The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.
So once again, democracy saved only due to the incompetence of this administration and Musk.
The likely motive:
“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials told ProPublica. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”
Well, this and to exploit them. Like:
Step 1: exploit vulnerabilities.
Step 2: accuse opponent of exploiting them, lock them up.
Step 3: profit
I don’t really understand why voting machines are complicated enough that there are feasible vulnerabilities. They have one job, and it’s to count. It really shouldn’t be too tough for a crack team of competent devs to write the software required to make them work securely. No network access, a memory safe language, and strict business rules should be relatively trivial to setup. Double that will external audits and you’ve got yourself a stew.
Just don’t use electronic voting. Electronic voting is such a dumb idea.
How do you know the software running on the voting machine you’re about to vote on is the software that was audited?
You go get all the machines together, make sure all the software runs on the newest version and it’s correct and it’s configured properly with the candidates. When you’ve got to distribute them to the polling stations, they’ve got to be kept securely between audit and polling day. Your adversaries are foreign state actors who want to manipulate your elections.
And then at the end of the day you have to get the results off the machines. You have to trust that the machine gave you the correct numbers and then you have to get those numbers all together without anyone having the opportunity to manipulate them.
Usually at this point someone comes up with the idea of a paper backup so the machine prints like a receipt of who you voted for that you can put in a ballot box.
If you’re doing that and then count all of the paper ballots to verify the machine count, why even bother with the machines? Just have people vote on a paper ballot with a pencil and count them by hand. The ways to attack paper ballot just don’t scale. You might be able to manipulate a few votes in one polling station, but you’d need a massive operation to do it across the whole country.
Or, just use a pencil and paper. This a solution in search of a problem with the additional issue (or feature, depending on who you’re talking to) of being able to undermine elections in a number of ways.
(Time taken to count is a shit rationale)
Problem is we buy these things from the lowest bidder
Do vulnerabilities in voting software typically get disclosed to the public? Is there a CVE list somewhere that I can browse?
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I’m not American, and don’t even live anywhere close North America, but I strongly disagree with this. The most you can blame Americans for is willful blindness.
It’s been fairly clear for pretty much ever that the US is an empire, and regularly commits atrocities like genocide for profit.
In the past, some people were genuinely oblivious to this, for which I’m not sure you can blame them. But others knew it and did not even speak out. Even more suspected it, but did not investigate, because they had comfortable lives.
But then again - the same can be said about nations of Europe, Australia, even some Asian and African ones. Usually to a lesser extent, but still.
Americans aren’t any worse than people in other countries. Their country certainly is and needs to be destroyed, ideally without civilian casualties, but they’re not their country, despite quite a few being brainwashed into thinking they are.
Sigh… humans are predictable in the worst ways.
fuck you, asshole.
I mean, on some level, they’re not wrong. We get what we vote for. The best government money can buy…
The irony of posting this take under an article about rigging an election. Think for a second, what are the odds that this is the first time they tried this?
Oh totally, elections have definitely been tampered with in the past. And that can account for surprising swings in a district here or there. But they can only do it discreetly because it’s already such a close race. We’ve had this problem for a long time.
Also, I don’t know if you caught it, but “the best government money can buy” is not a compliment. The US government has been outright purchased by big business. The corporations lobby constantly and donate heavily. Elections are won with dollars, and every congressman is dependent on the income they get from these corporate donations just to stay in office.
The real problem we have isn’t that some small part of elections get rigged, it’s that our legislators don’t even work for us; they work for their corporate donors, that’s who pays them. And as long as this remains the case, they won’t (and arguably can’t) adheer to the will of the people, they can’t adheer to the Constitution, they have to work primarily to further the goals of their financial benefactors, big corpo.
And the rest of the world?
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