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 Its key recommendations were that states replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems with a voter-verified paper trail and use statistically sound audits.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

Putin’s Saber Rattling

Earlier this week, President Biden reversed his 2022 decision, authorizing the provision of antipersonnel land mines to the Ukrainian government. It follows an earlier Administration authorization to allow the use of an advanced American missile system capable of striking as deep as 100 miles inside Russian territory. The US election season may be ending, but both Russia and the West show no indication of stepping down the conflict. Russian propaganda continues to swell as the Kremlin increases its threats to use nuclear weapons against the West. Last week Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the pro-Kremlin think tank Valdai Discussion Club (VDC), published an article on growing nuclear tensions in the region. Official Russian language in the last few years has been threatening. Since the US election, rhetoric like that in the Sushentsov article, has approached the level of nuclear blackmail. The VDC article’s main theme centers on Russia’s intent to directly confront the West militarily if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) becomes involved in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. “On the one hand, these threats are intended to frighten the West, but on the other, Russian propagandists themselves are starting to believe in the inevitability of escalation,” according to Ksenia Kirillova of the Jamestown Foundation. On November 11, Sushentsov wrote that “The conflict will reach a completely new level, with unpredictable consequences for Europe and the entire world.” Kirillova points out that Putin’s distorted image of the world is divorced from reality and is causing the Kremlin to issue demands that are impossible to fulfill. Financial and other Russian resources needed to support Putin’s war are growing scarcer at the same time. This week the Kremlin announced a reduction of payments to its soldiers. Recently North Korea acknowledged it was sending soldiers to fight in Ukraine as Putin is running out of bodies to use as cannon fire. The war is not going well for Russia. One question floating around the Washington intelligence community is whether Putin will act out of desperation before President-elect Trump assumes office. In recent months the Russian propaganda machine is spewing out materials from fairly reputable analytical platforms inside the country. Kirillova says that “Kremlin ‘experts’ do not conceal that such threats are only intended to break the West psychologically, as they themselves are not prepared for full-scale nuclear war.” Despite Russia’s lack of preparation for an all-out war with the West, the expanding nuclear rhetoric carries with it an increase in the threat of a full-scale war in multiple theaters of operation. In June 2023 a founder of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Sergey Karaganov, called for “delivering a pre-emptive strike of retaliation” on Poland to force the West to surrender. In the previous month, Dmitry Suslov, a direct of research programs at the policy center proposed organizing “a demonstration nuclear explosion” aimed at intimidating the West. In September, President Putin announced a reappraisal of Russian nuclear doctrine after speaking earlier in the year at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum and jokingly calling Suslov a “scary person.” Pavel Baev, writing in the European Daily Monitor, says “Putin intends his announcement to mark an escalation of nuclear brinkmanship and influence the proceedings of future Ukrainian peace efforts.” Putin is expanding the list of environmental conditions that are acceptable for using a nuclear weapon and incorporating it into Russian military doctrine. Baev adds that “The ups and downs of Russian brinkmanship are disconnected from the kinetic battles of the war, correlating instead with Ukrainian peace offensives, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s first peace summit in Bürgenstock, Switzerland.” Despite the increase in vitriolic language, in a You Tube video published a week before the US presidential election, Karaganov openly assured the West the primary goal of the escalation is to break the American spirit and that of the West, not outright nuclear war. By Election Day in the US, with political prognosticators predicting a win for former president Trump, Karaganov changed his tune and called for an increased role in nuclear deterrence. Kirillova points out that Western concessions to Russia are unlikely to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. The distorted reality inside the Kremlin continues to push that President-elect Trump is an adherent of “world government,” that Ukraine will create a nuclear weapon, and Russia must prepare for a nuclear conflagration to achieve its ambitions for a new world order. President-elect Trump has indicated he will not agree to concessions that destabilize Europe, the Middle East or other regions. Going forward a strong US foreign policy may be the most stabilizing course the West can count on to restrain Putin and his intent to rebuild the Russian empire. Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept. Illustration: Pixabay

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