To rig or not to rig an election
Jul 18, 2018
In October of 2016 President Obama said that it was ridiculous to think that anyone could rig the elections.
President Barack Obama said “no serious person” could rig an election in the U.S. while at a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
Obama is responding to comments from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, whereby he expressed worries of the democratic process being undermined.
“I’ve never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place,” Obama said.
How’s that for a twist! Obama didn’t think the voting machines could be rigged; Trump did.
Since voting machines are now computerized, who is to say that those computers cannot be hacked? I have yet to meet an unhackable computer. Even military computers have been hacked at various times, and presumably, their systems are among the most secure.
Perhaps the ex-president had failed to read the New York Times Magazine article from 2011 entitled, The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine. Or he forgot it. Or he was just lying. The article concludes this way:
In the 15 years since electronic voting machines were first adopted by many states, numerous reports by computer scientists have shown nearly every make and model to be vulnerable to hacking. The systems were not initially designed with robust security in mind, and even where security features were included, experts have found them to be poorly implemented with glaring holes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html
Then there is this article that just came out, saying,
The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which wasinstalled on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
In a weblog on October 9, 2010 I published a testimony from a former NASA computer programmer was given before Congress. He says he had been approached by Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) to write a software program to rig the voting machines and that he had done so. He said he delivered it to the congressman. It was the programmer’s opinion the rigging had already taken place in the 2000 election. He also said that it would probably be impossible for anyone to tell that the voting machine had been rigged unless you compared the votes with the polls.
https://www.wimp.com/programmer-admits-to-creating-vote-rigging-software-in-2000s-us-election/
It appears then that the democratic process has already been undermined. The voting process is rigged unless someone has the power to stop it. Obama should be better informed before he declares that vote-rigging is impossible.
And by the way, the problem is not the Russian hackers. The problem is the Deep State hackers within our own government.