Trump's wishlist for election security "improvements" is a mix of actually good nonpartisan measures advocated for by experts (prioritizing the use of hand marked paper ballots) and nakedly partisan restrictions on voting (cumbersome citizenship verification, restrictions on mail-in voting, etc), plus some crazy stuff that's not particularly partisan, but not helpful, either.
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@mattblaze
Crazy ideas? From our batshit-crazy president? I never saw that coming.
(But thanks for watching it, so that some of us didn't have to.)
@mattblaze Yeah, I remember when it felt like all of tech was screaming against using more technology in elections, long before it became partisan.
So much more important to get the answer right, and paper counts fast anyway.
And if someone wants to challenge things, robust pencil marks best every other evidence hands down. But I am an Aussie and hearing about Bush v Gore, hanging chads, dimpled chads and counting machines where the answer changed each run seemed stuff of comedy.
@mattblaze @bmacDonald94 Is there a link to that fool’s obituary yet?
@donhawkins @bmacDonald94 I'm sorry, but I'm trying to actually look at a serious issue of public policy about which I have specialized expertise. If you want random shouting and generalities, you'll need to find it elsewhere.
@mattblaze @bmacDonald94 Hey Prof, I’m not one of your students. tRump’s obituary will serve the greater good of an entire planet. If you doubt my claim, prove me wrong. If you want to pontificate on lesser matters have at it, but if you can’t handle the feedback, oh well, this isn’t your classroom.
I expect that many of these will come up in his speech tonight, and it will be confusing, because some of them will actually make sense, while others will be in the "wait, what?" category.
Announcing “declassification” and release of documents related to election system vulnerabilities and other intelligence. Something about China compromise of voter registration data. Previously “suppressed” by “deep state”.
So far this seems to be about voter registration data, which includes some non-public PII but is mostly public, and not about voting systems or tabulators.
@mattblaze You expected this to make sense? 🤣 This is word salad in service of election fraud. He'll say any stupid thing he can think of.
Now he’s talking mostly about Chinese influence operations, as opposed to technical attacks against voting systems. And now he’s talking about Chinese fake ballots.
Back to voting systems vulnerabilities, which are already well known.
Shifted to complaining about TV networks not covering the speech. Wants their licenses revoked.
DHS will notify states whose voter registration data was compromised (by “China”) and work to patch vulnerabilities.
Asserts without evidence that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt”.
Advocates for SAVE Act.
And that’s it.
No actual new policy initiatives announced. Just the release of these new documents (which I’ve not yet looked at).
No new executive orders announced, either. Basically nothing new or surprising here, though again, I’ve not yet looked at the docs.
He appeared to have been reading from prepared remarks on a teleprompter the whole time, and didn’t seem to veer off script much.
Anyway, not much here. Much more substance (and much more concerning) was last week’s FEMA grants announcement (mandating specific election “reforms” as a precondition for getting FEMA aid).
Normally, the US president claiming that our elections shouldn’t be trusted would be a four alarm fire, but here in 2026, it’s just a Thursday evening.
I’m not likely to get through the docs he mentioned (on whitehouse.gov) tonight, though there may be some interesting stuff in there. It’s been a long day already.
By the way, the most significant thing about tonight’s speech was what WASN’T included. I had heard informed speculation that it would announce:
- de-certification of election equipment from disfavored vendors (via the now-gutted EAC)
and/or
- a new elections executive order asserting some kind of executive branch control over elections
But none of that.
OK, I've downloaded the docs from whitehouse.gov and am starting to go through them. They're easy to find; there's a popup on the homepage directing you to them
Very irritatingly, the documents are only available in four zip archives (by topic category), which have to be extracted on your computer. This isn't hard to do, but it means that you can't link to specific documents.
I'm not going to go through all of them here, and definitely not tonight. But I'm starting with the Vulnerabilities folder.
The CISA report is interesting. It points out that election systems (both tabulators and election management) involve complex software, with inevitable vulnerabilities, demanding ongoing lifecycle attention and patching.
This is indisputably and uncontroversially true.
They also talk about the limited capacity of local election administrators to defend their systems.
Again, this is also indisputably true. State local, tribal and territorial election office networks (but not tabulators) are exposed to the internet, and are especially attractive targets for foreign intelligence adversaries.
This is a point I've repeatedly made myself. We don't ask the county sheriff to defend against enemy invasions, but we expect county clerks to defend their networks against the GRU and the PLA. They can't win if that's the game.
@mattblaze Well now I want to see "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming" but for voting.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060921/
![Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:](https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/accounts/avatars/115/833/042/784/456/710/original/6c4929fda05c7451.gif "Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:")
@mattblaze all I'm hearing is screeching noises.
@mattblaze The overarching theme, however, will be “We have to do these things because Democrats cheat, like the way they cheated to win in 2020 blah blah blah.”
@20002ist There's also a chance it will be "China is rigging our elections".
@mattblaze Said in that especially sneering “CHYYYY-na” voice he uses when being extra racist.
