At a gathering of hackers in Las Vegas, Nevada over the weekend, multiple security experts detected numerous security failures in the software used by voting machines in the United States.
As Politico reports, the DEF CON conference takes place every August for the purpose of bringing together hackers and other security and electronics experts. In the case of this year’s conference, multiple hackers in attendance were tasked with attempting to break into the machines that are used in American elections, so as to identify weak points that could be exploited by more malicious actors.
One such effort was carried out by Voting Village, a group of hackers who spent the entire weekend breaching the voting machines’ software. By the end of their experiments, they had discovered numerous shortcomings in the security measures provided by the machines. Voting Village co-founder Harri Hursti said that their report on these vulnerabilities would be “multiple pages” long.
“There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes I’m worried about things not being fixed.” Hursti explained. “But they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it.”
Hursti also warned about the likelihood of hostile foreign actors running far more intense and perpetual hacking operations for the purpose of interfering in the 2024 election.
“If you don’t think this kind of place is running 24/7 in China, Russia, you’re kidding yourselves,” said Hursti. “We are here only for two and a half days, and we find stuff…it would be stupid to assume that the adversaries don’t have absolute access to everything.”
But even more problematic than the weaknesses themselves is the relatively short period of time between their discovery and the election itself, now just 80 days away.
“As far as time goes, it is hard to make any real, major, systemic changes, but especially 90 days out from the election,” said Catherine Terranova, a DEF CON organizer. She noted that trying to fix such issues during “an election year like this” would be even more challenging than it normally would be in an off-year.
The hackers’ findings only confirm what former President Donald Trump and his supporters have been saying about election integrity ever since the 2020 election. In that election, despite the mainstream media and the Democratic Party refusing to listen, overwhelming evidence suggested that voter fraud took place which ultimately shifted the results away from President Trump and in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Among these fraudulent tactics were possible manipulation of voting machines, interference that would not be physically possible if paper ballots were used instead.
As such, election integrity remains a top concern and campaign issue ahead of the November election, with both sides warning of the risk of the legitimate results being altered in favor of the losing candidate.
But, but,but, all of us who have been pointing out problems with the elections for years are conspiracy theorists and misinformationists, according to the media and the Dems.