BREAKING: FEDS ANNOUNCE TAKEOVER OF U.S. ELECTORAL PROCESS
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
US election systems will henceforth be treated as “critical infrastructure,” the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson decreed Friday in a move some are describing as a major federal overreach.
In a letter to the Associated Press,
Johnson revealed the US government would monitor and intervene in
future elections, a process previously handled on a state-by-state
basis.
“Given the vital role elections play in this country, it is
clear that certain systems and assets of election infrastructure meet
the definition of critical infrastructure, in fact and in law,” Johnson
stated. “Particularly in these times, this designation is simply the
right and obvious thing to do.”
The designation “allows for information to be withheld from the
public when state, local and private partners meet to discuss election
infrastructure security – potentially injecting secrecy into an election
process that’s traditionally and expressly a transparent process,”
according to the AP.
“U.S. officials say such closed door
conversations allow for frank discussion that would prevent bad actors
from learning about vulnerabilities. DHS would also be able to grant
security clearances when appropriate and provide more detailed threat
information to states.”
The announcement of a federal takeover of the electoral process
follows a report from several intelligence agencies also released Friday
which purports the Russian government worked to influence the outcome
of the 2016 US election.
The AP reports several states in recent
months opposed the move fearing “the designation would lead to increased
federal regulation or oversight on the many decentralized and locally
run voting systems across the country.”
At least one member of the
US Election Infrastructure Cybersecurity Working Group, Georgia
Secretary of State Brian P. Kemp, stated he opposed the measure claiming
“more federal oversight could make systems more vulnerable and could
make protected records more accessible,” the AP writes.
Kemp
reportedly called the move “a federal overreach into a sphere
constitutionally reserved for the states” on a conference call with
Johnson Thursday, and said the designation “smacks of partisan
politics.”
Examples of election infrastructure include storage
facilities, voter registration databases, voting locations, voting
machines and other systems designed to manage the election process, the
AP notes.
DHS currently designates 16 public sectors as “critical
infrastructure sectors,” including the communications sector, the food
and agriculture sector and the energy sector. “Critical infrastructure”
is defined as systems “so vital to the US 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 DHS.
As
recently as August when he addressed concerns by then-Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump over election rigging, Obama
asserted the federal government plays no role in US elections.
“Of
course the elections will not be rigged. What does that mean? The
federal government doesn’t run the election process. States and cities
and communities all across the country, they’re the ones who set up the
voting systems and the voting booths.”
being propagated across the country – including in places like Texas,
where typically it’s not Democrats who are in charge of voting booths –
that’s ridiculous, that doesn’t make any sense, and I don’t think anyone
should take that seriously.”
