Feds: We need central control over elections

The Obama administration Department of Homeland Security is eyeing a plan to declare elections “critical infrastructure,” which would allow the federal government to take over electronic voting machines and the counting process.

The plan, reportedly already in the works, could be hastened by recent news that voting machines could become the target of foreign hackers during the 2016 election.

“There’s no one federal election system. There are some 9,000 jurisdictions involved in the election process,” DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told reporters earlier this month.

According to Johnson and other proponents of giving Washington central control over the electoral process at the local level, the number of jurisdictions and the different ways in which they handle the ballot process could make it difficult to target hacking attempts.

“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Johnson said, according to Washington Examiner.

“There’s a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others critical infrastructure,” he added.

Of course, as noted by American Thinker: “A federal takeover of elections presents an enormous challenge and one big roadblock: it’s unconstitutional…

“Even if they could justify the assimilation of the election process because of national security, the bureaucratic nightmare of guarding and regulating not just the 9,000 electoral jurisdictions, but also the more than 300,000 precincts – any one of which could be a gateway for hackers – is almost certainly physically impossible.”

And we all know how well DHS has done keeping its other “critical infrastructure” in check.

Foreign hackers are attacking the U.S. power grid with regularity

The nation’s power grid is vulnerable to massive failure

DHS wasted $5.7 billion on useless government cybersecurity

Parting gift from Congressional budget hawk: A scathing report on DHS failures

So why would agency officials think DHS could handle oversight of hundreds of thousands of voting precincts when it already has huge cybersecurity issues to address elsewhere? They probably don’t. But no self-respecting Washington bureaucrat would pass up a chance to give the federal government more control over the electoral process.

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