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.”

Do vulnerabilities in voting software typically get disclosed to the public? Is there a CVE list somewhere that I can browse?

Well that was...unexpected. Surely the more likely scenario is that they exploit the hack to change the results?

That's a much more findable paper trail than "holy shit we just found a vulnerability we didn't know about, that means someone might have cheated so we have to invalidate the results"

Instead of "whoopsie this thing says I won even though everyone you talk to says they voted against me"

Just open source the code, that's the best way to help validate the systems used. Though, no telling if they'd be modified, update/patched, or using a compromised fork, so who knows....

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.

His only real move in elections is to scream cheating. This is exactly what he wants to just declare the elections fake.

Problem is we buy these things from the lowest bidder

And the rest of the world?

Answer: confidentiality of the vote

all that russian bloatware is installed in GOP controlled machines.

fuck you, asshole.

VOTE ,VOTE ,VOTE

Choose better politicians then...

The actual investigation/article, by Propublica.

He has two moves: to scream cheating, and to cheat himself.

Or they'll deliberately introduce a hack that appears to benefit the Dems, in order to claim they've been cheated.

Good thing we don't all get what we deserve. That'd be an even worse world than the one we live in.

"Every accusation is an admission"

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.

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.

This just in, many liberals are attempting to vote three times in coming election!

I mean, on some level, they're not wrong. We get what we vote for. The best government money can buy...

Sigh... humans are predictable in the worst ways.

Yep ,sure iam a commi 🤣🤣🤣

China

Commieee

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.

Are there true electronic only voting machines in use? At least in my county, you go to one machine, pick out your choices, it prints out a slip with your choices (in plain English) and barcodes. You then go feed it into another system that scans it to record it and puts it into a locked box.

If a recount is ever called you have a paper copy with the actual names that were voted for.

In theory you are right.

In practice you need an OS, visual software, and a way to read from it.

OS is probably Windows XP or whatever because reasons nobody can explain.

Software is shit because they take the cheapest one.

And to read it from you just put in a usb stick and can hack it with know window xp burn abilities.....

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?

Hopefully they'll try and rig the election but do so in such an incompetent manner that it all just falls apart on its own.

It's classic America. Have an overly complicated stupid system that doesn't work, and is inherently unsafe, but don't fix it because doing so would require some billionaire to lose a revenue stream.

When the shareholders are casting votes on things in the company I work for they use an iPad. I'm reasonably confident that the side loaded iPad app they use is more secure than the US voting systems.

That didn’t quite answer the question. I said county not country. I’m in America, elections are run at the county level usually.

Depends on the state/county contract. The ones they had in KY and PA didn't provide any sort of paper backup when I lived there. They just seemed to be a touchscreen with a custom UI.

I’m glad my polling place lets us fill in bubbles on paper and scans them and that’s it.

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)

The US doesn't have a system. Elections are run/supervised by the county and regulated by the state. That makes for a robust system that pretty much can't be subverted, no single throat to choke.

Electronic voting has been compromised multiple times in the United States so that's demonstrably untrue

That's the only hope I'm really holding out for. Everything they've tried to do has been sloppy and disorganized, they're unintentionally pushing the world towards EVs and renewables.

I think the point was that maybe a system gets subverted but because everyone does it different what you did in that state doesnt always affect every voting place

There's no 1 spot to cheat everyone.

If he cheats, he still leaves the presidency. If he screams cheating, he can weasel a new election and provisory government. He doesn't care about the party either.

When and where? I'm not thinking about a single example. ?

Nah, just fake news , RELEASE the EPSTEIN FILES

Yeah, I wouldn't put it past him to cheat since he was caught cheating before, but I do believe the reason the Trump admin asked to keep any vulnerabilities under wraps is not so they could exploit them, but so they could delay the announcement of finding them after the results came in and invalidate the results if they ended up losing.

make him sit at the BBC deposition and televise it to say which part of the files he denied being in.