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 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.
@mattblaze @bmacDonald94 Ahh, brilliant. I see all that “expertise” has failed you.
@donhawkins @bmacDonald94 Learn some manners if you want conversation.
@mattblaze @bmacDonald94 🤣 what makes you assume I want conversation? Read my profile.
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.
@mattblaze I would bet good money that China is actually quite happy to have Trump in office instead of Biden
Back to voting systems vulnerabilities, which are already well known.
Shifted to complaining about TV networks not covering the speech. Wants their licenses revoked.
We should all stand at attention in front of our TV and listen to Big Brother Trump.
DHS will notify states whose voter registration data was compromised (by “China”) and work to patch vulnerabilities.
@mattblaze what does that even mean? About the only thing I can think of to do with voter registration data is to disenfranchise people by kicking them off the rolls. But the narrative Trump wants is that illegal immigrants voted or something?
@mattblaze That sounds scary. Also, if China screwed with that last election, Harris should be president!
Asserts without evidence that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt”.
Advocates for SAVE Act.
And that’s it.
@mattblaze He voted by mail. 🤬
@mattblaze thank you for wading through that sea of verbal diarrhea and distilling it for the rest of us.
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.
I guess the stuff they seized was so clean they couldn't twist it.
He appeared to have been reading from prepared remarks on a teleprompter the whole time, and didn’t seem to veer off script much.
@mattblaze he is saving the best for his Midnight Meltdown on truth social.
@mattblaze wonder what kind of drugs they gave/withdrew from him, this time.
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.
@mattblaze In ordinary times, the President addressing the nation would be something worth paying attention to. But everyone knows that what he says are a convoluted collection of senile rambling and lies, and that is simply not news.
@mattblaze I saw Rep Himes tonight. He was very animated and told people to go to whitehouse.gov and look at the documents because they’re all redacted, thinking people might understand what propaganda and paranoia is.
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.
@mattblaze
It's too soon for that. Doing it now would allow time for court challenges. They're probably going to do it in September or October.
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/
@jef Emergency! Everybody to get from voting booth.
Given that the White House itself is now endorsing this point, it's especially odd that almost immediately after Trump took office, he gutted CISA, which was providing federal-level threat intelligence and other defensive support to state and local election offices.
Hopefully they restore these vital resources soon.
We saw state and local election offices (and contractors they use) targeted by Russian intelligence services in the run up to the 2016 election. They compromised things like voter registration databases and software.
It would not surprise me one bit if Chinese intelligence was equally successful in 2020 (& 2024), or if Russia continued to enjoy access to these systems.
But remember, these aren't actual vote tabulators. These compromises can cause disruption, but can't easily alter votes.
@mattblaze And all the more reason to have openly counted paper ballots party scrutineers can independently tabulate.
@abartlet I'm sorry, but do you actually have any idea how US ballots are counted, what the ballots look like, or what safeguards are in place?
But thanks for your advice.
@mattblaze Only that there seem to be so many things all going on at the same time.
The view from this end of the planet is that there is an election down to the level of county dog catcher.
@mattblaze But if foreign governments are attacking databases, might they be removing registrations for people they think will vote in a particular way - and be much more effective in affecting the outcome than the SAVE Act?
Or were the databases simply corrupted, making the voting process more chaotic but not actually affecting the recording and tabulation of votes?
@PeterLudemann As far as we can tell, they penetrated the systems but didn't use the capability (so far).
If they remove registrations, we discover that pretty quickly, when those people show up to vote and aren't listed. But that's not happened at any scale.
@mattblaze Wasn't there a major problem in Florida 2000 & 2004, when some automated process removed thousands of people from the voter rolls? Or did those people get notified that they had been removed, so they didn't cause a noticeable blip when showing up to vote? (Or removals were reversed?)
(All because the Constitution doesn't say that all citizens have the right to vote, but I digress)
@PeterLudemann Things like that happen. That's not the same as foreign election hacking.
@mattblaze Understood. I am simply wondering whether the removal of thousands of people from the voter lists had a noticeable effect at voting time. Especially if that state didn't have a mechanism on election day for re-registering people who had been left off the lists.
@PeterLudemann This is what provisional ballots are intended to address.
Compromises of these systems are a problem because they can DISRUPT elections, which is something a foreign adversary might well want to do as part of a cyber operation. But if China (or Russia) did manage to compromise these systems, they appeared not to have actually used the capability in the actual elections (which we know because they were not noticeably disrupted).
But helping state and local government shore up these systems is definitely an important and legitimate goal.
I've not read all the documents yet. I read the CISA report carefully, but I've only done a sampling of the others.
There's some interesting stuff in there, but there doesn't so far seem to be anything earth-shattering or especially surprising.
In summary, nothing I've seen alters my general assessment (which is fairly mainstream):
- US election systems do have technical vulnerabilities, and we should definitely continue to work to make these systems better.
- There is, fortunately, no credible evidence thus far that technical vulnerabilities have ever actually been exploited to alter a US election outcome.
@mattblaze I could see him holding a rally on a random January day next year and calling for the assembled christofascists to go attack Congress
@mattblaze
This is true.
I did something of a ‘deep dive’ in 2020.
The machines are relatively simple tallying machines. They are not ‘online’ during the voting process, they just return a tally faster.
What passed muster previously was much more ‘vibes’ based: polling/media orgs collected & reported on the ‘vibes’ from key constituencies thus ‘calling it’ way before full counts had been completed.
Now, the Orange Oaf is exploiting all the misunderstandings to bring the entire process into question.
@mattblaze Given how often you have to make that point. I should register us-elections-have-technical-vulnerablities-but-there-is-no-credible-evidence-to-date-they-have-been-exploited-to-alter-outcomes.com as a quick and convenient link to reference teeheehee.
@mattblaze Thank you so much for your even and level commentary.
you have already done a commendable job of protecting the rest of us from the raw pain.
take a break and use whatever is your own palate/brain cleanser of choice.
@mattblaze happy thursday evening 🙃
@mattblaze Guess he took the whole “people are making money off how much I veer off the teleprompter” thing personally. Or maybe he made a bet of his own to get in on the action.
Thank you for giving your input. I appreciate it.
@mattblaze
I appreciate the summary, so I didn't have to watch.
@mattblaze Of course he likes to scare the crap out of everyone by playing up a big announcement as usual.
@mattblaze Yeah. I sure hope the voter machines aren't done away with completely.
@mattblaze
old man yells at democracy
![Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:](https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/accounts/avatars/115/833/042/784/456/710/original/6c4929fda05c7451.gif "Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:")
@mattblaze did you have Obama on your bingo card?
@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.
