After years of lawfare, a smoking gun report on US election machinery has come to light – and it shreds the supposed security of electronic voting machines in the 2020 election. The report says the system’s flaws would allow vote switching and the alteration of election results ‘without detection’.

The report’s author says wryly it’s not even hard to do: ‘No grand conspiracies would be necessary to commit large-scale fraud, but rather only moderate technical skills….’ And while the report focuses on Georgia, it notes that the same unsafe equipment was used in 15 other states in the 2020 election, including swing states such as Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

While this report succours those sceptical of US elections, it is cold comfort for Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, who only two months ago settled an election fraud defamation case with Dominion for a massive US$787 million.

The report’s main finding is that the 2020 system of ballot scanners and ballot marking devices used across Georgia ‘suffers from critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited to subvert all of its security mechanisms: user authentication, data integrity protection, access control, privilege separation, audit logs, protective counters, hash validation, and external firmware validation’. More-over, any old Joe could insert malware within minutes that would affect entire systems.

The long-awaited report was written by highly awarded expert, Professor J. Alex Halderman, who is at the top of his field. The University of Michigan computer scientist and electrical engineer wrote Security Analysis of Georgia’s ImageCast X Ballot Marking Devices, after a 12-week investigation into Dominion Voting Systems equipment. It was submitted to an Atlanta, Georgia District Court in July 2021 as evidence in a long-running lawsuit challenging the integrity of Georgia’s Dominion voting system, but was sealed from public view until a few days ago. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed Halderman’s findings and later issued a security advisory urging election officials to mitigate the identified risks.

A spat has now broken out over fixing Georgia’s ICX devices. Dominion commissioned a rival security report which said the flaws were ‘operationally infeasible’, that’s to say, unlikely. The Georgia GOP government rejected the Halderman report as ‘theoretical’ and ruled out any fixes ahead of the 2024 election, while a posse of 20 cybersecurity experts rushed to condemn the rival report as dangerously wrong, and urge Georgia to adopt the fixes.

Among Halderman’s findings:

– ICX malware can change individual votes and most election outcomes without detection;

– Unnecessary Android software can change access controls and allow users to edit files, including audit logs;

– An attacker can install malware by attaching a single USB device for a couple of minutes.

– Smart cards for authenticating election workers and others can be forged; and

– It’s very likely that there are other, equally critical flaws… yet to be discovered.

The Halderman report makes no finding regarding actual 2020 election fraud. Fox lawyers sought but were denied access to the report, and Halderman himself leans left, having backed Hillary Clinton. Is it too far-fetched to imagine the report was sealed until after Fox’s case was settled? Fox seemed to me to hold back on the 2020 election fraud issue; many conservatives and Trump supporters felt the same. It was hosts like Lou Dobbs who went in to bat, and then suffered the retribution. Had Fox gone in harder earlier, and successfully established the flaws of electronic voting devices, would Dominion have won such a total victory? That’s an irony to contemplate.

It’s also worth wondering what might have happened had Delaware trial judge Eric Davis had access to the Halderman report. Ruling in March this year on the falsity of the Fox election fraud claims, he said it was ‘CRYSTAL CLEAR that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true’, (bolding and italicising the judge’s). However, a number of the judge’s cited evidentiary bases had crumbled by the time his ruling came out. For example CISA famously claimed in November 2020 the election ‘was the most secure in American history’ only to issue security fixes in June 2022 after Halderman’s report; the Maricopa County election was demolished by a subsequent forensic audit; and now Georgia’s machines turn out to be wide open to fraud. Fifteen other states are also affected. Rupert is entitled to look on all this with some bitterness.

Curiously, the Halderman criticisms have been widely covered by legacy media; 2020 election fraud claims usually vanish media-wise, with YouTube only in the last month permitting such content. But the Overton window on discussable topics is highly mutable on election fraud. It’s inside the Overton window for Hillary Clinton to claim Russian election fraud in 2016 and for Stacey Abrams in Georgia in 2018, but outside for Trump to do so about 2020. In fact there’s a long history of Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris criticising electronic voting machines.

In an outburst of truthiness, Barack Obama told a 2008 meeting in Ohio: ‘I tell you what, it helps in Ohio that we got Democrats in charge of the machines…. It’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past, sometimes Democrats have too. Whenever people are in power they have this tendency to try to, you know, tilt things in their direction.’

That’s the key to understanding this pattern; if you are controlling the machines of course your system is fair and honest. Just ask and we’ll tell you. Election interference in the US takes many forms, with lawfare against Trump the tool du jour, but it’s no surprise that two-thirds of US voters think elections are fraudulent.

Ron Klain, until recently Joe Biden’s chief of staff, is quotable here. In reply to a Vox post on July 14, 2014 showing ‘68 per cent of Americans think elections are rigged,’ Klain tweeted: ‘That’s because they are.’