Are Monopolies Making It Easier For Putin To Hack U.S. Voting Machines?

I'm sure Señor Trumpanzee's only responses to this ominous NBC News headline: Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems, top U.S. official says, will be "fake news" and "no collusion, everyone agrees there was no collusion." Oh, yeah... and "quick, look over there at my military parade." Drug addicts and morons elected a treasonous con-man to the White House. George W. Bush still gets high level security briefings. Yesterday he was at an economic summit in Abu Dhabi where he said there's "pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled" in the 2016 election. He didn't talk about Trump's collusion but said that "It’s problematic that a foreign nation is involved in our election system. Our democracy is only as good as people trust the results." And he had some harsh words for one close Trump ally, Putin: "He’s got a chip on his shoulder. The reason he does is because of the demise of the Soviet Union troubles him. Therefore, much of his moves (are) to regain Soviet hegemony... That’s why NATO is very important... "He can’t think, ‘How can we both win?’ He only thinks, 'How do I win, you lose?'" And all this from inside the Trumpist Regime is pretty damning:

The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn't talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, "We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated."

Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, "2016 was a wake-up call and now it's incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again."

"We were able to determine that the scanning and probing of voter registration databases was coming from the Russian government."

NBC News reported in Sept. 2016 that more than 20 states had been targeted by the Russians.

There is no evidence that any of the registration rolls were altered in any fashion, according to U.S. officials.

No evidence? But they hacked the registration rolls for some other reason? Fun? Gimme a break. Can any rational American not worry that Trump and his detestable, treasonous family are working with the Kremlin to steal the midterms in November, especially in states where there is no way to check what happened at the outdated screens that Trump adamantly refuses to update?

This week, the anti-trust publication, The Corner from the Open Markets Institute asked a straight-forward question every American ought to be wondering about, Does A Voting Machine Oligopoly Open The Door To Mass Hacking? "Lots of people are worried about the security of our voting machines in the upcoming 2018 congressional election—and with good reason. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Russians attempted to hack election systems in 21 states in 2016." They're not just looking towards the Kremlin though.

Yet one of the biggest threats to the integrity of our electoral system has been widely overlooked: the concentration of the voting machine industry into the hands of three corporations. Fewer and bigger electronic voting systems, which are used in all fifty states and many democracies around the world, make it easier for hackers to disrupt more votes. They also simultaneously reduce the competitive pressure on these corporations to invest in hardening their systems.

Since 2002, mergers have cut the number of players from eight to three. The remaining firms-- Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart Intercivic-- control roughly 92% of voting machines across the United States, according to a report from the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative.

This concentrated market structure threatens the integrity of our elections in three ways. First, the companies can exert their market power to lock-in clients. As the financial research firm PrivCo has written, the company with the largest market share, ES&S, is “economically incentivized to offer closed-system solutions.” This arrangement makes it difficult for county or state officials to switch to the newer or more secure system of a rival, especially after a breach.

Second, the industry’s high degree of concentration reduces investment in making voting machines more secure. The three incumbent companies can easily cooperate in carving up the existing market. And little outside competition, according to the authors of the report, means “limited incentives for innovation.” Indeed, a 2017 economics paper published by New York University Professors Germán Gutiérrez and Thomas Philippon validates this point, noting, “industries with less competition and more concentration (traditional or due to common ownership) invest less.”

As the 2018 congressional elections approach, election officials, vendors, and advocates are looking to address this issue. One idea comes from a growing chorus of politicians calling for greater enforcement of antitrust laws. If applied to the voting machine industry, that would begin to solve the problem and help de-concentrate the voting machine industry.

Another comes from Greg Miller of Open Source Election Technology (OSET). OSET is working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Election Assistance Commission to create standards for electoral machinery, build open-source software, and help states certify secure equipment. The hope is that improved standards would reduce lock-in effects used by companies like ES&S and create a more competitive voting machine market.

Unfortunately, neither of these fixes will solve the problem quickly. State and county officials often enter into ten-year contracts with election vendors, and many of those existing contracts run through the 2020 election.

Austin Frerick is running for a House seat in southwest Iowa after his work at the Treasury Department. This is right up his alley-- so I asked him. "Trump," he told me, "is not the cause, but rather the result of the concentration in our economy. Another Trump will come along until we tackle this root cause. Concentration in our economy is everywhere, but it's not obvious at first. I didn't realize it until I was an Economist at Treasury."

Meanwhile, Democrats keep winning more and more special elections in the heart of Trump country-- like the shocking Missouri House race on Tuesday-- and even the most old school and conservative Beltway pundits like Dave Wasserman, who never goes out on a limb, are predicting a GOP collapse in "safe" red districts. His most recent congressional map updates all have something in common-- 21 Republican-held Trump districts moved a little bluer-- even in places like Arkansas, Indiana, North Carolina and-- hold on-- Staten Island!