Tag Archives: voting

An Important Point

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Deroy Murdock made one.

Recall that the City Council of New York City is contemplating—seriously—letting noncitizens, all 808,000 of them in New York City, vote in city elections.

Yet, as Murdock emphasized, there is no such thing a as a noncitizen.

Rather than non-citizens, these people are foreign citizens. While they are not American citizens, they remain citizens of the foreign nations from whence they came—Mexico, Haiti, Russia, Singapore, New Zealand, and dozens more.

He went on:

The New York City Council aims to dilute the local votes of American citizens by extending the franchise to 808,000 foreign citizens. This would include letting approximately 117,500 citizens of communist China select the mayors, City Council members, district attorneys, and other officials of America’s most-populous municipality.

Imagine the citizens of our enemy nations selecting who governs us. These elections, so far, are at the local level, but it’s the local levels that are the foundations on which are built that our higher jurisdictions.

It’s at the local level that our ordinances and laws are created—by elected lawmakers that citizens of our enemies have a say in electing. Which gives those foreign citizens a say in the local ordinances and laws that govern us. Those local ordinances and laws are the foundation on which the statutes enacted by our higher jurisdictions are built.

One city, albeit one of our largest, might not seem much of a threat, and it’s not. But it’s more than a start: Progressive-Democrats in other local jurisdictions have already done the deed. They’ve

already empowered foreign citizens to vote for San Francisco school board and in local races in two Vermont cities and 11 Maryland communities.

Why Bring in the Feds?

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There was a (the latest, anyway) very serious…bad deed…in Georgia’s Fulton County election facility: some 300 hundred voter registration applications were shredded, just three weeks prior to the upcoming county municipal elections. Two election workers have been fired over the incident.

Yet Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wants a Federal Department of Justice investigation.

The Department of Justice needs to take a long look at what Fulton County is doing and how their leadership disenfranchises Fulton voters through incompetence and malfeasance.

Never mind that elections, including elections for Federal office, are State-run affairs, and so the Federal government has no role, at this stage, in investigating election miscreancies, and it has less than no role in being the default investigator of States’ election miscreancies.

Why does Raffensberger have so little confidence in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation? Why does he place so much stock in the Feds’ FBI? Why does he trust the Merrick Garland-run DoJ?

That’s Nice

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The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee are jointly holding “training” sessions aimed at their activists, our campaign managers, our consultants, everyone who’s in our ecosystem on

topics such as working with the voter file, building turnout projections and vote goals, polling and modeling, online fundraising, digital advertising, social media, grassroots voter contact data and TV optimization.

Their goal is to give their election support audiences

a better understanding of how to be efficient with their time, whom they’re targeting, and the tools they’re using in order to make calls faster, send more text messages, and knock on the right doors.

That’s nice. It’s even highly useful, but it’s badly insufficient.

What about training sessions for actual candidates and their aids and surrogates, sessions aimed at getting them to stop being too timid to go talk to voters where they live?

What about sessions aimed at getting candidates and their aids and surrogates knocking on all doors rather than excluding some voters?

What about sessions aimed at getting candidates and their aids and surrogates into black neighborhoods, Hispanic neighborhoods, Asian-American neighborhoods and talking to these folks directly—in their diners, in their rec centers, in their parks and playgrounds, in their streets?

Unless Republicans and Conservatives stop insisting on reaching their non-white constituents by remote control and instead start talking to them personally, they’ll continue to struggle in elections. And our nation will continue to struggle in the elections’ aftermaths.

It’s a Start

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In acknowledgment of the fiasco associated with 2020’s voting machine accessibility from/to the Internet, the Election Assistance Commission, an independent Federal Government facility (and unaffiliated with the Federal Election Commission), has moved to bar any connection with the Internet by a voting machine.

Going forward, vote systems cannot be connected to any digital networks, and wireless technology must be disabled too.

And

The new requirements provide a much more draconian ban on external access to the Internet or other computer networks, a security provision otherwise known as an “air gap.” The commission specifically cited the potential threat posed by foreign adversaries to meddle in elections.

It’s a good start, but it’s insufficient. That air gap can be penetrated, also, by any party interested enough to do so. Computers—any electronic device—emits electromagnetic radiation, particularly radio frequency radiation, and those signals can be received and read. For this reason, our National Security Agency has developed TEMPEST requirements to prevent these signals to be receivable by our foreign adversaries. Of interest here, TEMPEST requires electronic equipment containing or processing information of sufficient security interest to be enclosed inside glorified Faraday cages, which block those electromagnetic signals from escaping the equipment facility.

For the most part, such requirements would seem overkill for a voting center—except for that bit about foreign adversaries looking to meddle in an election. That risk is potentiated by the existence of a potentially highly contentious election, which gives one or another party an interest in…influencing…an election’s votes.

Our voting centers need to address that air gap vulnerability, also.

 

The EAC’s new requirements, in their entirety, can be read here.

Alternatively

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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has told the recalcitrant (because this is a more-or-less family blog) Maricopa County management folks to

comply with a state Senate subpoena and turn over its election routers to auditors or risk losing millions of dollars in state aid.

Specifically,

If MCBOS fails to resolve the violation within 30 days, the AGO, in accordance with state law, will notify the Arizona Treasurer to withhold state revenue from Maricopa County until MCBOS complies[.]

The withheld amount would run to $700 million, which amounts to roughly 23% of Maricopa’s 2020 budget.

It’s a nice step, but 30 more days? Maricopa’s managers have been ignoring the State Senate’s subpoena for some months already.

Alternatively, the AG or Governor could send the State Troopers in to execute the subpoena by seizing the routers and arresting any Maricopa County person who gets in the way of the execution.