership. That has not stopped NATO and allies from continuing “to provide Ukraine with unprecedented levels of support, helping to uphold its fundamental right to self-defence,” according to the organization. Socor says that keeping Ukraine out of NATO will not advance peace with Russia. Waiting for a peace settlement, he suggests, would only serve to encourage Moscow to continue the war indefinitely. Although the Biden Administration officially withdrew its support for Ukrainian membership in 2021, NATO maintains an “open door” policy toward membership-seeking countries. The current White House position led the way for European states to oppose Ukraine’s membership saying that a decision should be delayed until “conditions are met.” Biden pushed for changing “open door” to a “bridge” metaphor. It is not intended as an across-the-board NATO policy and has been implemented in the past on a case-by-case basis, says Socor. “The alliance’s open-door policy was not fully insulated from Russia’s non-statutory blocking power, and NATO-aspirant countries’ path toward membership was not always irreversible.” Russia has successfully blocked states like Georgia from joining, first in 2008 and again after the war in Ukraine began in 2014. Russia recognizes the value add of Ukraine to NATO is enormous and that Kyiv has a better case than some other nations. Putin’s invasion was, in part, intended to foreclose that option. By 2021, Moscow was pushing hard to maximize its war objectives, which included further annexations of Ukrainian territory. A main goal for Putin was, and is, to ensure there is no Ukraine left to join NATO. As President-elect Trump prepares to assume office in January, he is faced with the historical challenges presented by the war. Post-conflict security guarantees were the center of several proposals made during the 2023 military stalemate. The incoming Trump Administration has yet to outline how it intends to handle the Russia-Ukraine war. Analysts in Washington believe that the new Administration will expect its European allies to guarantee the majority of Ukraine’s security needs. As we approach 2025, several European nations have acknowledged that they do not view Ukraine as eligible for NATO membership as it would draw the organization into the middle of the conflict. Others want to wait until the war is over or pending a “peace” settlement before considering Ukrainian membership. Socor reports that some “influential voices” are suggesting that “Kyiv should join NATO after “freezing” the war along a stable armistice line, de facto accepting Ukraine’s partition, with NATO security guarantees applying de jure to the government-controlled territory only.” This would mean starting accession talks soon with the actual talks to commence only after a ceasefire is in place. Trump arrives in Washington at a time when Putin’s hybrid strategies of war in Ukraine have eviscerated commonly-held differences between war and peace. “Absent a political consensus in NATO over Ukrainian membership, certain European allies, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, are holding informal consultations about post-conflict security guarantees to Kyiv by NATO members outside of NATO’s framework,” according to the Jamestown Foundation. The Biden Administration downplayed the discussions on possible forms of military assistance and defense industry cooperation by sending only an Assistant Secretary of State. For a European peace to hold the Trump Administration would need to formally extend the United States’ nuclear deterrence to Ukraine. Options under discussion in Europe include a “coalition of the resolute” to deploy forces to Ukraine as part of a possible armistice package, deterring further Russian attacks, says Secor. European officials are also debating, without any agreement, whether its military forces could perform non-combat logistical roles to free Ukrainian forces to fight. None of the possible courses of action has moved forward as all eyes are waiting on the incoming Trump Administration for clues about its intended level of support for a NATO framework and other non-NATO proposals. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.