MAY 17, 2019
Huge new string of criminalities surround California's failed 'motor-voter' system
By
Monica Showalter
California's election has unsettled many, given the role of ballot-harvesting in supposedly flipping Reagan-country Orange County entirely blue in the last midterm.
But the details rolling out now are getting far more disturbing. RealClearPolitics investigative reporter Susan Crabtree has put together a string of criminalities surrounding the way California runs its elections which makes one wonder if California has adopted the Venezuela Model of electoral goverance.
She starts with a sickening new report that California's election was hacked through its "motor-voter' system, the system the state has to register as many votes as possible. If a California resident applies for a drivers license in the state, he (or she) gets registered to vote whether he likes it or not. An applicant can only say 'no' to the registration, not 'yes,' the 'yes' is embedded into the system. It's a set-up that relies on the "honor system" for a voter's claims of valid citizenship to vote and there is no verification.
Naturally, such a system is vulnerable to foreign cyberattacks from abroad and one actually happened, from Croatia, and it was one they tried to cover up. Here's what occurred, according to
Crabtree's report:
The state has had a motor-voter system up and running for years, but a new law required the Department of Motor Vehicles to electronically transmit information on drivers who are eligible to vote and who visit the Golden State’s DMV offices to the state’s voter rolls, unless they opt out.
Among the concerns surfacing now is that state officials never publicly acknowledged the hacking until California media reported on it last month. And there are lingering questions — and serious doubts — over whether the system’s numerous glitches have been fixed in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential primary and general election.
California officials moved up the state’s primary from June to March to boost its role in determining who wins the Democratic nomination for president, making it even more critical to ensure the integrity of voter registrations, election watchdogs argue.
Up until now, most of us in this state have been pretty confident that our election was hack-proof because it involves paper ballots filled in with a stylus pen on punch-card. It's pokey, but no one can change the ballot a voter casts. This hack is done at a higher point upstream in the system, where voters have no control, and they can't even watch their vote being changed by the computer system (as the Venezuelans could) to know there was fraud going on.
Here's the other disturbing implication of the hack - Crabtree notes that activists say there now are privacy concerns. What a normal person might ask from that is whether some Big Brother manipulating this hackable system might be knowing and recording just how you vote. If hackers can do it, you can bet the state counting the ballots can do it.
