Contributed by Doug Ferguson
There is always irony in how history plays out.
The HBO documentary, “Kill Chain”, about how unsecure our electronic elections systems are and how easy they are to “hack” has interesting origins considering what has happened since the documentary was released last spring many months before our contentious fall elections. In a BBC interview with one of the filmmakers, Sarah Teale, an admitted registered Democrat, she talks about the fact that the documentary didn’t have the impact they had hoped for because it came out just as the COVID-19 crisis started and captured all the headlines. This BBC interview, by the way, was done just before the 2020 elections.
In the documentary, Harri Hursti, the voting system security expert from Finland is followed around the U.S. interviewing other software experts, talking to voters, participating in the Def Con “hackers” convention and even actually buying used voting machines (models still in use around the country) at bargain prices from a clueless Ohio recycling dealer to show how easy it was to hack them! All this to show how unequivocally vulnerable our voting systems are to outside forces and how most voting machines are easily connected to the internet no matter what the manufacturers say.
Hursti points out that you don’t need to move votes to create havoc and confusion in an election, you can just screw up the voter registration records and create delays or invalid votes. You can add ineligible voters to the roles facilitating added illegal paper ballots at election time. If your goal is just to mess things up enough to destroy voter confidence in the system and thus qustion results, you can do that easily.
Now about the irony in all this. Even as the currently left wing Time magazine just published a headline article on how the Democratic Party “saved our democracy” by orchestrating a coordinated secret effort to guarantee the outcome of the recent 2020 presidential election, the “Kill Chain” documentary and other efforts to challenge election fraud in the past few election cycles appear to have been originally motivated by an effort to show how the Republicans, not the Democrats, previously tried to steal elections with the clear implication that Trump stole the presidency in 2016!
The picture is from the 2020 Georgia Primary election last summer. It was also affected by large voter registration "glitches" and very long lines.
The only actual election discrepancies covered in “Kill Chain” were those in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election between Governor Brian Kemp and Stacy Abrams. First there were over 300,000 voters initially deemed ineligible due to a so-called “computer glitch” causing hours long voter lines until the issue was resolved and generating huge voter anger. Then one of the primarily black voting districts ended up overwhelming voting for Kemp who was white.
The documentary showed how both of these events could be easily done through “hacking” the system. Kemp won the election by a fairly slim margin. This one election was obviously what motivated most “honest” Democrats to support the voting system vulnerability effort prior to the 2020 presidential election even though plenty of questionable Republican defeats around the country were never investigated.
Now it turns out that this effort to expose voting system vulnerability might explain how Joe Biden won! What irony! It probably explains why we don’t hear much about “Kill Chain” now that the 2020 election is over! Could it be that the extreme vulnerability of our electronic voting systems so dramatically researched and demonstrated in “Kill Chain” had some role in the election of Joe Biden? Who knows? Without the rigorous paper ballot audits that were so passionately recommended by all the experts interviewed in the documentary, we will never know for sure.
Regardless of what side of the political aisle you are on, the messages brought forth in the documentary are still very relevant. All who were interviewed agreed that democracy depends on an honest voting system that the vast majority of the people believe in.
They all also agreed that almost all of the electronic voting devices in use today are antiquated and very vulnerable to “hacking”, not only by outside nations with great computer resources, but also by “lone wolf” types who just want to create havoc. They all further agreed that the only way to guarantee the integrity of an election is by the rigorous audit of paper ballots manually filled out by voters and used as inputs to the overall system. As of today, there appear to be no efforts to do so in the contested “swing states” where paper ballots were used as in our own Alaska, for instance.
Our countries’ future depends on honest elections that people believe in. We also must be vigilant that whatever changes we make, we protect the rights of the states and not be overreached by the Federal government as the legislation currently going through congress is bound to do.
What could the Federal laws do that won’t jeopardize states rights? First it could require that all election system vendors allow their products to be open to outside certification audits of both hardware and software before sold in the U.S. as we do with Underwriter’s Laboratory for electrical products and many other safety concerns. Second, it could require that all states use voter created paper ballots as input to whatever system the state develops and that some sort of mandatory audit of these be required to certify election results for all elections. Violations in national elections should be a Federal offense. The states would be free to implement their own systems with only these requirements.
America’s future depends on what we do to fix this broken system!
Doug Ferguson is a retired engineer living in Palmer, Alaska who has had a life-long interest in science, computer technology, history and, of course, politics