For weeks now, we’ve heard that voting machines cannot be hacked because they are not connected to the Internet. We now learn that is not true.
It turns out that machines which electronically record and tabulate votes are in fact equipped with modems — permitting communication with the outside world.
In an affidavit, John R. Brakey, an Arizona-based election integrity activist currently seeking a hand count in a number of Wisconsin counties that used optical scanners to recount paper ballots, states his knowledge that:
“…many of these counties are vulnerable to insider or sophisticated hacking because election results are transmitted through a cellular modem that is connected to the Internet.”
Brakey says that he and others working with him have confirmed that the scanning machines used in at least three Wisconsin counties — Milwaukee, Waukesha (suburban Milwaukee) and St. Croix (western Wisconsin) — contain a cellular modem to allow results to be sent over the Internet.
This, he says, makes them vulnerable both to insiders (including machine suppliers) and to sophisticated hackers.
They’re checking to see if this is the case with other counties.
As long as there is such communication, the possibility of hacking, and of remote control and manipulation of that machine, remains very real. (And please see our story on the unexpected spike in internet traffic coming from Russia and its former republic Kyrgyzstan, suggesting the possibility that someone was checking the hackability of voting machines in Wisconsin.)
You are not going to do anything but fuel paranoia by going to the most abstract possibilities of hacking. The proof lies not with hackers but statisticians. Did the suspect polling units report something outside of predicted norms for those polling places?
There were plenty of anomalies with polling data up to and including exit polls which have long been the benchmark for judging the accuracy of the counts. Tens of thousands of ballots in Detroit with no Presidential selection? Broken machines? 101% voter turnout in several Wisconsin districts?
Add voter suppression in all the various favorite flavors GOPers prefer and you are FK straight it was stolen.
Oh and nevermind those 3 million people over there that don’t count – nothing to see move along now.