Jill Stein talking:
we have sort of a general assault going on against democracy and our election system, you know, from—you know, from the very beginning to the end. And it’s really important, I think, that we think about the continuity of our—you know, the process of elections. So, in other words, it’s not just the voting machines. It’s also the voter rolls, and who gets stripped from them, and the voter ID laws, which essentially intimidate voters and outright bar them from voting. And then you have the issues of ballot access. And then you have sort of this—this kind of fear-based voting, this two-party system, where people are afraid to vote outside of the two choices. And then you have the collusion of the corporate media. In the last election, 75 percent of voters were screaming for other choices. And yet, you know, those choices were basically denied people, who, for the most part, didn’t know. Almost half of voters stayed home for lack of having a candidate that they could support.
So, you know, my campaign was the basis for generating a recount effort in three states. That effort is actually continuing. We have a case which is working its way through the courts in Pennsylvania, still trying to get our hands on the material, and, in particular, on the voting machines, in order to find out. That recount effort has really been quite validated by the course of events, because now there is really definitive evidence of a whole lot of hacking going on, particularly into the voter registration databases in more than 20 states.
There is clear evidence that voter registration systems have been hacked into.
So, we know this stuff is being hacked. There is circumstantial evidence mainly in the case of the DNC hack or leak. It’s still disputed, I think, what it is. That evidence is circumstantial. It points to Russia, but it is circumstantial. And in my view, it’s not something we should go to war over. And we should not, you know, accelerate the Cold War over this very uncertain identification of Russia.
The problem is, the voting system is wide open for hacking. And we have not yet examined the voting machines. We know that everything around the machines is being hacked into, not only registration, but also the computers of local election officials and private software companies, private voting software companies. So, you want to know. You know, if everything around the bank is getting robbed, you want to know whether the bank is also getting robbed.
– on the issue of election integrity, computer hackers from around the country gathered at the annual DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas over this weekend, where participants competed to break into 30 voting machines identical to the models that have been used in U.S. elections for years. The winning team hacked their machine within minutes. Others showed how machines made by Diebold, Sequoia and WinVote, and touted as, quote, “secure,” could be easily broken into over wifi, which—with hackers able to plant software on the machines. CNET reports one voting machine widely used in the election of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has the password “abcde” and can’t be changed. The conference follows a recent exposé by The Intercept which revealed Russian military intelligence conducted a cyberatttack on at least one U.S. voting software company just days before last November’s presidential election. Astonishing stuff just came out, a lot of it this weekend.
it’s been common knowledge. You know, I mean, it’s great that they’ve demonstrated it again and that they could do it that quickly. But this has been well known, you know, in the election integrity movement for at least 10 years. Alex Halderman has been one of the sort of leading authorities on cybersecurity and elections. He recently testified before Congress. And, you know, Congress appeared to be quite impressed.
The report that was published by The Intercept, which had been leaked, I believe, by the NSA, it showed that the private software companies have been hacked into. And it was pretty definitive evidence. What it did not show was who did it. The identification of Russia, again, was a presumption. This is presumption all based on work done by CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity company with rather questionable professional, you know, reputation and with conflicts of interest, hired by the DNC, which also, by the way, refused to allow the FBI to examine the server. So, there are just a number of weird things about this whole process of figuring out who did it. You know, it shouldn’t have been delegated to a private security firm hired by the DNC to decide this. This should have been done, you know, by our own security agencies. So there are a number of funny things going on here.
But there is no doubt the system is wide open, and it can be easily protected. This isn’t rocket science. You don’t protect the system by slapping the hands of Russia. You don’t protect the system by slapping anybody’s hands, when a high-schooler can basically hack into it. You know, you need cybersecurity good practices. You need paper ballots, because they can’t be hacked into. And you need audits, as well as recounts.
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Jill Stein
former Green Party presidential candidate.
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-05