Plausible deniability

Jed Shugerman tweeted about some shady stuff happening in a Georgia Election. In one machine the GOP won every race. In the other six machines in the precinct Dems won every race.

That brought a response from Leah McElrath, who tweeted:

You wouldn’t hack an election by hacking every machine throughout the nation. You’d do so by causing marginal changes in select machines in strategic locations, thereby creating plausible deniability.

To be clear: by “hacking,” I am not even talking about hacking via the internet.

Voting machines are stored w minimal security. Humans are the weakest link.

Depending on machine type, thumb drives or mechanical adjustments could be used to make marginal changes in voter input.

Jennifer Cohn is an attorney and an election security advocate. She wrote about voting machines for Medium and tweeted a short version. This is my summary of her thread:

Two vendors, ES&S and Dominion, account for 80% of voting equipment. Corrupt insiders or foreign hackers could wreak havoc on US elections. Both companies are held by private equity, so we can’t tell who funds and controls them. The known financiers and company officers of both companies are in tight with conservatives.

Cohn explains how voter equipment irregularities in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 gave the presidency to the GOP. There are now lawsuits in Georgia about missing votes from black voters. And Steny Hoyer, House majority leader, co-wrote the voting law in 2002 made sure it didn’t require machines to have a paper trail.

Free and fair elections? Sorry, not in America.