by Walter W. Murray, reporter
The crucial 2018 midterm elections are now less than two months away, and already there are reports of serious problems… and critics warn it could be election fraud.
The electronic system used in many states is badly flawed… vulnerable to hackers… and in at least five cases has NO paper backup.
That means if a vote is changed electronically, NO ONE WILL KNOW!
That might sound far-fetched.
But voters in Georgia — one of those five states — say they’ve already SEEN their votes being changed.
A shocking report from NBC affiliate WSAV said voters in the recent primary there watched as the digital system used to cast ballots ALTERED VOTES… right in front of their eyes.
They selected one candidate on the computer, but the computer had other ideas.
It switched the vote to another candidate!
The errors are so alarming, it has candidates on both sides of the aisle angry.
“We’ve heard reports all over the state of these old machines often not taking a person’s vote, it’ll change,” Democratic congressional candidate Lisa Ring told the station. “And, sometimes, if people don’t catch it, we don’t know if the vote is being recorded accurately.”
Georgia Rep, Buddy Carter, Republican, urged his fellow lawmakers to invest in fixing this.
“I don’t think there’s any question that we need to spend a little bit of extra to make sure we have safe and secure elections,” he said.
Experts have warned of these problems for years now, and so far have been ignored.
And Georgia, they say, could be the canary in the coal mine.
“These are old school voting systems. I call them old school because they are one of the few systems in the country that still don’t have a paper trail on them,” author Kim Zetter told Yahoo’s “Bots & Ballots” podcast.
Zetter said these touch-screen machines have had issues for nearly 15 years, when the source code was leaked online and tech experts were able to see the flaws.
“The systems in Georgia run on the Windows operating system, and that’s not a sophisticated system. It’s a system that everyone has on their laptop that you can study,” Zetter said.
That means the only problem for a would-be hacker is access. If they can get that access, they can change the outcome of votes and possibly swing an election.
“All that’s left now is whether or not machines are secured enough to prevent this, and also designed well enough to detect it if someone does subvert a machine,” Zetter said. “And I would say that the answer on both of those counts is no.”
Indeed, experts have already shown how easily these machines can be hacked.
In April, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on a demonstration that showed how quickly the state’s machines can be taken over.
Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, let an audience watch as he “infected” voting machines with malware so that a specific candidate would win no matter who the people voted for.
Doctors are keeping quiet about THIS
“Voting is not as safe as it needs to be,” he told the audience. “The safest technology is to have voters vote on a piece of paper.”
But will the voters get that piece of paper?
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”