Trumpists trying to "show the system is insecure, are actually making it more insecure"

Given some of the historic questions this blog has raised about election software that depends on trust of election software corporations (as opposed to open source approaches) I’m interested in hearing folks thoughts on this:

"Jack Cable, a security researcher, said he assumed US adversaries already had access to the software. He said he was more concerned the release would fan distrust among the growing number of people not inclined to believe in the security of US elections.

“It is a concern that people, in the pursuit of trying to show the system is insecure, are actually making it more insecure,” said Cable, who recently joined a cybersecurity firm run by the former Cisa director Christopher Krebs and former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos.

Concerns over access to voting machines and software first surfaced in Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state senate hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no elections experience, to audit Maricopa county results. The firm’s chief executive tweeted support of conspiracy theories surrounding last year’s election.

After the county’s Dominion voting systems were turned over, Arizona’s top election official determined they could not be used again and ordered new ones."

Clearly the Trumpists are a problem, but the enemy of them (Dominion in this case) is not necessarily our friend…

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Right-wingers and Republicans expressing concern about electronic voting systems are operating in bad faith, so the outcomes (except their setting themselves up for ruinous lawsuits) really don’t matter.

Meanwhile, serious people with actual knowledge of the challenges of voting software and machines (closed- and open-source, including Dominion) read the XKCD long ago.

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This is a valid concern. Right wingers entire MO in the US is to claim the government is broken and incapable of doing anything good and only focuses on graft.

Then when they’re elected they intentionally break the government, commit graft, and prevent the government from rendering services.

It’s entirely consistent. If a right winger says “the elections aren’t secure” you can absolutely bank that they’re doing whatever they cant to try to make it insecure.

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There’s an xkcd for that too:

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It’s just ironic that they decided to pick out Dominion, as by far the most “analog” and conservative digital voting system currently in use. They didn’t challenge the less secure, no-paper-records systems that really should not be used in elections, because the GOP had good results in the states that used them. Possibly too good (I’m looking at you, North Carolina!).

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Yep. The machines that can easily be remotely compromised by russian cyberops are never the problem. It’s all those automatic tabulators that spend all their time disconnected from the internet and just count paper ballots that are at fault!

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