Angelenos! I’ll be at the Los Angeles Festival of Books TOMORROW (Apr 19) for a panel called “Nature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Other” with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago.
Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn't exist.
The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it's far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a "standard" voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.
Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.
Instead, they decided they were going to publish a "descriptive standard." Rather than designing a new standard, they'd write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.
That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.
The voting machine companies weren't done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.
This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.
Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.
Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.
Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.
(Incidentally: anyone who tells you that "online safety" requires us to make online platforms liable for their users' speech needs to explain how this wouldn't empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn't just do what Diebold did. It's not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)
That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore's webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore's webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.
That's where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called "Students for Free Culture." It was pretty danged cool.
That wasn't the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country's history.
Diebold's stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president":
Now, to be clear, I don't think that O'Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that's the Supreme Court's job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.
In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:
At Defcon, the amazing Matt Blaze has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:
https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp
Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology…right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:
That's when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history's most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:
There's a name for this: it's called "schismogenesis": when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:
This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.
Which is bad. It's bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world's most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you've conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.
Just because some voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are good, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.
Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years. Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:
The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines. We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot – only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!
This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper. That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part – and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's super-hackable:
So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.
These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're good) – but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.
But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's also not good. He can still be terrible in other ways – and he is.
Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners – but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.
As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.
First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit? As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."
Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit – a step that Raffensperger has not explained. And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."
So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.
And here's the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it's very cheap:
Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan "bubble ballots" that the voter has marked with a pen.
This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, "This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade."
This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it's part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One MS NOW producer is sounding the alarm about a comment President Donald Trump made during his extensive interview with the New York Times
One MS NOW producer is sounding the alarm about a comment President Donald Trump made during his extensive interview with the New York Times that is telling about his 2026 intentions.
Kyle Griffin, executive producer of Weeknight wrote on X that the detail was a "BIG FLAG."
"Trump said during his interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election. He doubted whether the Guard was 'sophisticated enough' to carry out the order effectively," Griffin said.
The comments come as the Washington Post reported Monday morning "if his party loses," in the 2026 midterm elections, it is expected that Trump will "sow doubt in their validity."
Trump's new plans included forcing Republican state lawmaker tos redraw congressional lines in Republicans' favor. That step, however, was only the beginning. Trump is also pushing to make voter registration more difficult and end the use of voting machines and mail-in ballots.
Trump’s “success” is due in large part to his preternatural ability to identify men and women who harbor ambition, vanity, and weakness in equal measure. Trump exploits their ambition and vanity by dangling access to power, knowing that their weak characters will look past his corruption, depravity, and malignant narcissism that threaten our democracy. On Wednesday, the bitter fruits of Trump’s sordid recruiting efforts were on sorry display in the US Senate.
At some point in their lives, Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton were respected members of the bar with outstanding reputations among lawyers, judges, and clients. Todd Blanche has trashed his reputation over the last three years by representing Trump in the Manhattan hush-money trial—which ended in conviction on 34 felony counts—and in two federal prosecutions that were abandoned after Trump's 2024 re-election, a result made possible by the Supreme Court's immunity ruling in Trump v. US.
But the jury was out on Jay Clayton. Until today. The damning verdict was delivered by Clayton himself through his sniveling, evasive, shameful appearance before the Judiciary Committee. In the legal vernacular, “Clayton has drunk the Kool-Aid.”
For those not familiar with Clayton, he is currently the US Attorney for the SDNY. He previously served as the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He served on the Management Committee of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the world’s largest and most respected law firms. His financial disclosure showed he drew a salary and bonus of more than $6.7 million from Sullivan & Cromwell in the year before his SDNY nomination, lofty salary that reflects his stellar legal training, his government experience, his purported legal acumen, and his wise counsel.
But in a brief exchange with Senator John Ossof, Jay Clayton demonstrated that either (a) he is willing to lie to a Senate Committee while under oath, or (b) he is functionally illiterate and cannot be trusted to serve as the nation’s chief intelligence officer. I believe the answer is option (a), but I will let you judge after watching the video of the exchange between Senator Ossof and Clayton, below: (Press the “play” arrow at the bottom of the embedded video to watch the exchange.)
If Clayton’s testimony was truthful, he was unaware that his predecessor in the job of Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the execution of the FBI search warrant that seized the Fulton County, Georgia, ballots. Clayton claims he was also unaware that Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that Trump requested that she attend the FBI’s seizure of ballots in Georgia.
Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County raid was extensively covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and widely reported on cable news, including Fox News. So, too, was Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony that she was at the raid at Trump’s request.
Again, Tulsi Gabbard is Clayton’s immediate predecessor in the job for which he is seeking a favorable report by the Judiciary Committee. For Clayton to pretend to be unaware of the biggest controversy surrounding his predecessor is (in the words of Jon Ossof) “not credible.”
But Clayton has performed the calculus. He has weighed the stain on his reputation and the behind-the-back whispers that will follow him for life, and concluded, in his weakness and vanity, that access to power is more important than truth, honor, and patriotism.
Such are the men selected by the partners of Sullivan & Cromwell to lead their firm. It is no surprise that S&C never capitulated to Trump. It never had to; instead, it voluntarily aligned with him, serving as the White House’s favored intermediary to coerce other firms into capitulating to Trump.
And, now, Jay Clayton will be our nation’s chief intelligence officer, delivering critical briefings to a president who cannot abide bad news. Jay Clayton is the wrong man for a job that affects the safety and security of every American.
Tell your Senators that Jay Clayton is unfit to hold a position of public trust in the federal government!
As bad as Clayton's confirmation hearing was, Todd Blanche's was worse. Blanche walked into the confirmation room having protected Ghislaine Maxwell, obstructed the production of the Epstein documents, approved the bad-faith prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James, and approved the $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists and the IRS immunity agreement for Trump. It is difficult to see how it could get worse. But it did.
One of the first questions posed to Blanche was whether he was Trump’s friend. He replied, “I am his lawyer . . . was his lawyer.”
There you have it! For two seconds, Todd Blanche spoke the truth before he caught himself. But in that momentary candor, he explained why he was unfit to be the Attorney General of the United States. He views himself as the president's lawyer, rather than the lawyer for the people of the United States.
The influential New York City Bar Association filed a lengthy objection with the Chair and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, explaining why Todd Blanche is unfit to serve as Attorney General. See City Bar Opposes Todd Blanche Nomination for U.S. Attorney General (2026).
Senator Adam Schiff released key moments of his examination of Todd Blanche. See Schiff’s notes, Todd Blanche’s Conflicts of Interest. In a key moment in the examination (beginning at the 9:30 mark), Senator Schiff got Blanche to admit that he approved the $1.8 billion slush fund.
Senator Schiff then asked,
What happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York? What happened to the prosecutor people had respect for?
What happened to the prosecutor who once respected the rule of law? What happened to the prosecutor who said “there won’t be a whiff of political partisanship” and then prosecutes the president’s enemies over seashells and making a video stating the plain law of the Constitution?
What happened to the Todd Blanche of the Southern District of New York that could convert him into you, someone who is willing to say the president has both the right and the duty to prosecute his political enemies?
[The above quote is my personal transcription from the video; I tried to get it right, but the official record may differ.]
There is more, but you get the point: It was a brutal hearing for Blanche—but cowardly Republicans—like the feckless Susan Collins—will vote for a man who has proven his willingness to ignore the Constitution, federal statutes, due process, the rule of law, and human decency.
Trump reverses order for ICE to “cease non-urgent traffic stops.”
Remember two days ago when Senator Susan Collins was bragging that she had convinced DHS to order ICE to cease all non-urgent traffic stops? Well that cessation lasted less than a day. See The Atlantic, Inside Trump’s Reversal on ICE | Attacks from immigration hard-liners had the president worried about looking weak.
Per The Atlantic,
The president overruled his own administration after getting furious pushback from his MAGA base over the ICE order suspending most vehicle stops. White House officials told us that Trump had heard a litany of complaints from hard-line allies over the past day.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!,” the president wrote on his Truth Social network. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
Don't let Susan Collins lie about persuading ICE to suspend non-urgent traffic stops. Her plea to MarkWayne Mullin was immediately overruled by Trump. Perhaps she should've waited a few hours before taking credit for a major change in ICE policy. Now, she has proved that she is powerless to rein in Donald Trump.
Concluding Thoughts
Don’t believe anything Trump says on Thursday evening.
Trump will give a primetime speech on Thursday evening. According to reports, he will allege that China attempted to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by attacking Trump on social media. However, Trump apparently has no proof that China affected voting procedures or vote count totals. And, of course, it is well established that Russia likewise attempted to affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election by attacking Joe Biden.
The most important point is this: Simply because Trump claims the authority to do something does not mean he has that authority. Moreover, if he attempts to exercise authority not granted to him by the Constitution, he will be stopped by the courts.
I had an email exchange with a reader that illustrates why things that “sound bad” may be bluffs designed to frighten or dispirit us. The reader asked,
Trump has fired the remaining EAC commissioners. The EAC is tasked with the certification of voting machines.
Can we predict that Trump will claim votes are invalid because machines were not certified?
Good question—and one that may be causing some people to fear that the firing of the Election Assistance Commission will lead to “chaos.” But let’s look at the facts.
1 The certification of voting machines by EAC does not impose any obligation on states to use those machines. It’s like a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” on a cleaning product; you are free to purchase the store-branded, cheaper version. Some states have laws saying that they must use federally certified machines; others do not (e.g., California).
2 Once a machine is certified, it remains certified forever, unless it is decertified. Every machine that requires federal certification under state law already has it—and thus can be used in 2026. Moreover, the structure of the certification program—which delegates certification decisions to EAC staff rather than requiring a Commission vote—allows the testing and certification to continue despite the vacancies. See Just Security, What is the Election Assistance Commission With No Commissioners?
So, the answer to the reader’s question is, “No,” Trump will not be able to claim that 2026 votes are invalid because “the machines were not certified.” No federal law says anything of the sort.
On the other hand, Trump makes lots of claims that are patently illegal and unconstitutional. Can he make up a rule that, because the EAC doesn’t exist, all votes in 2026 are invalid? Sure, just like he can issue an executive order stating that he can levitate. That doesn’t mean he should jump off a skyscraper.
So, if Trump makes claims about voting machines not being certified for 2026, ignore him. The machines and software have already been certified.
