Demings, Val Rep

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</div><div>=</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/relentless-corruption-and-sheer-madness-are-donald-trumps-super-powers/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">random 220 what fresh hell</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Relentless corruption and sheer madness are Donald Trump’s super powers</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">President Donald J. Trump delivers his State of the Union address Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2020, in the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story February 16, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Seven days after he took office, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13769 which barred migrants from a handful of Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. Hundreds of travelers were detained as they arrived here and tens of thousands of people had their visas suddenly revoked</b>. For many Americans, it was clearly a bridge too far. Some had hoped that he would grow into the job, or that his bigoted campaign rhetoric would give way to a more responsible tone after he won, and the Muslim ban was evidence that those hopes had been misplaced as Trump moved to codify xenophobia.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With minimal organizing, thousands of people took to the nation’s airports to protest the policy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Today, three years and three weeks later, Trump is crowing on Twitter about a New York Times story detailing how he’s basing his re-election campaign on his simmering resentments and paranoia</b>. He is using customs and immigration enforcement to openly extort New York state into dropping investigations into his personal businesses. He’s brazenly retaliating against his own regime officials for testifying in his impeachment hearings. Meanwhile, his Attorney General, hand-picked after writing a brief arguing that it’s kosher for a president to exercise his or her powers toward corrupt purposes, is overruling career prosecutors to grant leniency to Trump’s henchmen when their crimes are unearthed. While federal investigators look at potential crimes committed by Trump’s personal attorney as he sought to fabricate a scandal about one of Trump’s Democratic foes, others within the agency are simultaneously colluding with that very attorney to advance that effort. Our nation’s top law enforcement agency has adopted a relentless focus on finding support for the president’s* unhinged conspiracy theories.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>As Trump rants and raves, there are no crowds gathering spontaneously outside of US Attorney’s offices around the country to protest Bill Barr’s unprecedented corruption of the Department of Justice,</b> . We may be outraged, but we seem to run out of gas. Trump’s behavior is so consistently venal and outrageous that we’ve become inured to it. Abuses of power that would be huge scandals under any other president of either party elicit ritualistic condemnations, but are ultimately just Trump being Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Overwhelming our sense of decency with a constant stream of outrageous comportment is Trump’s super-power. It’s impossible to even keep up.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
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</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">David Axelrod</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@davidaxelrod</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In this crazy world, almost nothing is said about the fact that @realDonaldTrump is rehiring his 29-yr-old former body man, forced from the WH earlier for failing a vet & with no personnel background, to direct hiring ACROSS THE ENTIRE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT</b>!https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top …</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnny McEntee</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ex-Trump aide John McEntee to lead White House office of personnel - Axios</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He's been hand selected by Trump, who sees him as the ultimately loyalist.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">axios.com</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">9,798</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">4:49 AM - Feb 14, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">6,101 people are talking about this</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Speaking of the DOJ, an agency “anti-human trafficking grant program is facing internal complaints, after two nonprofits were denied funding in favor of two less established groups whose applications were not recommended by career DOJ officials.” According to Reuters, “the awarding of more than $1 million total to the two groups<b>, Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina, has triggered a whistleblower complaint filed by the Justice Department’s employee union to the department’s Inspector General.</b>”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In related news, the FBI is revamping its efforts to curb homegrown terrorism after years of criticism that it downplayed or turned a blind eye to violent right-wing extremism. As part of those efforts, reports The Daily Beast, the FBI will now focus on “abortion violent extremism.” But they mean terrorists on “both sides” of the debate, despite the fact that the FBI could point “to just one episode of pro-choice-inspired terrorism—one that did not involve an actual act of violence, but rather a threat in an online comments section.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It’s hard to say whether these people are just trolling us at this point…</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Friday in an encounter the American side apparently wanted to keep under wraps.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The State Department made no announcement of the meeting, which took place in Lavrov’s own dedicated meeting room at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the major annual conference of politicians, policymakers and security experts is held. Pompeo’s aides also did not provide any readout after the meeting ended.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Russian journalists traveling with Lavrov were aware of the meeting in advance, and wrote about it afterward.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Probably not…</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Something strange happened in mid-December involving Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Late last year, the U.S. government signaled that it was about to level a new round of sanctions targeting people and entities linked to Deripaska, according to two Western officials with knowledge of the communication. Back in April 2018, the U.S. sanctioned the oligarch, who once lent millions of dollars to convicted Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort as part of a decades-long relationship between the two men. Over the following months, Deripaska’s allies made a deal with Treasury to limit Deripaska’s control over the companies in exchange for sanctions relief…. In the year since then, it’s been all quiet on the Deripaska sanctions front.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Until December, that is. What’s strange is that despite the signal, Treasury didn’t follow through and the sanctions—which would have targeted the unnamed people and entities because of their proximity to Deripaska—didn’t materialize. It’s been two months since the U.S. indicated that the new sanctions were about to come out, and there’s been no movement from Treasury on the oligarch. The two months of inaction has stirred suspicions of political interference in the sanctions process.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Return on investment…</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">“Trump has proposed a 25 percent cut to the signature military fund designed to offset Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, according to the Defense Department’s budget documents unveiled Monday.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Rep. Val Demings</div><div style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">RepValDemings</span></b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Today Senate Republicans blocked THREE election security bills.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Two would require that illegal foreign election interference be reported to the authorities.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The other would make voting machines harder to hack.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">All blocked.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">52.5K</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">11:15 AM - Feb 11, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">34.9K people are talking about this</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">We are fortunate that these malignant and corrupt ideologues aren’t more competent…</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Caitlin McCoy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@CaitlinMcCoy_</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The final rule that went to OMB last month is "...sprinkled with glaring numerical and spelling errors (such as “Massachusettes”), with 111 sections marked 'text forthcoming.' The cost-benefit analysis showed that consumers would lose more money than they would gain." YIKES.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1228065396554653696 …</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Coral Davenport</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@CoralMDavenport</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The Trump administration has rolled back nearly 100 environmental rules. <b>But Trump's attempt to take down his top regulatory target,the US's largest #climate change rule, are in meltdown. "They look like they’re headed to a legal train wreck</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">."https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/climate/trump-fuel-economy-rollback.html …</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">9</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">2:29 PM - Feb 13, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">See Caitlin McCoy's other Tweets</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Type Investigations has an important story about how the Bureau of Land Management has, “over the past several years, ignored longstanding requirements that stem from the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> approved mines and drilling without adequate review, turning the region into a ‘clearinghouse for federal permits’; and taken personnel off mining inspections in order to expedite development.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This will disappear down the memory hole in short order….</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“A White House memo justifying the U.S. strike that killed Iranian military leader Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January makes no mention of an imminent threat, which was President Trump’s rationale for the attack.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Children aren’t born into this world harboring bigotry.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Since Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Last week, we mentioned that a 65-degree temperature recorded at Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula set a new record for the continent.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That record appears to have held up for four days. This week, “a weather research station on Seymour Island in the Antarctic Peninsula registered a temperature of 69.3 degrees (20.75 Celsius) on Feb. 9.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">*</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And we leave you this week with a couple of pieces of good news, via the courts…</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Washington Monthly</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@monthly</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">#BREAKING:<b> The D.C. Circuit Court just shot down Trump’s Medicaid work requirement.</b> Last week, @r_m_larochelle & @lsdeprez wrote about this move as part of the administration's war on the social safety net. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/02/07/donald-trumps-assault-on-the-social-safety-set/ …</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Donald Trump</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Donald Trump’s Assault on the Social Safety Net</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">It's a policy of death by a thousand cuts.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">washingtonmonthly.com</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">27</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">9:11 AM - Feb 14, 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Twitter Ads info and privacy</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">16 people are talking about this</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Stephen Wolf</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@PoliticsWolf</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Whoa, this is a major win for Native American voting rights in North Dakota. </b>The GOP passed a voter ID law that blatantly excluded most tribal-issued IDs, but the backlash against it helped activists raise money to provide free IDs in 2018 & Native turnout hit historic highs https://twitter.com/kira_lerner/status/1227989452838010880 …</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Kira Lerner</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">?</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">@kira_lerner</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New: The North Dakota secretary of state settled two lawsuits brought by Native American tribes over the state’s strict voter ID law. The state agreed to accept tribal IDs and allow people who don’t have a residential address to vote https://campaignlegal.org/press-releases/secretary-state-agrees-settle-voter-id-lawsuits-entering-consent-decree-north-dakota …</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/americas-voting-machinery-hackable-falling-apart-privatized-and-gop-doesnt-care" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/americas-voting-machinery-hackable-falling-apart-privatized-and-gop-doesnt-care</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democrats in Congress have issued what may be their most alarming report ever about the vulnerability of America’s voting machinery to sophisticated adversaries and the limited abilities of government at every level to stop Election Day chaos.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The “<a href="https://democrats-homeland.house.gov/sites/democrats.homeland.house.gov/files/documents/TFESReport.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Congressional Task Force on Election Security Report</a>,” from the party’s foremost experts on cyber threats in the House, gives new details on Russian hacking of the 2016 election and how the response across many layers of government was often poorly coordinated and marginally ineffective.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, as the 2016 presidential election came to a close, the Department of Homeland Security wanted to help states and counties by probing their computer systems to identify hacking vulnerabilities. But it noted that states and localities that sought help had to wait for weeks in October—a timeline out of sync with early November's Election Day. (The report said DHS is now trying to do better.)    

The report also restated how and why the nation’s electronic voting infrastructure is aging, cannot universally be trusted to accurately count votes, is not accompanied by thorough post-election audits to verify vote counts, and is made and maintained by a monopoly of private firms and contractors with little regulation or marketplace pressure to do better.

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Its authors are sponsoring legislation to spend hundreds of millions to patch a national system beset by hacking pathways and other vulnerabilities. Not a single Republican in Congress took part in the hearings that produced the report. Nor have Republicans shown interest in acknowledging the cyber threats to voting or the millions needed to fortify the machinery for more trustable elections.
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“The president and House Republicans have done nothing,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a press conference releasing the report and the legislation, where she recounted how every top intelligence official appointed by President Trump has recently said that Russia is already meddling in the upcoming 2018 election. “They have refused to take inventory of what our resources are and what they need to be. They have refused to assess what the danger is to our electoral system, while the intelligence community, clearly by consensus, has told them.”

<strong>Layers of Vulnerability</strong></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The <a href="https://democrats-homeland.house.gov/sites/democrats.homeland.house.gov/files/documents/TFESReport.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">report</a> covers a lot of ground, starting with what Russia did in 2016 that was different from its past efforts to seed and spread political propaganda in the U.S.

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It began by citing the outlines of what most people already know; that Russian agents posted “more than 1,000 YouTube videos, 130,000 tweets, and 80,000 Facebook posts. The latter were viewed by approximately 126 million people on Facebook platforms alone.” But the report quickly narrowed its focus to cyber probing of voting systems, starting with state voter registration databases.</span>

“The 2016 election has shown us that these systems are vulnerable to attack,” the report said. “The Department of Homeland Security found that Russian hackers targeted these [registration] systems in 21 states. In Illinois, Russian hackers successfully breached the databases and attempted, but failed, to alter and delete voting records. In Arizona, hackers were able to successfully install malware on a county election official’s computer. That gave the hackers access to the official’s credentials which could have then been used to get into the county’s voter registration database. In addition, hackers targeted at least one election vendor with the hope of ultimately obtaining access into voter registration databases.”

The report described the kind of havoc that could have ensued had the Russians—or anyone else—scrambled voter data in those systems.

“The most significant threat posed by vulnerable voter registration databases is that an attacker could alter, delete, or add voter registration records which would then cause profound chaos on Election Day and potentially change the results of the election,” it said. “There is no federal law that governs what steps election vendors must take to safeguard their systems from attack. Instead, any obligations that vendors are subject to stem from the terms of their contracts with states and localities.”

<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The report also noted successful hacks by North Korea, China and Iran of U.S. companies, including defense contractors, banks and major media. However, it noted that none of those foreign governments were known to have meddled in U.S. elections. In comments at the press conference, report co-author Rep. Val Demings, D-FL, emphasized that America’s system of<b> privatized contractors programming voting machines must be pushed to follow higher security standards.</b></span>

“The [proposed] Election Security Act proactively strengthens our elections system by requiring election technology vendors to adopt specific cyber security standards that share threats with elections and security officials, intelligence officials, as well as running pre-election threat assessments to uncover vulnerabilities, with enough time to solve them,” Demings said. “Nowhere is that more evident than in my home state of Florida, where a voter registration vendor [VR Systems] for 57 of 58 counties was targeted in August of 2016. By October, at least 12 county elections officials had received information about it, but it was not until November first that all counties were notified of the attempted hack. To my knowledge there were no successful breaches, but Russia and others will be back with a vengeance. We must be ready.”

<strong>DHS and Critical Infrastructure</strong></font></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Demings alluded to some of the report’s most eyebrow-raising content, which discussed, in great detail, how difficult it was for DHS to work with state and county officials to try to detect and prevent attacks on the different computer systems overseeing voting. (Voter registration databases are one system; another system tabulates the votes.) That cooperation was also hampered by Republicans in Congress and states that didn’t trust the Obama administration—even though DHS is not a regulatory agency. 

“DHS was slow to gain the trust and buy-in of its state partners,” the report said. “On September 28, 2016, with the election nearing and fewer than half the states requesting assistance from DHS, bipartisan congressional leadership wrote to state election officials to urge them to take advantage of resources to secure their network infrastructure, including those offered by DHS. At the same time Congressional leadership promised to ‘oppose any effort by the federal government to exercise any degree of control over the states’ administration of elections by designating these systems as critical infrastructure.’”

The report notes that DHS was unable to expeditiously help states as 2016’s election came to a close, even where its assistance—such as running tests to see if voting networks could be hacked—was wanted.

“On October 10, DHS once again warned election officials that: ‘[T]ime is a factor... There are only 29 days until Election Day,’” the report said. “Although cyber hygiene scans can be performed quickly and remotely, ‘it can take up to two weeks...to run the scans and identify vulnerabilities. It can then take at least an additional week for state and local election officials to mitigate any vulnerabilities on systems that we may find.’”

The report’s authors have drafted legislation in which DHS can play a significant role. As a result, the report alternates between critical passages like the above paragraph, and supportive passages about what DHS achieved, such as: “With consistent prodding, DHS provided cyber hygiene scans to election officials in 33 states and 36 local jurisdictions and shared over 800 cyber threat indicators officials could use to identify attempted intrusions, as well as other tactics, techniques and best practices, with officials in thousands of jurisdictions across the country.”

But the problems of DHS coordinating with states that want its help has persisted since the 2016 election, the report noted. In one example, states had to wait nine months to have the federal agency assess their cyber vulnerabilities. That track record, apart from promises of help by top DHS officials, was troubling, election officials told the report’s authors.

“Election officials also had difficulty squaring DHS’ offer of ‘priority access’ to services with the nine month waiting list for certain services like Risk and Vulnerability Assessments,” the report said. “These delays render the benefit useless in light of the compressed time frame of an election cycle.”
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