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 Its key recommendations were that states replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems with a voter-verified paper trail and use statistically sound audits.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

Part 2: America’s Strategic Posture

As we noted in Part 1, the dramatically deteriorating national security picture for the United States and its allies prompted a review of “America’s Strategic Posture.” We present Part 2, reviewing key strategic points. STRATEGY To achieve the most effective strategy for stability in light of the 2027-2035 threat environment, the Commission identifies three necessary changes: ` The United States must develop and effectively implement a truly integrated, whole-of-government strategy to address the 2027-2035 threat environment. The objectives of U.S. strategy must include effective deterrence and defeat of simultaneous Russian and Chinese aggression in Europe and Asia using conventional forces. If the United States and its Allies and partners do not field sufficient conventional forces to achieve this objective, U.S. strategy would need to be altered to increase reliance on nuclear weapons to deter or counter opportunistic or collaborative aggression in the other theater. ` The size and composition of the nuclear force must account for the possibility of combined aggression from Russia and China. U.S. strategy should no longer treat China’s nuclear forces as a “lesser included” threat. The United States needs a nuclear posture capable of simultaneously deterring both countries. The Commission recommends the United States maintain a nuclear strategy consistent with the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), based on six fundamental tenets—assured second strike, flexible response, tailored deterrence, extended deterrence and assurance, calculated ambiguity in declaratory policy, hedge against risk—and apply these tenets to address the 2027-2035 threat. STRATEGIC POSTURE In the context of a strategic posture deploying both conventional and nuclear capability, the Commission believes the traditional role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy remains valid and of continuing importance: deterrence of adversaries; assurance of Allies; achieving U.S. objectives should deterrence fail; and hedging against adverse events. The Commission recommends fully and urgently executing the U.S. nuclear modernization Program of Record (POR), which includes replacement of all U.S. nuclear delivery systems, modernization of their warheads, comprehensive modernization of U.S. nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3), and recapitalizing the nuclear enterprise infrastructure at the DOD and DOE/NNSA. The current modernization program should be supplemented to ensure U.S. nuclear strategy remains effective in a two-nuclear-peer environment. Comprehensive risk-mitigating actions across U.S. nuclear forces must be executed to ensure that delays in modernization programs or early age-out of currently deployed systems do not result in militarily significant shortfalls in deployed nuclear capability. The U.S. strategic nuclear force posture should be modified to: ` Address the larger number of targets due to the growing Chinese nuclear threat. ` Address the possibility that China will field large-scale, counterforce-capable missile forces that pose a threat to U.S. strategic nuclear forces on par with the threat Russia poses to those forces today. ` Assure the United States continues to avoid reliance on executing Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launch under attack to retain an effective deterrent. ` Account for advances in Russian and Chinese integrated air and missile defenses (IAMD). The U.S. theater nuclear force posture should be urgently modified to: ` Provide the President a range of militarily effective nuclear response options to deter or counter Russian or Chinese limited nuclear use in theater. ` Address the need for U.S. theater nuclear forces deployed or based in the Asia-Pacific theater. ` Compensate for any shortfall in U.S. and allied non-nuclear capabilities in a sequential or simultaneous two-theater conflict against Russia and China. ` Address advances in Russian and Chinese IAMD. NUCLEAR SECURITY ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION The Commission recommends the DOD and DOE/NNSA strategic infrastructure be expanded to have sufficient capacity to: ` Meet the capability and schedule requirements of the current nuclear modernization POR and the requirements of the force posture modifications recommended by the Commission in time to address the two-peer threat. ` Provide an effective hedge against four forms of risk: technical failure of a warhead or delivery system, programmatic delays, operational loss of delivery systems, and further deterioration of the geopolitical environment. ` Flex to respond to emerging requirements in a timely fashion. To support the proposed strategy, the Commission recommends Congress fund an overhaul and expansion of the capacity of the U.S. nuclear weapons defense industrial base and the DOE/NNSA nuclear security enterprise, including weapons science, design, and production infrastructure. Specifically: ` Congress should fund the full range of NNSA’s recapitalization efforts, such as pit production and all operations related to critical materials. ` Congress should forge and sustain bipartisan consensus and year-to-year funding stability to enable the defense industry to respond to innovative DOD contracting approaches and invest with more certainty. ` Congress should enact annual DOD and DOE authorization and appropriation bills before the beginning of each fiscal year. ` Congress should place the purview of all “050” programs (President’s Budget line item for “national security”) that are in NNSA under Defense appropriations subcommittees (House Appropriations Committee-Defense (HAC-D), Senate Appropriations Committee Defense (SAC-D). ` Cabinet Secretaries, working with states and union leaders, should establish and increase the technical education and vocational training programs required to create the nation’s necessary skilled-trades workforce for the nuclear enterprise. The Commission recommends a number of specific actions to expand the capacity and effectiveness of the nation’s infrastructure and supply chain for its strategic capabilities. The Report concludes tomorrow Photo: Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, speaks with members from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as industry leaders at the NORAD and USNORTHCOM headquarters on Peterson Space Force Base, Colo.(DoD)