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 ...
Did you read the article? The software being discussed is the state wide database of registered voters.
New Hampshire already requires paper ballots, and voter ID, but it is also necessary to know who the registered voters are.
I wouldn't consider a large, secure, state wide database which has hundreds of users to be "rocket science" but there is quite a bit of work required to design and code a voter registration database system.
Seems like a database of registered voters that lets you print out lists of registered voters for polling places would be helpful.
What if every pole has drop boxes or machines, one for Republican and one for Conservative. If they were locked containers, what could go wrong?
Did YOU read the article?
Its a discussion of the problems of the software "supply-chain," often foreign-coded, with unknown and unvetted vendors.
Its intro was a specific example of the NH voter registry database, but it moved into a discussion of voting systems in general (of course with required discussions about Russia) - and the potential lack of confidence and disquiet problems with software would cause with any election result.
My comment stands. Oddly, New Hampshire was able to conduct legitimate elections long before the advent of the internet. Why is that?
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