"We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said during a news conference earlier this month.
Johnson went on to say "There's a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others critical infrastructure."
Homeland Security already has the responsibility for protecting 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof according to the DHS website.
Setting aside the fact that Obama and Johnson have done next to nothing to protect the power grid, the nation’s most critical infrastructure here’s the troubling part of what Johnson said:
There's no one federal election system. There are some 9,000 jurisdictions involved in the election process… There's a national election for president, there are some 9,000 jurisdictions that participate, contribute to collecting votes, tallying votes and reporting votes.
In other words, what Johnson and Obama have in mind is not providing the local and state election officials who have the constitutional responsibility for conducting elections with improved technology or ballot security, it is federalizing the collecting, tallying and reporting of votes.
Conservatives have been concerned for quite some time that Democrats’ laxity or fraud in voter ID and ballot security compromised the integrity of elections, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has purportedly found breaches in Illinois and Arizona’s voter registration databases.
After Yahoo News broke the data breach story on Monday an FBI official told Time that investigators were also seeking evidence of whether other states may have been targeted. The FBI is urging states to increase computer security ahead of the November presidential election, according to reports in Time and other outlets.
However, the cyber threat is very remote compared to the reality of voter fraud that has been documented in crucial battleground states such as North Carolina and New Hampshire.
The conspiracy-minded among CHQ readers will find it most peculiar that all this talk of election cybersecurity came about as Hillary Clinton is sinking in the polls, has obvious health problems and hasn’t given a press conference in nine months, and it completely ignores the most obvious threat – good old fashioned voter fraud that Democrats have honed to the point that they give ovations to convicted vote fraud perpetrators.
And to those who have been claiming Obama would find some way to stay in power this sounds, not unreasonably, like the beginning of a virtual coup.
The idea that the same people who have opened the U.S. border to thousands of illegal aliens and who run the dysfunctional TSA, in an administration that has steadfastly waged “lawfare” on any state that passed a voter ID law, should take over the management of the presidential election is so preposterous that is doesn’t even pass the red face test.
Yet there was Secretary Johnson blandly explaining [11] the need for federal intervention to safeguard the integrity of the election.
When Democrats start talking about a federal takeover of the collecting, tallying and reporting of votes in the presidential election we starting thinking of what Tammany Hall’s infamous Boss William Marcy Tweed once said: "As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?
