🔥What are America's electronic voting system vulnerabilities, & what's being done about it

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text: Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢
@jennycohn1
🔥What are America’s electronic voting system vulnerabilities, & what are the grass roots efforts seeking to mitigate them next week? Pls read my latest @nybooks piece to find out. Several projects still seek volunteers #electiontransparency https://nybooks.com/daily/2020/10/31/how-safe-is-the-us-election-from-hacking/…
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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/10/31/how-safe-is-the-us-election-from-hacking/

In September, The New York Times reported on a concerning surge in Russian ransomware attacks against the United States, including “against small towns, big cities and the contractors who run their voting systems,” the “full scale” of which “is not always disclosed.” Last week, the newspaper further reported that Russia “has in recent days hacked into state and local computer networks in breaches that could allow Moscow broader access to American voting infrastructure,” but said that “Russia’s ability to change vote tallies nationwide is limited,” a caveat that seems more ominous than reassuring. Meanwhile, public officials and voting-machine vendors historically have not always been forthcoming with the public about the extent of security weaknesses and breaches. Election security advocates worry that this lack of transparency may leave the public exposed both to potential election theft and to false claims that election theft has occurred. In an effort to mitigate these risks, grassroots efforts around the country seek to make the 2020 election more transparent than past elections.

In August 2016, according to David Shimer’s book Rigged, “the U.S. Intelligence community had reported that Russian hackers could edit actual vote tallies, according to four of Obama’s senior advisors.” But the only government official who publicly alluded to this possibility was then Senate minority leader Harry Reid. On August 29, 2016, Reid published a letter he’d sent to then FBI director James Comey in which he said the threat of Russian interference “is more extensive than is widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results.”

Reid has said that he believes vote tallies were changed in 2016. According to Rigged, “Obama’s leading advisors dismissed Reid’s theory, with a catch: they could not rule it out.” James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, told Shimer: “We saw no evidence of interference in voter tallying, not to say that there wasn’t, we just didn’t see any evidence.”

According to Rigged, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not have independent surveillance abilities and just thirty-six local election offices had let them assess the security of their voting systems before the 2016 election. In January 2017, the DHS confirmed that it had conducted no forensic analysis to verify that vote tallies weren’t altered. In June 2017, it again confirmed that it had conducted no such forensic analysis and did not intend to do so. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has since said that “As far as I can tell, no systematic post-election forensic examination of these voting machines took place. Whatever the reason for this failure to act, this administration cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of 2016.”

*snip*

[questionseverything]

1. We need hand counted paper ballots

And a tight chain of custody