The Nightmare Is Confirmed
In the past few years, many major companies and institutions have been subject to hacking. A short list would include Colonial Pipeline, Solar Winds, Microsoft Exchange, JBS Foods, Equifax, Yahoo, Uber, Marriott Hotels, Capitol One, the Office of US Personnel Management, Department of Homeland Security, Departments of both Treasury and Commerce, The Department of State, the FAA, The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy, The Department of Defense, and today we learn, that every American’s Social Security Number may have been hacked/stolen.
Within the same time frame as the Social Security hack, an interview on X between owner Elon Musk and Donald Trump was delayed by a cyber attack.
Russians, Iranians, Chinese, North Koreans, and other murky private actors have done these cyber break-ins. God knows how many foreign intelligence agencies are involved in this work.
Anything connected to the internet is vulnerable to attack.
However, according to Democrats, the only mechanisms not vulnerable to hacking are our voting machines connected to the internet. Question their security and you are an “enemy of democracy.”
Look, if Homeland Security can be hacked, you are telling me voting machines maintained by Maricopa County are always and everywhere secure?
Coming with the news of the raid on Social Security, we have news that a group of independent hackers in just two days got into a variety of different kinds of voting machines.
According to left-of-center Politico: Organizers and participants at the DEF CON Voting Village found cyber vulnerabilities in everything from voting machines to e-poll books, but there is no time before the November elections to fully implement their findings…
“From Friday to Sunday, Voting Village hackers clustered around tables with all shapes and sizes of voting machines and equipment to verify voters’ identities or tabulate ballots, trying to get past firewalls or other security measures. Nearby, secretaries of state and other election officials gave talks on misinformation and disinformation threats facing the upcoming election.”
Politico confirms what many of us have suspected, and that is, that voting machines connected to the internet can be compromised and rather easily.
Much of the rest of the piece goes on to say that after problems are discovered, it is too late to make any changes.
But since hackers are innovative and the situation is inherently dynamic, wouldn’t one fix simply leave another vulnerability to be exploited? Of course, it would. It is a constantly moving target so no amount of time would be enough.
In short, Secretaries of State would have to be in a constant game of whack-a-mole, and constantly monitoring for system vulnerabilities. And since there is no time to fix things, what would be the point of the entire exercise?
Particularly galling is the line, “We don’t have time to fix the system.” Elections are kind of important, ya know. Imagine this attitude in another context: I am sorry. I just didn’t have time to fix your car, pull your tooth, or finish the surgery. Sorry, the US nuclear arsenal has been hacked, but we don’t have time to fix it. I didn’t have time to check the plane that carried your family…
A special kind of stupidity descends on the subject of voting integrity. It is kind of a poisonous intellectual fog that leaves those who breathe it uttering nonsense and reciting platitudes.
The story on this event by Yahoo News contains this observation:
“There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes I’m worried about things not being fixed, but they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it,” Harri Hursti, co-founder of the DEF Con conference’s Voting Village program, told Politico.
“If you don’t think this kind of place is running 24/7 in China, Russia, you’re kidding yourselves,” he added. “We are here only for two and a half days, and we find stuff…it would be stupid to assume that the adversaries don’t have absolute access to everything.”
“The Voting Village programmers found pages of vulnerabilities, and are expected to release a full report of their findings in the coming weeks.”
So, let’s see if we can summarize. Our major companies and government agencies are being hacked all the time. A conference of professional hackers found all kinds of vulnerabilities this year and in previous years regarding the election systems adopted by various states in just a few days of effort. They argue election authorities should have been doing a lot of preemptive things, but have not been doing so.
These hackers have no vested interests but the bureaucrats overseeing elections and manufactures do have vested interests.
These states and the press have assured us that their systems were secure and that anyone who thinks otherwise is an election-denying insurrectionist.
Both the states and the machine designers have not fixed problems for a long time leaving our “sacred democracy” vulnerable to fraud. But don’t be concerned, if problems are eventually discovered, there will be no time to fix them. Is this the best we can do?
However, if the hacker does his job right, he may NEVER BE DISCOVERED. Further, we seem to have no process to re-set elections if fraudulent hacking is found after an election.
Bureaucrats by their nature will always be behind the curve to hackers, both foreign and domestic, and so will the voting machine companies. Various societal systems are being hacked all the time.
Maybe some things are so vital they should not be connected to the internet
If what these professional hackers have said is true, then why the hell are we using machines to count votes, and have those machines connected to the internet?
Well, because government employees are in charge of counting our votes and they always know best how to do that, and they never have any bias. And, pigs can fly…supersonic.
And as for the judges who refuse to hear cases, they often are elected by the same flawed system they refuse to examine. They also get appointed by people elected by the flawed process. Hmmm… that’s not the kind of independence required.
Do you notice it is hard to find an objective participant in any part of this process?
We have provided the links to the three articles in question and we urge readers to read both articles and not rely on our summary.
After reading the articles, assume that the hackers are correct. Assume the Country Recorder is maybe not as good at cyber security as the US Department of Defense. These volunteer citizen hackers have no vested interest in a particular outcome or the preservation of any particular company or bureaucracy-negotiated contract and they are experts.
Worse yet, assume there are technical disputes among hackers and they don’t always agree. How are government employees and the public ever going to be able to sort out those kinds of high-level technical arguments? Most of us struggle to program our smart TVs. We need a simple, transparent, and unhackable system.
We had such systems for years and so do many other advanced countries that use paper ballots that are counted by humans with observers present to check on fraud. We had an election day and people showed up at the polls, showed IDs, and there was a more secure chain of custody of the ballots.
No unsupervised drop boxes, no early voting before information was completely out. All of us participated in the system. While not as convenient as mail-in voting, it was not inconvenient or difficult. You just had to sacrifice a little time for the preservation of our system.
It is obvious. The older system was more secure. Not perfect, but not as prone to abuse.
According to TDM Research:
“The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections [1]. Countries such as Germany [2] Norway [3], Netherlands [4], France [5, 6], Canada [7] , Denmark [8, 9], Italy [10], United Kingdom [11], Ireland [11], Spain [11], Portugal [11], Sweden [11], Finland [11], and most other countries [11], protect the integrity and trust of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.”
We can’t see the logic of maintaining the present system. We have sacrificed the security of our elections for convenience. Screw convenience! Without secure elections, people will lose faith in our system.
We have long felt the case for election interference was a sound one. We know now without dispute that Democrats conspired with the press and with foreign intelligence services, and domestic intelligence services, to gin up the whole Russian collusion thing. We know our intelligence agencies and the press colluded to hide the Hunter Biden laptop. We know there were serious procedural and legal shortcomings to the January 6th hearings. We know officials without authority, changed election rules. We know Google and social media suppressed conservative opposition and Facebook spent a half billion on local government agencies overseeing the elections. We won’t even get into the actions of the myriad of non-profits nor the illegal use of government agencies to interfere in the election process.
But proof of fraudulent counting has been hard to come by. This has mainly been because of the resistance of state authorities and the courts which have not allowed trials to proceed where evidence could be presented to a jury.
These hackers have done us all a huge favor. They are the experts who were never called in all the trials never held. Moreover, they have no vested interests. They are not supporting one side or another in an adversarial legal contest.
They are telling us we have a huge problem!
Those worried about election integrity have contended that these machines can be hacked and results altered. This has now become a partisan political issue. It should not be. All participants need to know the counting of ballots is accurate and the outcomes represent the voice of the people governed.
So now both election interference and technical election manipulation, have been confirmed.
We should not have a system where either can occur with such frequency. Nor should we leave ourselves vulnerable to foreign powers who have full-time departments working on hacking us when our independent hackers can discover vulnerabilities in just a few days.
If we must use machines, they should be plain tabulating machines, not connected to the internet. But if they can hand count in France, why can’t we?
If we don’t have time to fix the system, we need to replace the system with one that does not require such onerous upkeep and has such technological vulnerabilities. The irony is we had such as system just a few years ago and scrapped it.
It was scrapped largely by Democrats who contended that having to register and go to the polls uniquely disqualified “people of color”, and was voter suppression.
There will always be issues about what ballots are valid to count. Even in the older system, dead people were voting in Chicago and Jim Wells County Texas. We don’t want to count the ballots of dead people or ineligible voters. But once that is sorted out, can we not count the remaining valid ballots accurately? We can count money accurately. We can count parts accurately.
Excuse me, do we have time to conduct fair elections? If not, what is the point of voting? And if we are not going to settle our political disputes at the ballot box, then brace for horrible violence.