Have you ever seen the inside of a voting machine? The hardware is old, Windows XP era. DefCON 2017’s Election Village taught me a lot – I got to talk to the people at NIST who wrote the voting machine security standards, who lobby and inform Congress as to the state of our machines and their manufacturers and talked with the experts face to face who compromised said machines twice in an hour.
I don’t mean “look at election results” and a computer compromise that doesn’t matter – I mean changing the votes over wireless. I watched it, I talked to the people who did it.
I’m not the world’s foremost expert in voting technology but I’ve had face to face conversations with the people who are. Believe me when I say Christopher Wray is lying to the American public: we must wake up, have no faith in our voting machines and make every effort to affect positive change in our elections.
Attack by foreign power is a red herring – it’s a given that other nations are trying to affect our elections, but what people don’t get is that it’s the American businesses behind their sale, distribution, manufacture and lobbying efforts who are the threat, and it is they who successfully hacked the 2016 election.
- NIST wrote security guidelines, and states who say they follow them have a single machine that is compliant. Few if any of those deployed actually comply.
- There is no budget for fixing the known security holes. The compromises affected at DefCON are still there.
- There is no actual, effective interest by those in power in securing these machines.
- Between these machines and gerrymandering, those in power can affect the vote any way they want.
The November 2018 election is crucial for many reasons, but the biggest one is this : everyone knows Trump is an incompetent fraud, a figurehead for the 1% to get their way. If the election in November doesn’t turn both the House and Senate blue, it means election hacking is too far gone and the American people will never have an honest election again.
It will mean it’s too late, and we will never get true liberty back.
Vote flipping started with the Bush elections, we watched it, we saw the polls get turned on their ear and have nothing to do with the election “results” and we saw documentaries where lead software developers testified to Congress that they were told to flip the vote on voting machines. We watched live YouTube videos where someone pushed the Kerry button and Bush was registered in the system.
Obama got elected because of sheer numbers. People got out and actively voted, tales of fraud and suppression made headlines and the resulting numbers were too broad for them to fudge. Those in power were forced to concede and they were PISSED. They’ve been planning the 2016 election ever since.
Some people vote passionately red, some vote passionately blue, but it’s those who didn’t vote at all who can shape our country in 2018. Those who vote “other” fail to do their job as citizens.
I know this is a contentious point, but this is how you, a person, a citizen, can actually affect your country. Do you remember the tale of the angels in the war between Satan and God? God punished those who refused to fight on either side. Nevermind the theology: ask yourself why. Why does that matter? When you figure out you’ll have your answer, and that’s what you must do : decide one, or the other, or your vote is just as valueless as those who didn’t vote at all.
It’s a broken system, but make no mistake that you have to vote, and when you do you have to decide one, or the other. This isn’t the way it should be, but it’s the way it is, and it’s obvious that it’s what we all must do or else you’re making an emotional decision, not an intellectual one. Do the math. Make it count.
