Anyone who discovers a tabulator vulnerability that can be exploited via a satellite, a thermostat, or a power strip should absolutely write it up and submit it to the Voting Village conference this summer. It would be a huge breakthrough!

I have a bit of experience with election systems. With current systems, all the known ways to compromise tabulator software require physical access to each machine. Elon Musk's boasts nothwithstanding, I'm aware of no tabulator vulnerabilities that involve satellites, thermostats, or power strips.

From a talk I’m giving this afternoon

You see, if you have satellites, you can program them to aim their Hacking Rays at the voting systems. It's just science.

I see your 2 Peter 3:18 and raise you one Article VI Clause 3 Part 2: "... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Just for the record, there is simply no credible evidence that either the 2020 or the 2024 presidential elections were rigged. None. “I can’t believe that other jerk won” is not evidence of fraud. “People voted in ways I didn’t expect” also isn’t fraud.

Malfeasance by election officials is rare, but potentially very serious, and so this sentence reduction sends the wrong message. apnews.com/article/tina...

There's a particular variety of "election integrity activist" whose "work" consists mostly of (inaccurately) explaining security problems back to the people who discovered them, and then scolding them for not being more frantic. These people are as rewarding to deal with as you might imagine.

As I said, repeatedly, there are ample reasons to implement strong safeguards like RLAs. We should absolutely do this. But there is also no evidence that any election outcome has thus far been altered. Anyone who finds such evidence would be widely celebrated and become famous, so have at it.

Anyway, if you have ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER of partisan malware in election systems, that would be huge news. So far no one has found any. That's not proof that none exists, but I don't know how to prove negatives.

Anyway, most election software and hardware is crap, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Which is why we should do RLAs. But I've seen no evidence of hardcoded partisan malware in any of it. Just the usual software crappiness.

And there's been real progress here. Some of those other threats were viable in older systems. Not complete progress, but significant progress.

Yes. Privleged insider attacks within a county election office are a serious and potentially viable threat, and, absent some breakthrough, can only be effectively mitigated with things like RLAs. But that's, fortunately, much narrower than remote attacks over the Internet or "any voter".

Anyway, if you're claiming there are vulnerabilities in some aspects of US election infrastructure, that's not news. If you're claiming these vulnerabilities have been used to actually compromise an election outcome, put up or shut up.

I'm "sanguine about election security"? Google me. I'm serious.

So you're saying that malicious code on the tabulator can result in incorrect tabulation. Yes, everyone agrees on that. That's not the same thing as there ACTUALLY BEING malicious code on any actual tabulator used in any actual election, which would be an extraordinary discovery.

Then for the love of god or whatever you hold dear, STOP EXAGGERATING THE THREATS. You aren't helping the cause you claim to be promoting, assuming that's actually what you're trying to do.

The problem with the claims you're making is that they're easily dismissed and refuted by people who actually understand how elections work, and that makes it more difficult for others to make the strong case for RLAs based on the real risks that they mitigate.

There are plenty of good, well documented reasons we should make RLAs a routine part of the election certification process in every jurisdiction. There is no need to exaggerate the risks or make unsupported claims about speculative attacks. The truth doesn't need help here.

The reasons that we need RLAs are have to do with the fact that tabulators can indeed, under some conditions, make errors or be compromised. But it isn't nearly as easy to do this, especially at scale, as you claim it is with current systems. Stop spreading bullshit you don't understand.

Don't get me wrong, RLAs are great. They are an important and effective safeguard that should be routine everywhere. But the regrettable failure of most jurisdictions to conduct RLAs is not the same thing as an election actually being compromised.

In any case, if a county EMS has been compromised to give false tabulator results from a precinct, then the published results wouldn't match the precinct results. This does not require an RLA to catch; a simple canvas would suffice. I am aware of no instances where such a compromise has happened.

Truly, being a pollworker has done so much to get me hyped about all the integrity-protecting processes we’ve got in place. I’m sure it helps that my city’s elections department is excellent, but it’s also very inspiring and reassuring.

I’ll add that working at the polls in general elections is a way to get out of your own bubble and spend time with people from the other side who also believe in election integrity. I never feel more patriotic than when I’m serving as a poll worker

Do you want to help improve elections? There are productive things you can do besides partly-informed fear mongering. Sign up to be a pollworker would be my first suggestion. You'll learn a ton about election operations and they need help from dedicated people like you.

What I don't understand is what you're trying to accomplish. I know election security can be improved. That's what I've been working on for a quarter centrury and counting. What are you trying to convince me of, exactly? That the sky is falling?

That’s what RLAs are intended to remedy, and why we need to do RLAs routinely, as i have personally long advocated. (See my testimony on the subject). However, compromising tabulators at scale is not a trivial attack to carry out, especially without detection.

Thomas Stockett's Baltimore Afro-American cartoon on the Voting Rights Act, August 1965.

In any normal world, a president attempting to pay himself TEN FREAKING BILLION DOLLARS from the US Treasury (and have tax audits for him and his family businesses dropped) would be all anyone could talk about. Congress would rush to impeach. Today, barely a footnote.

This means that one in every 15 people in the US are subject to ICE detention. Insane.

Raffensperger has, for the last six years, been the target of relentless death threats (many credible), not for any substantive political or policy position, but for his refusal to alter Georgia's 2020 election results to suit Trump. Election denial is *dangerous*.

no alt-text, so here it is because we need to pay fucking attention to this threat to murder trans people and everyone who supports trans people

Indeed. The legal ways billionaires demonstrably use their wealth to influence elections seem to be pretty damn effective.

Should we improve election security? Of course we should, as I’ve advocated for decades. But there’s nothing to be gained by exaggerating the situation. We can and should do better, but there’s also no evidence that any election has actually been compromised.

Could it be done? Maybe. But if anyone has actually tried, they’ve somehow done it without leaving even a trace of evidence or had any conspirators defect.

In particular, while remotely compromising a county EMS is certainly serious, successfully altering an election outcome almost certainly would involve compromising tabulators as well, and would be very difficult to accomplish without a conspiracy of local insiders.

No one - certainly not me (google me if you doubt this) - claims that US elections are impenetrable. However, it’s an oversimplification to conflate the lack of post election audits with a complete lack of controls or safeguards. There’s more to hacking an election than installing some malware.

Aside: close to 100% of people who say "why don't they just..." about elections have never served as poll workers.

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

It's a lazy fantasy. They don't understand that while voting system fraud might be possible, you're not going to uncover it by sitting on the couch watching youtube videos.

I'm grateful to the Post for opening my eyes to the plight of billionaires, who have gone far too long with no one to speak for hem.

Anyway, it's still a free country. You can believe whatever crazy bullshit you want. But don't be surprised when people ask you to back it up.

And this idea that election experts, candiates, and election officials - who devote their careers to studying these things - are just cavalierly ignoring credible claims is just silly. As if everyone missed the big obvious smoking gun except some guy on the Internet who watched a YouTube video.

Is it POSSIBLE that someone bypassed all these controlls? Maybe. But if expect anyone to take a claim seriously, it needs to be supported by persuasive evidence. And no such evidence has been put forth. Just vague inuendo by people unhappy with the result.

US elections aren't perfect. There's still work to do to impove their security. But that's a LONG way from evidence that elections are being rigged. Certified outcomes are based on an ENORMOUS amount of evidence - ballots, tallies, witnesses, audits, procedural controls.

If you want someone to believe something, you have to provide convincing evidence. You're the one trying to convince ME. You don't get to say "I dunno, you're the expert, you tell me how they did it." I don't KNOW how they did it, or if they did it. I've seen no evidence of any fraud, in fact.

"Don't worry, boss, I'll fix the election for you. When you win, remember me."

What about Trump’s claim that Ted Cruz’s father killed JFK? Shouldn’t we investigate that, too?

Trump says lots of things. Specifically, how did Musk do this? What computers, exactly? Where are they located and how do you access them? Are there confounding explanations, such as that people voted that way? I understand a lot about elections and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The claims of fraud in 2024 (and 2020) amount to: - "Suspicious" patterns that, in fact, reflect normal and readily explained voter demographics - Confusion between the concepts of evidence that something COULD occur and evidence that it DID. - A disbelief that the winning candidate was popular.