Posted on 09/01/2024 10:48:29 AM PDT by Libloather
When election officials in New Hampshire decided to replace the state’s aging voter registration database before the 2024 election, they knew that the smallest glitch in Election Day technology could become fodder for conspiracy theorists.
So they turned to one of the best — and only — choices on the market: A small, Connecticut-based IT firm that was just getting into election software.
But last fall, as the new company, WSD Digital, raced to complete the project, New Hampshire officials made an unsettling discovery: The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.
The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.
The probe unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
The company that conducted the scan, ReversingLabs, has also warned about those issues in a blog post and a talk at a hacking conference last year, though it did not specify the state and the vendor where the issues were found.
New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.
None of the findings amounted to evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said, and the company resolved the issues before...
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Another problem and controversy which would easily be solved by traceable paper ballots and voter ID
But of course, they will never allow that.
That entire "industry" is sketchy.
TRUMP - Day One!
I think election software is a dumbass idea.
But if we’re going to have it, shouldn’t it be open-source in a “democracy”?
The “open source community” has been taken over by the woke. They are now in the process of cancelling some of the best coders and removing the code they wrote from the codebase because of their actual or assumed political leanings.
The first fair election in the US in the last 70 years will happen when all voting is in person, on one or two days, with voters dipping one of their fingers in purple ink to prevent voting more than once.
...by paper ballot with no computers involved in any of the processes.
That’s what my son says too. Drives him up the wall. But isn’t the point of open source that anybody could “check the work”?
Vet coders? Forget it. The US Government can’t do that for Windows which runs on almost all of its workstations and servers. Stop using the machines if they think they have to vet the coders.
dipping one finger in purple ink won’t work. the truly dedicated leftist radical will just cut off the purple finger then vote again. it would take 3 or 4 voting cycles to identify them.
The Linux "kernel" is outrageously huge. They've decided to put the baby and the bathwater in for no apparent reason. So yes, it is open source, but who the heck is going to search through the millions of lines of code to find any potential soft spots?
You’d just about have to break the oversight project into smaller pieces and have a bunch of people do it.
My son despises all the bloat, does a lot of work with Gnu and Guix
‘traceable paper ballots’
So much for anonymity
Sad.
They will steal it again.
I kind of doubt an Excel Macro would scale let alone not be easily hackable:-) But yeah election software should not be rocket science.
In person double voting is a very minor issue. Mail in and absentee voting with bad voter registration on the otherhand is a very major issue. Voter registration needs to be in person, with ID, and be redone every 4 years because voters move, die, get incarcerated or sent to funny farms, develop severe dementia, brain damage etc. Political parties (Democrats) will exploit every hole in the registration process to cast ineligible votes.
A voter registration system that was not digital and paper based only would be hackable by anyone in the registrars office not to mention exceedingly labor intensive. Just ask ant librarian who was around before computers how hard it was to maintain a card catalogue and anybody who used it could hack it by pulling a card out and sticking it in his pocket. Computers and software are essential for a registration system. Paper ballots are a possibility, but again who does the counting and is anyone checking their numbers. I counted paper ballots back in the old days before I was old enough to vote. Nobody checked my tallies.
I have a friend and former co-worker who went to work for a three letter agency. He was a very good programmer, but his job was to read other people’s code to make sure they were not putting anything in the code they shouldn’t. At that agency they had three employees reading every line of new code for every guy writing code. They took security very seriously.
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