Obama Administration Plotting to Usurp Control Over Elections
Under the guise of providing increased “security” for “critical infrastructure,” the Obama administration is plotting to insert itself and the federal government into the American elections process. While voting is constitutionally the responsibility of state and local officials, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, pointed to the alleged threat of cyberattacks to justify the latest proposed usurpation of power. The controversial scheme was floated amid growing national concerns, fueled in part by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's warnings of a “rigged” election, that America's electoral system might be vulnerable to major manipulation. Critics and experts, though, warned that the White House scheming may be a first step toward illegally nationalizing the electoral process — with all the dangers that would entail.
Homeland Security boss Johnson, a leading luminary behind Obama's illegal amnesty plot, has said repeatedly said in recent weeks that the administration was thinking of issuing a decree declaring elections to be “critical infrastructure” in need of supposed federal oversight and “protection.” “We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Johnson told reporters in Washington earlier this month. “There's a vital national interest in our electoral process.” In a phone call with state officials, he reiterated those comments, offering “help” with elections.
Details about what, exactly, an Obama designation as “critical infrastructure” would mean for elections remain hazy — probably deliberately, with Johnson's DHS also declining to comment on what specifically the scheme would entail. But, ironically, if the plan were to standardize or centralize the elections process, it would make the elections much easier to manipulate at the national level. Instead of clarifying, Johnson simply said that designating elections as “critical infrastructure” would raise “several implications” that would make the election system “very much a part of our focus.” One thing is sure: Such a designation would result in more federal spending and control over the process.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest did not add much additional light to the proposed takeover of elections. “I know this is an idea that other members of the president’s national security team have also discussed,” Earnest said, as if the “president's national security team” was all powerful. “The president has confidence in the integrity of our electoral process and everybody else should, too.” Earnest also suggested that the fact that each state has its own systems makes the job for hackers more difficult, because “it's difficult to identify a common vulnerability.” Perhaps by declaring it “critical infrastructure,” Johnson and Obama can change that — if not legally or constitutionally, at least practically.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), blasted the proposed scheme. First of all, there is “no credible threat of a successful cyberattack on our voting and ballot-counting process because of the way our current election system is organized,” said von Spakovsky, who also served at the U.S. Justice Department as an elections expert and manages Election Law Reform Initiative at Heritage. Citing unnamed sources, he added that DHS boss Johnson had admitted as much to state officials.
“But designating the nation’s election system as 'critical infrastructure' under a post 9/11 federal statute may be a way for the administration to get Justice Department lawyers, the FBI, and DHS staff into polling places they would otherwise have no legal right to access,” von Spakovsky continued. And that, he said, would “enable them to interfere with election administration procedures around the country.” Despite acknowledging some areas in which security could be improved, von Spakovsky painted a picture of a decentralized system that would be very difficult, if not impossible, for hackers to interfere with in any meaningful way.
However, if the Obama administration were to declare elections systems to be “critical infrastructure” under a 2001 statute and a revised “Presidential Policy Directive” issued by Obama in 2013, federal officials would try to insert themselves into state and local elections. “If Jeh Johnson designates our election system as 'critical infrastructure,' then according to this directive, the Justice Department is given the authority to 'investigate, disrupt, prosecute, and otherwise reduce' threats to that infrastructure,” von Spakovsky said. “DHS will 'coordinate the overall Federal effort to promote the security and resilience of' the infrastructure.”
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