Imagine being the federal agency whose entire job is protecting voting systems, and somebody asks you to get one of those voting machines and see if it can be broken into… and your career staff calls the request "shocking." Read that again. The people paid to keep our elections secure were horrified at the idea of actually testing whether the machine can be hacked.
Here is what ProPublica is reporting. A few months into this term, DHS appointees asked CISA to acquire a voting machine, examine it and report the findings back so they could go to the White House, and they did not want the vendor tipped off if flaws turned up. The career people "repeatedly" told them it was impossible, the appointees eventually stopped pressing, and one former official said "My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like." So the fear was never that the machine has holes in it… the fear is that somebody might find them.
Now keep in mind who we are talking about. This is the same agency that, along with secretaries of state and the voting machine vendors themselves, put out a statement calling 2020 "the most secure in American history." The vendors signed off on their own report card. CISA's standard practice is to alert the voting machine company when it finds a flaw, which means the company gets a heads up and a chance to fix it quietly before anybody else ever sees it. How exactly is that an independent check? And the same story says officials in one large jurisdiction have been meeting privately with machine vendors to plan for what happens if the federal government seizes their machines. Why are you building a contingency plan around the machines being examined if there is nothing to find?
I have been saying it for years and I will keep saying it… if these systems are as secure as they swear they are, open them up and test them. Every one of them. Arizona's Adrian Fontes says the administration "cut us off and left us on our own," Maine's Shenna Bellows calls it "too little, too late," and yet nowhere in that entire story does anybody ask the obvious question, which is why a simple test of the equipment that counts your vote gets treated like a crime. Think I am wrong? Show me the last time a vendor let somebody with no stake in the outcome take one of these machines apart and publish what they found.
They want your trust and they will not let anybody look. That is the whole game. ProPublica wrote this up as a scandal about Trump appointees and accidentally told on the people who run the machines.
@realDonaldTrump, Mr President, get these machines tested by people who answer to the voters and not the vendors, and put every finding out in public before November 3.
Pray, Stand, Speak, ACT.
Love,
What all of you good people are thinking
New: DHS appointees made an unusual request of CISA, its agency that protects election systems: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use CISA for its own ends.
propub.li/4zL7awx