Monday, October 22, 2012

NY Times: "WA State Voter Registration Flawed and Vulnerable"

Print Friendly Version of this pagePrint Get a PDF version of this webpagePDF
This election carries a lot of emotion.

A number of people are speculating there will be riots following the election that may disrupt the entire country. This concern is based on a number of polls, particularly one by PEW that found 86% of all Americans are either "angry" or "frustrated" with the federal government.

Earlier this year, USA Today published an article that said, "More than 24 million voter-registration records in the United States— about one in eight — are inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead."

USA Today published a column yesterday saying that voter fraud has been downplayed by those who oppose voter ID, but the evidence they use is very thin and that, in fact, voter registration is extremely vulnerable.

They said, "Chaotic voter registration rolls make it easy to commit voter fraud." They say voter fraud is so easy that "James O'Keefe released a video of a 22-year-old undercover reporter who obtained Attorney General Eric Holder's ballot in Washington DC, and could easily have voted if he chosen to."

There is so much focus on voter fraud that The Hill is reporting that, "United Nations--affiliated monitors from Europe and central Asia will be at polling places around the US looking for voter suppression activities by conservative groups."

The Hill reports, "The observers, from countries such as Germany, France, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, will observe voting at polling places and other political activity."

Giovanna Maiola, spokeswoman for the UN oversight activity, told The Hill, “They [will] observe the overall election process, not just the ballot casting. They are focusing on a number of areas on the state level, including the legal system, election administration, the campaign, the campaign financing [and] new voting technologies used in the different states.”

Welcome to America where our voting is overseen by the United Nations, because far left progressives are concerned about the elections.

Secretary of State Sam Reed's office is telling us that Washington State has 3.9 million registered voters this election---an all time high. He predicts 81% of them will vote.

In this cloud of corruption, the New York Times is reporting that the voter registration in Washington State is flawed and vulnerable.


The New York Times is reporting, "In the last five years, Maryland and Washington State have set up voter registration systems that make it easy for people to register to vote and update their address information online. The problem is that in both states, all the information required from voters to log in to the system is publicly available."

They say it took them less than three minutes to track down the information online needed to update the registrations of several prominent executives in Washington State. Complete voter lists, which include a name, birth date, addresses and party affiliation, can be easily bought — and are, right now, in the hands of thousands of campaign volunteers.

They say a hacker could use that information to, say, change a person’s address online to ensure that the voter never receives a ballot in Washington, where voting is now done entirely by mail.

The Times says, "But the real concern, critics say, is that large numbers of voters from one political party, or demographic, could have their information changed by automated computer programs. A program that could change tens of thousands of voter records at once, they say, would require only a dozen lines of code."

Critics say that hackers could use botnets, networks of infected computers, to change voters’ addresses. And new machine learning technologies can beat captchas, or people can be paid to type them in, in real time, for as a little as a penny per captcha or less.

“They could influence an election with 20,000 votes for less than a penny a head,” said J. Alex Halderman, one of the computer scientists who first discovered Washington’s loophole. “That would be a great return on investment for them.”

Last week, Mr. Halderman, David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and Barbara Simons, a retired IBM computer scientist, sent a letter to Washington election officials with seven recommendations for security.

Shane Hamlin, Washington’s co-director of elections, said that the state’s registration closed last week, but that his team planned to review transaction logs for unusual activity. “Their suggestions are all reasonable and doable. Some we have in place and can build on, some are longer term.”

John Fund writes for USA Today, "A 2012 Rasmussen poll found that 64% of Americans think voter fraud is 'very' or 'somewhat' serious. Blacks (64%) and those earning under $20,000 a year (71%) agreed."

Fund says, "The Supreme Court has backed that concern. In 2008, it found states have the right to pass photo ID laws; the majority included liberal Justice John Paul Stevens. In a unanimous 2006 decision reinstating Arizona's voter ID law, the court stated: 'Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process. ... Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised'."

Fund concludes, "We can make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. We should keep trying."

Be Informed. Be Vigilant. Be Discerning. Be Prayerful. Be Blessed.