WHAT I LEARNED FROM THE COMEY HEARING AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

Forget all the he said/he said, the memos, the impressions at various meetings, yada yada yada--the one thing that Director Comey said during the hearings that I found worrisome was his testimony regarding the Russians meddling in US elections. OK, so we’ve already heard the reports regarding the fake news that was put up on social media by thousands of trolls paid for by the Kremlin, and I know that is true because I saw a lot of those fake news re-postings made by Facebook friends of mine. (There is still a lot of fake news on Facebook. I always check on validity when something sounds a little too fantastical, on both sides.) And we know that unflattering emails were hacked and released through Wikileaks. Those things are worrisome, but there’s no way to measure the effect one way or the other that any of this might have had on the election. However, the one thing Comey said that startled me is that there were attempts by the Russians to hack into our state and local voter rolls.

As most of my friends know, I worked as the Elections Administrator for my county for three years. Before that, I was a poll worker off and on for over ten years. An Elections Administrator not only oversees elections, which is a big enough job in itself, but he or she is also the county Voter Registrar. This is an ongoing job that lasts in between, around, and after elections. It is, in fact, the main function of the Elections Administration Office. Having held this job I have some inside information that a lot of the public may not have, and it’s important to understand some things, especially for those who think none of this matters, that’s the probe into Russian interference into our elections is a witch hunt, or as one of my beloved relatives said, America is big enough to not be afraid of Russian hacks. Bear with me now as I try to explain something a little technical.

 After the Gore v. Bush debacle in 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act. As part of the Act, better known to election officials as HAVA, every state was required to keep a statewide electronic voter roll. That means any person who applies to register to vote is cleared through their state, with the Social Security Agency and the Department of Public Safety both playing an important role in identity verification. Also as part of each statewide voter roll is a voting history for each and every person who is registered in that state. In other words, every time you vote in an election, it is recorded and stored at the state level. The EA can pull up your name in the state database and see which elections you voted in, even if you've just moved to his or her county, your voting history in previous locations is carried with you on the state rolls. There is currently movement to make this nationwide.

Generally, the way a person votes, who or what they vote for, is not revealed in these state voting history files, but there is one exception. Primary elections. For those of you who may be unclear, a Primary election is the way that the political parties choose who will be their candidate in the General Election.

Primary elections are treated as completely separate elections. They are programmed differently, and if the two parties hold their primary at the same time, for the election officials it is as if there are two side-by-side elections being held. This is why you must state which ballot you want to vote, because you are voting in a separate election from your neighbor down the street who might be supporting the other party’s candidates. So because the Republican Primary Election is an entirely separate election from the Democratic Primary Election, your voting history will show which one of those two elections you voted in.  

 Not everybody votes in Primaries, but there are plenty of people who do. 

So because it shows up on your voting history that you voted in one or the other of the political party’s Primary, it is possible to identify you as a Republican or a Democratic voter. This is why, after you have voted in a Primary, you start getting all that political mail in your snail mailbox. The Freedom of Information Act requires the EA to release that information to the Parties, or anyone else who wants to know. It's also the reason that when I heard that the Russians had tried to hack into state voters rolls, my red flag went up and started to violently wave. Because--since it would be possible for any hacker to identify a large section of the population as favoring one party or the other,  it would also be possible for that hacker to eliminate, wholesale, entire groups of registered voters from the rolls in order to throw an election one way or the other. And this is why all of us should be concerned, and care, about the investigation that is going on right now into the Russian interference into the 2016 election. This time they only probed into some of our state’s voter rolls. Next time they could hack into them outright and REALLY and TRULY affect an election.

Please understand, despite what some of the pundits on television might say because they don't get it either, that I am not talking here about the voting machines that you vote on. Those are not at issue and never were. It would be ridiculous for anybody to hack into ALL THOSE MACHINES! It's the information that is taken off of those machines and stored at the state and local levels that is vulnerable and could influence an election. 

Our intelligence agencies have all, without exception, agreed that the interference described in my first paragraph went on. They have all also stated that there is no way to know what kind of an impact internet trolls and hacked emails had, but it is for certain that this will not be the last time the Russians, or some other adversarial government, interferes, and next time it could be the voter rolls that are vulnerable. So we had better get our government ready to take them on when it happens next time. It is not a partisan issue, next time it might be the candidate that YOU support who gets knocked out of the race by some means much more sophisticated than what happened in 2016. And it is imperative that the state voter rolls be kept secure for just this reason.  Take an interest. This is more important than partisan politics.

Onward....