Oh woe is us! Hackers have found vulnerabilities in voting machines and, gee whiz, there is just no way to fix them before the November election. At least that is what the Politico cybersecurity reporter Maggie Miller would like you to believe.
However, there is a certain word very conveniently missing from her story on Monday and that missing word is "paper," as in "paper ballots," which you will find nowhere in "The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them."
Some of the best hackers in the world gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year’s election — all with an eye to helping officials identify and fix vulnerabilities.
The problem? Their findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before Nov. 5.
Media Translation: If there are voting machine irregularities this November there was no time to fix it.
Every August, hackers at the DEF CON conference find security gaps in voting equipment, and every year the long and complex process of fixing them means nothing is implemented until the next electoral cycle.
As a result, many in the election security community are bemoaning the fact that no system has been developed to roll out fixes faster and worrying that the security gaps that get identified this year will provide fodder for those who may want to question the results. “As far as time goes, it is hard to make any real, major, systemic changes, but especially 90 days out from the election,” said Catherine Terranova, one of the organizers of the DEF CON “Voting Village” hacking event. She argued that’s particularly troubling during “an election year like this.”
But Election Day security is under particular scrutiny in 2024. That’s both because of increasing worries that foreign adversaries will figure out how to breach machines, and because President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of widespread fraud in 2020 undermined confidence in the vote among his supporters.
It's very very important to get the typical media slam in early at Trump in any discussion about election integrity.
But somehow Politico didn't find any space to discuss Dominion Voting Machines and Smartmatic suing the pro-Trump news networks after the 2020 election, as in: wait, there were problems that went unfixed before that massive-turnout Covid election? It continued:
As a result, many in the election security community are bemoaning the fact that no system has been developed to roll out fixes faster and worrying that the security gaps that get identified this year will provide fodder for those who may want to question the results.
“As far as time goes, it is hard to make any real, major, systemic changes, but especially 90 days out from the election,” said Catherine Terranova, one of the organizers of the DEF CON “Voting Village” hacking event. She argued that’s particularly troubling during “an election year like this.”
Hmmm... A system immune to machine hacking or perhaps not a machine at all but a successful blast from the past such as paper ballots? Ironically although Maggie Miller seems to have forgotten that, she herself mentioned the paper ballot solution two years ago in her Politico story about the 2022 DEF CON conference:
The findings have fueled calls to move back to using paper ballots or machines with paper records to verify votes.
Paper ballots, once hailed even by liberals (and Politico) as a solution to voting machine irregularities, has been sent down the media Memory Hole.
