It’s time to Put a Target on Their Backs and Take Them Out with Our Votes

 

Sophisticated hacking of highly secured databases is a regular worldwide occurrence, including in our own backyard. Cybercrime is a real and growing threat. On August 6, I received a letter from Allianz Life Insurance Company informing me I had been caught up in a data security breach that allowed hackers to access my personal information including name, address, date of birth, and social security number. The hackers used a “social engineering technique” to access a “cloud-based customer relationship management platform” used by the company. All 1.4 million of their customers were affected. The FBI is investigating.

 

This notification got my attention immediately because of the obvious risk that my personal information will be used for identity theft, but also because I do not have a direct business relationship with Allianz. I did some research and learned that Allianz, based in Minneapolis, is a “leading provider of retirement solutions”. Their products and services include annuities, life insurance, and asset management.  As I dug deeper into how this company would have my personal information in its possession, I learned they collect information from many third-party sources including employers, brokers, business partners, insurers, and medical providers.

 

If you are uneducated in this complicated area of massive electronic databases that are full of sensitive personal information as I am, the bottom line is this. We are living in a complex, electronic world in which companies we do business with are sharing our information with other companies legally and for reasons we can only imagine. This compounds the security challenges as more and more entities are given legal access to our personal protected information unknown to us. I also learned from Allianz itself that federal and state governments limit an individual’s ability to say “no” to sharing his or her own personal information. It is safe to assume most of us recognize we live in an increasingly paperless world and electronically transmitted and stored data are here to stay.  It should be reasonable to expect that, to the extent humanly possible, our data is secure.

 

The ability to steal things of value through cyber hacking is a magnet for criminal minds. Amassing power and control of the government by stealing elections is a powerful motivator to breach insecure election systems wherever they are found. Stolen personal protected information may result in devastating losses and heartache for individuals, but these data breaches pale in comparison to the implications of the stolen elections that can result from hacking voter names and creating fraudulent ballots.  The integrity of our elections is fundamental to our freedom. It safeguards the accurate expression of the will of the people

 

The unverifiability of Wisconsin’s elections, the result of the gross inaccuracy of the Registered Voter List maintained by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), has been fully exposed to Wisconsin voters over many months.  There are more than 4 million names of ineligible voters on the list and the WEC steadfastly refuses to remove them and restrict the list to only currently eligible voters. The Federal Department of Justice is currently investigating the WEC’s Registered Voter List maintenance procedures. At its convention last spring, the Republican Party of Wisconsin unanimously passed a resolution demanding that the state Legislators take action to clean up the list.  There has been no response.  I am unaware of a single Legislator who is making this serious vulnerability in our election system their priority and taking the aggressive actions necessary to force the required changes. There are a few pretenders who give lip service to the issue.  Some defer and deflect.  Most remain silent. It doesn’t matter why the Legislators ignore their duty - ignorance, incompetence, cowardice, a love of being in office that supersedes integrity and responsibility, or personally benefitting from cheating.  They seem unaware they work for the people and the people should show them no tolerance. Time is short. We have a Supreme Court election in April of next year and the very important Midterms and Gubernatorial race next November. Cheating to win will be part of a dirty playbook. It’s time to put a target on the back of every derelict Legislator and take them out with our votes.