Kerby Anderson

Sometimes I hear from a caller worried that our voting machines might be hacked and therefore should be monitored. Well, be careful what you wish for. Now some in the Obama administration are using the unlikely possibility that Russia could hack into our voting machines to justify putting federal agents in our voting areas.

John Fund is a columnist for National Review and the author of Stealing Elections. Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Elections Commission. They are co-authors of the book Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk. They remind us that the U.S. election system is safe enough, and they don’t need federal help to run their polling booths.

The voter-registration systems maintained by state and country governments are separate and distinct from the voting machines that will be used in November. And that is also true of the vote-tabulation equipment used in county election departments.

It is also worth noting that three out of every five countries in this country use optical-scan technology, not electronic voting machines, making hacking nearly impossible. The other counties that use electronic voting machines store them in secured warehouses until Election Day. The Russians would have to recruit thousands of hackers to go to polling places in order to hack the machines without being noticed.

Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund believe all of this new found concern about Russian hacking is really just the first step in federalizing election administration. The Obama Justice Department has objected to election-integrity reforms and filed lawsuits against voter ID laws and other common sense legislative proposals. It may be a convenient way to give Justice Department lawyers and Homeland Security staff legal access to polling places.

We have the most decentralized election system in the Western world. We don’t need to call the feds and put them in our polling places.