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Securityweek has a look at the bits of HR1 with digital election security implications running:
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has unveiled its first Bill: HR1, dubbed the 'For the People Act'. It has little chance of getting through the Republican-controlled Congress, and even less chance of being signed into law by President Trump.
Nevertheless, HR1 lays down a marker for current Democrat intentions; and it is likely that some of the potentially bi-partisan elements could be spun out into separate bills with a greater chance of progress.
One of these is likely to include the section on election security. This has been a major issue since the meddling by Russian-state hackers in the 2016 presidential election, and the subsequent realization on how easy it would be for interested parties (both foreign hackers and local activists) to influence election outcomes.
I'm all for secure and accountable elections but the feds are going to need to be careful and deliberate in what they mandate vs. what they place conditions for funding on. They do have significant authority as far as election laws go but their power is more deep than broad; most specifics are legally up to the states. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean they currently have the legal authority necessary to do it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday January 06 2019, @09:29PM (1 child)
And it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. The reason for this is extremely simple: Political parties have made the decision that their electoral victory is more important than democracy. Once that line has been crossed, there's no possible way to make a fair election happen:
- You can pass laws that make things better, but those laws won't be enforced if the people responsible for the enforcement are of the same party as the people who broke those laws.
- You can invite international observers, but those international observers' findings can and will be ignored by whichever party won if the international observers don't come up with the same answer.
- You can try electing tough enforcers of election law to the posts that enforce it (typically the secretaries of state), and those who got elected by being crooks will either loosen the laws or cut the budgets to make that enforcer unable to do their job.
- You can use paper and other physical ballots. Even if they aren't made intentionally confusing, a bad guy can defeat those by having ballots mysteriously go missing if they don't contain the votes you want to count, or by changing the counts so much even while the ballots remain locked down that nobody looks at the ballots.
- You can use electronic systems to vote. If you do that, you're going to have that system compromised, because there are so many layers from the hardware all the way on up to the application and everything in-between (OS, libraries, utilities like databases, etc) that there's going to be at least 1 vulnerability that will be successfully hidden. Remember, you have a lot of people with access to a lot of money who have every reason to want to compromise these systems, and the list of those people also not-infrequently include those at the companies making these electronic voting systems.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday January 07 2019, @02:21AM
Once that line has been crossed, there's no possible way to make a fair election happen:
Accept our fate then, eh?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..