Why the Obama Administration is now Concerned About Election Rigging

by Philip Hodges 

If you talk to most self-identifying Democrats, election fraud doesn’t exist except in conspiracy theories in the minds of conservatives.
But Democrats all of sudden start believing those conspiracy theories when they see that their preferred candidate loses or risks losing.
U.S. officials are concerned about the possibility of election rigging this November, but only because the DNC computer systems and Hillary’s emails were hacked. If they can be so easily hacked, then how vulnerable are our electronic voting machines? Roll Call reported:

With the stakes running high, the Obama administration has said it is attuned to the threat and is looking at ways to mitigate it. “There is a vital national interest in our election process,” Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said Wednesday. “We are actively thinking about election cybersecurity right now.”

One step the administration is weighing, Johnson said, is to include the electoral system as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, putting it on par with the power grid and financial sector. Such a move would make the election system eligible for federal protection.
Johnson also said that in the short term he is considering sharing a list of “best practices” with state and local election officials to help secure the integrity of the voting process. But in the long run, he said, the nation will need to invest in the cybersecurity of the entire electoral system.

This is not a new concern. It’s something we’ve been concerned about ever since the advent of electronic voting machines. It’s just that a Democrat has been in the White House since 2008, and so it hasn’t been a concern.
If you have the time – about an hour and twenty minutes – watch this documentary called Hacking Democracy about how electronic voting machines were practically designed to be hacked and leave no evidence of tampering:  https://youtu.be/M7W7rHxTsH0https://youtu.be/M7W7rHxTsH0





That documentary was produced in 2006 in response to the voting anomalies in the 2000 and 2004 elections – both of which George W. Bush won. So, when Republicans win, obviously there’s vote-rigging going on. When Democrats win, Republicans are sore losers and “conspiracy theorists” for bringing up election rigging.
The truth is, election rigging like this probably occurs on both sides of the aisle. As long as the politician is someone who can be easily controlled through bribery and/or blackmail, the major powerbrokers who “select” presidents don’t care who wins, regardless of what letter appears after their name. (And the U.S. harps on other countries for not having “free elections”…oh, the irony.)
The Roll Call article goes on to state that a big part of the problem is that voting systems are not under federal control. If only the feds managed all the voting machines, then we’d be better protected. (Hmm…I’m not so sure about that.)

According to most of the cybersecurity experts interviewed for the article, hacking into the voting systems is definitely possible, and there are many vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. Even so, pulling off a successful hack would not be easy and would require a great deal of advanced planning and resources.
One expert Christopher Porter with the security firm FireEye said that the kind of resources and planning needed to breach electronic voting machines would have to be provided by a nation-state backed group.
A “nation-state backed group” like those working for…Russia?
Needless to say, now the President and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson are expressing security concerns about U.S. voting machines. I can only figure that they’re worried that Russia is going to hack into our system and sway the election in Trump’s favor. In fact, if Trump wins, that’s going to be the Democrats’ first accusation.

If Russia for whatever reason had instead been suspected of hacking into Trump’s computer systems and leaking all sorts of embarrassing emails from him, I don’t think the Obama administration would be all that concerned about the general election. Especially if they thought that Russia was helping Hillary. They’d dispel all our fears by laughing off our “conspiracy theories.”