The Department of Homeland Security's Scheme To Embarrass Georgia Didn't Turn Out As Planned

A lot of things make sense in retrospect.

In the run up to the November election, the media was abuzz with stories that our voting system was vulnerable to “hacking.” Presumably, this hacking would have been done by foreign actors. When one stops and reviews the facts in this claim, it is clearly specious. The number of voting machines connected to the internet approaches nil. Yes, some state voting registers were vulnerable to hacking but it fake voters were inserted then actual humans had to show up to take advantage of these identities. This is something that Anonymous or the Russians aren’t going to do… but something that Democrats could very well pull off. The various PhD geeks who have demonstrated how to hack a voting machine have yet to explain how it could be done other than one machine at a time… again, not something a hacking consortium or the Russians would be able to do.

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Anyway, the Department of Homeland Security offered its services to the states to secure their voting systems. Mind you this makes as much sense as having your cousin’s best friend Guido, who is a bookmaker, manage your retirement portfolio or having TSA screen baggage… oh, wait… Because if Homeland Security was actually able to offer help that was helpful we wouldn’t be worried about the voting systems being hacked anyway. At least one guy, Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, was having none of it:

Georgia has declined an offer from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to scan their voting systems ahead of the 2016 elections.

In August, DHS offered to help states thwart potential hacking amid cybersecurity concerns about just how easily a U.S. election could be manipulated.

But Georgia will rely on their own systems to monitor potential election hacking, reports NextGov.

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp cited state sovereignty concerns.

“The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security,” he told Nextgov in an email. “Designating voting systems or any other election system as critical infrastructure would be a vast federal overreach, the cost of which would not equally improve the security of elections in the United States.”

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Kemp is right. Managing elections is a black-letter state responsibility and one can see how getting the federal camel’s nose under the tent under the guise of providing security enables the federal government to eventually impose rules on states to facilitate that security. It is a proven technique that has worked every time it has been tried. Like, for instance, in the education system.

As it turns out, it appears that Jeh Johnson’s band of merry men were not happy with Kemp’s impolitic declining of their offer and they set out to embarrass him:

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There is nothing at all about this that is unbelievable. We’ve seen the Obama administration, time and again, attempt to create facts on the ground in order to justify aggrandizing state power to the federal government. This was what led to the Fast & Furious gunwalking fiasco. This is why the White House sent staff to the funeral of deceased thuglet Michael Brown and helped foment the riots in Ferguson. Hacking a state voting system that had turned down DHS “assistance” is exactly the kind of petty crap that is this administration’s stock in trade.

This is the kind of relentless f***wittery that has become SOP within Homeland Security. It has turned into a truly rogue agency hellbent on becoming a national police force. There is no chance that the corrupt and dishonest Jeh Johnson is going to investigate this but there is a chance that the new administration will. If Secretary-designate John Kelly truly wants to stop this nonsense he will investigate and prosecute the people who thought up this petty, juvenile scheme and fire anyone who helped them carry it out.

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