The results of a major election security investigation have just revealed that investigators found evidence of election hacking and disturbing “blindspots” in America’s voting machines.
A six-month-long investigation found shocking levels of foreign influence in voting systems used for U.S. elections.
New Hampshire officials hired a prominent forensic cybersecurity firm to conduct the investigations into election software.
People “familiar with the examination,” who were “granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it,” reported leaked details of the investigation to Politico.
Politico notes that the investigators “found troubling security bugs” in voting machine software.
Those “bugs” include connections to Russian servers, the Ukrainian national anthem embedded in the code, and evidence that overseas contractors had been accessing the software database.
According to the Politico report, the voting machine software had been “misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia.”
The outlet also discovered that the software coding is “overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter.”
Investigators even found that “a programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.”
However, despite the troubling findings, Politico notes that New Hampshire officials argue that the investigation did not uncover anything that “amounted to evidence of wrongdoing.”
Officials who reportedly spoke to Politico anonymously insist that the IT firm responsible for the database, WSD Digital, “resolved the issues before the new database came into use ahead of the presidential vote this spring.”
Politico goes on to argue that officials are reluctant to expose “the risk that hackers could have exploited the [software and database] to surreptitiously edit the state’s voter rolls” because they don’t want to “stoke election conspiracies.”
The report continues by citing a lack of a “uniform or rigorous system to verify what goes into software used on Election Day and whether it is secure.”
Politico then claims that both federal and state officials “have tried to bring greater attention to these flaws” but have faced “critics who resist ‘federalization’ of state election processes.”
The outlet states:
The fear, current and former election officials said, is less a far-reaching hack that flips enough votes to swing an election than small, localized errors or attacks that undermine confidence in the ballot — or empower dishonest candidates to mount legal challenges to the results.
The report then continues by arguing that voter rolls are more of a security issue than voting machine vulnerabilities.
“If the last two elections offer any indication, voter registration databases are one of the most vulnerable targets for foreign hackers because — unlike voting machines — they must be accessible over the internet in order to operate,” Politico reports.
“In the worst-case scenario, hackers could manipulate a state’s voter list, adding fictitious people to the rolls, changing real voters’ information, or directing voters to the wrong polling places on Election Day,” the report adds.
David Jefferson, an expert in election security and a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the outlet:
“Outsourcing, even indirectly, to an international source is just asking for trouble.”
New Hampshire’s Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan issued a statement, saying:
“The biggest challenge facing election administrators in this upcoming 2024 election cycle is trying to create a climate where we can restore the trust and confidence” in the election process.
“That job is challenging,” he continued.
Voting machines “use computer code and are highly technical,” Scanlan added.
“Things can go wrong.”
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