On today’s BradCast, amidst a fresh flurry of mainstream media coverage of how simple it is to manipulate election results via electronic voting and tabulation systems, Politico Magazine offers a blockbuster cover story describing it as “child’s play” and, as it turns out, also serving as a virtual “Best Of” from the past 15 years of The BRAD BLOG’s coverage of e-voting failure and concerns. [Audio link to full show posted below.]
Ben Wofford’s 8,500+ word feature today on how a group of computer scientists and cybersecurity experts coming out of Princeton University have, in recent years, been able to hack virtually every such system still in use across all 50 states in the U.S., details one story after another that we’ve either broken or covered in detail, and highlights the brilliant work of a bunch of the scientists and experts who I’ve interviewed on the blog or radio show or who have otherwise served as sources for much of my reporting over the years both at The BRAD BLOG and other publications.
(Just a very few of those greatest hit hacks from over the years: the Diebold Touch-Screen Virus Hack, the Sequoia Pac-Man Hack, the $26 Radio Shack Hack, the D.C. Internet Voting Hack.)
More importantly (as I detailed earlier today), Wofford’s lengthy and well-researched report offers hints that even the computer scientists are finally beginning to concede that the most secure voting and counting system of all may be plain old, hand-marked paper ballots, publicly counted by hand at each precinct on election night before ballots are moved anywhere. (What I’ve long described as “Democracy’s Gold Standard”.)
As Shane Harris reports at The Daily Beast this week in his piece “How Hackers Could Destroy Election Day”, there are many ways that electronic voting and tabulation threatens American democracy, including by someone merely claiming that the vote has been hacked, whether it really has been or not. “If you have a system that’s been shown to have vulnerabilities, even if someone doesn’t attack them, but creates the impression that they might have, in a closely contested elections you’ve got a problem,” explains Johns Hopkins’ computer scientist Avi Rubin, one of the first to detail the enormous vulnerabilities in computer tabulator source code (in systems made by Diebold, in that case.)
Also today: After the nation’s most conservative federal appeals court recently found Texas Republicans violated the Voting Rights Act with their racially discriminatory Photo ID voting law, the state agrees to a court-ordered remedy that broadly expands ID types that may be used for voting, re-enfranchising at least 600,000 legally registered, disproportionately Dem-leaning Texas voters in the bargain.
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report with some accountability in Michigan, and to bat down several persistent wingnut climate changes myths (from Donald Trump and WI’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson among others) that just won’t die, no matter how much independently verifiable science gets thrown at them…
Brad, thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you.
I’d add to your, “hey Texans go vote,” that attorney’s at the Justice Department, NAACP, ACLU and other voting rights organizations have expended extraordinary time and efforts to restore your right to vote. For those whose right to vote has been restored, it would reflect ingratitude not to exercise your right to vote.
So now, lady and gentlemen, the only remaining dilemma is: how to vote to inflict the most visceral damage on our monstrously corrupt, irreparably toxic, and astronomically USELESS 2-party system whose ONLY MOTHERFUCKING GOAL is the endless perpetuation of our gutwrenching governmental shambles….in order to benefit (wait for it) t – h – e – m – s – e – l – v – e – s…
Whaaaat, ChicagoMel????!!!….you say the D’s and the R’s are actually COLLUDING against the American people, in a puppet show of pretend rivalry to take our eyes off the money changing hands??!….NO, ChicagoMel, nooooooooooooooo!!!!!!….please tell us it isn’t so!!!….please tell us how to decide between D(ump) and R(ump) for the future of our great nation!!!….please tell us what we all must DO…
FUCK
THEM
BOTH
TO
HELL
…for their despicable hijacking of OUR American political birthright, for their own vicious egos and greed….fuck them both and fuck them twice, so they really get your point…
I’m voting, but i honestly haven’t yet figured out for whom or for what….my singular criterion is nothing short of Ulyssean retaliation against this two-headed DNC/RNC gargoyle….and where there’s a will, there’s a…
And YES, thankyouthankyou “”” Brad, for ringing the bell of election malfeasance this entire time….being right isn’t always enuf….but it’s always the right place to start…
ChicagoMel:
Was that you I heard chiding The Secretary of Defense? Good job. No more war!
I haven’t voted since 2010. If I can get my lazy butt in gear I will register and vote for Jill Stein. The rest of them can go float in a Rio waterway for all I care!!