As we all know, the 2020 presidential election was the most honest, above-board exercise of popular suffrage in the recorded history of mankind, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a racist, bigoted redneck yahoo who wants to install Donald Trump as dictator-for-life of this once-proud republic. That said, however, there has been a steady trickle of revelations suggesting that the 2020 election was not actually the pristine civics lesson that we have been forced to affirm it to have been (on pain of vilification and deplatforming). The latest is the belated release this week of the 2021 Halderman Report, which shows that Dominion Voting Systems voting machines are not quite the unimpeachable fortresses they’ve been touted to be.
This is odd in the extreme, as it was just a few weeks ago that Fox News settled with Dominion for an eye-watering $787.5 million and fired its top host, Tucker Carlson, on top of that, all for suggesting that the election may not have been up to the standard of elections in bastions of democracy such as Cuba or Zimbabwe. But on Sunday, the National Pulse reported that the Halderman Report “lays bare a litany of ‘critical vulnerabilities’ in Dominion Voting Systems’ machines, currently being used in a number of states, and in all voting locations in the U.S. state of Georgia.”
The report, which according to the National Pulse was “compiled by Prof. Alex Halderman and Prof. Drew Springall as part of the lawsuit Curling v. Raffensperger,” explains how “ballot scanners and ballot marking devices (ICX) ‘can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms’ and that ‘ICX could be used to change the votes of individual Georgia voters.’” And if it can be done in Georgia and the same machines are in use elsewhere, it can be done in other states as well.
The possibilities for what might have been done in 2020 are obvious, but it’s clear that no matter what comes out now, there’s no getting rid of Old Joe Biden and his henchmen until Nov. 2024. The overarching question now is whether these vulnerabilities can and will be fixed in time for the next presidential election, or whether the Dominion voting machines will once again present a golden opportunity for all those who want to “enhance” our next presidential contest the way they did the last one.
The Halderman Report also establishes that in the Dominion voting machines, “attackers can alter the QR codes on printed ballots,” and “can install malware with only brief physical access to the machines.” Halderman adds, “An attacker with brief access to a single ICX or a single Poll Worker Card and PIN can obtain the county-wide [cryptographic] keys.” He noted that all this can be done without leaving any traces of its having been done: “ICX malware can still change individual votes and most election outcomes without detection.” And post-election audits would be no use, either: “Even the ‘auditability of the ballots’ can be compromised, and ‘such cheating could not be detected by [a risk limiting audit] or a hand count.’”
Related: Dominion vs. ‘Russian Collusion’ and ‘Disinformation’
Halderman accordingly warns that “[a] dishonest election worker… with just brief access to the scanner’s memory card could violate ballot secrecy and determine how individual voters voted.” This kind of vulnerability wouldn’t even require some large-scale conspiracy. All that would be needed would be a handful of wokesters among local election officials, and lo and behold, we’ll be in for another Red Trickle, or at worst, a Blue Wave emanating not from a popular enthusiasm for men dominating women’s sports and racial tensions being higher than they’ve been in decades, but from chicanery in the voting machinery.
Even fixing these problems may not be enough, as the problems with the machines are extremely large. The report further warns that “merely patching these specific problems is unlikely to make the ICX substantially more secure… It is very likely that there are other, equally critical flaws… yet to be discovered.” Halderman accordingly concludes that these “technical findings leave Georgia voters with greatly diminished grounds to be confident that the votes they cast on the ICX BMD are secured.” Once again, that doesn’t go for Georgia alone. The Pulse points out that “by November 2020, 24 states used one or more components of the Dominion Democracy Suite voting system, and the ICX mentioned used in 16 states, with Georgia mandating the system as the primary method of voting.”
Thus as we head into the 2024 election, the integrity of the entire process is in serious jeopardy. And who is working to fix that?
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