Would it greatly concern you if all of the votes in the 2020 Presidential election were routed to Amazon servers in Barcelona and Frankfurt before being reported or is it just me? Alexa. Give Biden 2 million votes in Pennsylvania!!
The expansion by Amazon Web Services into state and local elections has quietly gathered pace since the 2016 U.S. presidential vote. More than 40 states now use one or more of Amazon’s election offerings, according to a presentation given by an Amazon executive this year and seen by Reuters.
So do America’s two main political parties, the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the U.S. federal body charged with administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws.
While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS – along with a broad network of partners – now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results, according to company documents and interviews.
A recent hack into Capital One Financial Corp’s COF.N data stored on Amazon’s cloud service was perpetrated by a former Amazon employee. The breach affected more than 100 million customers, underscoring how rogue employees or untrained workers can create security risks even if the underlying systems are secure. Did this happen in PA, MI, WI, and GA? This US election looks, feels, and sounds like the Kenyan elections of 2017…the servers were in France and have never been opened to date..nobody knows the actual figure of votes cast then.
The question now, where are the servers?
The most important part of data security is the process of decentralization. Though Amazon advertises itself as a secure provider of cloud services, it is not infallible, and by storing data across one provider puts the process at risk. States and political organizations using AWS are in essence creating a one-stop shop to access voting records, which when you think about it, is what Amazon is all about.
About the Author
What’s up with all the assurances about “ballot security? How does this mess get fixede? Will there be an uncivil “Civil War”?