NOTE: This article is from more than 7 months ago.
Edit: I’m on my phone, so forgive any formatting snafus, but I just recently responded to a question about why that Substack post was removed for, and I think it is applicable here.
I’m a mod on c/politics. I don’t speak for any of the other mods, and while I don’t recall interacting with your specific post, I’ll give you two reasons today that would likely be sufficient to me, for why I would have removed that post. (1) It’s an article to a Substack post, which isn’t necessarily dispositive, but the author is unknown (at least to me), which is a ding against its credibility. (2) I don’t know enough about the author’s intent to know whether to characterize the article as mis- or dis-information, but I’ve been involved in elections for more than a decade, so I know that I can say — unequivocally — that the information the author is spewing, is incorrect. Specifically, the author demonstrates ignorance of the technology and logistics involved in the administration of elections, along with different methods of verification.
And just to be clear, the 2024 election was not perfect and there was institutionalized voter suppression; however, that Substack post is not rooted in fact.
The response I got from that post was (the other person quoting me):
I’ve been involved in elections for more than a decade, so I know that I can say — unequivocally — that the information the author is spewing, is incorrect.
This seems to be stating that we must accept what you say at face value without evidence. (End of the other person’s quote.)
To which I responded, and I would say is just as applicable here:
Okay, well here are some facts that you can confirm with anyone else who has been involved in election administration that support my point:
- The individual or group of individuals involved in administering elections, varies from state to state, and sometimes even more, within a state, so extrapolating from a single case and assuming you could apply that to explain a nationwide election demonstrates a lack of familiarity with election administration.
- The technology involved in administering elections, varies from state to state, and sometimes even more, within a state, so extrapolating from a single case and assuming you could apply that to explain a nationwide election demonstrates a lack of familiarity with election administration.
- The article completely skips over addressing how any of these changes wouldn’t be caught during count verification steps.
Those are three things undermining the article’s credibility that you can confirm for yourself. It’s spewing the same kind of bullshit theories that I heard about the 2020 election, and spent the years since, fighting. I didn’t like the outcome of the 2024 election either, but I know what I’m talking about.
The entire point of this is that it takes considerably more effort on your end to respond.
I just came back to this thread because I wanted to say: thank you for this write up, you got a lot of details I neglected to mention. The most important of which is that elections are run at the state level and every state is going to have their own security and cybersecurity teams, and the assumptions made in this treat it like either every cybersecurity team in every state is grossly incompetent or the cybersecurity teams were somehow “in on it” and kept their mouths shut (not a skill most of the people in Trumps orbit seem to have) or that the Trump admin had been sitting on a massive zero-day exploit to be used at the right moment, through the right channels, with the right pieces of hardware installed in the right spots every place they needed them (once again, these people are not good about keeping quiet about such things). Which, to me, all three are so highly implausible it really makes no sense to make grand conspiracies in your own head about it all.
It’s wild that a mod can just decide what is misinformation based on whether they personally know who the author is or not.
Just post your rebuttal as a comment. Objectively, you are hardly a more reliable source than the person who wrote this.
You may “know what you’re talking about,” but how do I know that you know? Why should I believe that your opinion is more correct?
Okay, well here are some facts that you can confirm with anyone else who has been involved in election administration that support my point:
I’m quoting OP to make a point here, and that point is they gave you an opportunity to validate the evidence they were presenting and not just take their word for it.
I have never worked in elections but have done enough research on elections to agree with the mod that these are indisputable facts. Elections are run at state and county levels and at each level you literally have security and cybersecurity teams that have to work with each other but were all hired by different groups: State, county, city. Due to this, processes will be different at each level and in each city/county/state. Similarly, each place will be sourcing their hardware from a different vendor, meaning it is highly implausible that somehow they all had the correct Tripp Lite devices in place in all the right districts and that the cybersecurity teams were either all grossly incompetent or somehow in on a grand conspiracy. Hell, I’ve had a government job for a short time, and even different agencies in the same government will be using different vendors than another agency. There is no overarching “you have to get your equipment from this specific vendor and no one else” more like “you can get your equipment from this large group of vendors who fit the specifications and requirements our city/county/state government has.”
These are things you can research and verify. The mod isn’t just asking you to their their word on it, they provide evidence and give you the opportunity to go verify that evidence for yourself. To go ask the people who run your local elections and find out. Not just trust the musings of some random asshat on the internet. Also the whole “elections are run at the state level” thing should be pretty common knowledge because that’s basic civics.
Click the “more direct source” in the body of the post for a recent tie-in of how it fits in with Rockland county etc.
I just updated my comment, to reflect another conversation about that Substack, and the short of it is: that Substack post is misinformation.
I know it probably wasn’t your intent, but In the future though, please don’t use a “shell” article to post other content.
The people denying this are the same ones who screamed collusion the first time around, and this is infinitely more clear and obvious. Why are you so desperate to assert that trump won fair and square as it becomes clearer and clearer that isn’t the case?
I’m just glad some of y’all are starting to realize, I remember getting banned from multiple communities for stating the obvious cx
This article was from right after the election, before Rockland county found that its votes didn’t add up and the investigation that followed.
I’d be curious to see newsweeks update considering that information.
This is a source-check on the other substack article which is quoted from above.
The centerpiece of the new theory is recounted thoroughly in a June 11 Substack post titled “She Won. They Didn’t Just Change the Machines. They Rewired the Election.” Unlike earlier post-election theories, this one doesn’t just focus on theoretical vulnerabilities plus suspicions or vague statistical anomalies. It introduces what it claims is a complete mechanism consisting of software manipulation; a new access mechanism; and a test case.
New Technical Documentation: It describes engineering change orders (ECOs) showing that Pro V&V, a federally accredited test lab, approved software and hardware changes to ES&S voting machines just before the election, without triggering a full certification review. It did so, according to the new claim, by declaring the changes to be “de minimis” (inconsequential) which allowed the changes to be implemented without a complex recertification process. This “de minimis” claim is presented as essentially bogus — a cover to create an ability to make substantive changes without subjecting them to review.
A New Starlink Access Pathway: It claims that Elon Musk’s Starlink gained a new, previously unknown access that provided real-time internet connectivity to voting machines, allowing votes to be altered during tabulation.
‘A “Smoking Gun” Test Case: It cites five machines in Rockland County, NY, that recorded zero votes for Kamala Harris while showing hundreds of votes for other Democrats in the same precincts. These claims suggest a full system: motive, method, and result. According to the post, this wasn’t just dirty politics or local fraud. It was a coordinated digital operation—technically sophisticated, nationally scaled, and hidden in plain sight.
. . . Tentative Conclusions
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The voting machine changes were real, but the idea that Pro V&V scammed the system by claiming “de minimis” to cover up malicious changes does not seem to be supported.
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The deployment of 265 Starlink satellites just before the election is confirmed, but there is no evidence any of them were ever connected to voting tabulators and it appears they played no role in vote counting.
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The “zero vote” anomaly has a strong sociological explanation and a clear historical precedent- bloc voting by orthodox jewish communities acting on recommendation of their rabbi. It happened in 2020 with Joe Biden receiving zero votes as well.
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The truth is worse.
That there’s more people who want this (or at least did until they realised it meant their families being abducted by ICE) than people who didn’t, and more people still who didn’t give a fuck enough to bother voting.
That should keep them up at night more than vote rigging.
more people still who didn’t give a fuck enough to bother voting.
For reference, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election:
FWIW, I didn’t vote this past election. Not for lack of trying, mind you. I sent for a mail in ballot and it never showed. I corrected my address (which somehow got switched to an old address) and requested another and every time, the site would throw an error. By that point it was too late and I would need to vote in person which didn’t work because of the address thing. And before people go “well you should have made sure first”, I did. I verified everything months prior and it changed my info after…
What a pain in the ass… something about the degree of insoluble complications makes me feel that it may not have been entirely accidental (I know, I know, I have no concrete proof but other countries/jurisdictions are able to avoid these vote annulling scenarios fairly easily). Would it still have been possible for you to vote in your former district, or was it too far away (different city/state)?
Holy shit, OP. Those huge replies to your own post make you seem like a loony.
It’s a bit much to take in.
Hey, thanks a lot.
I hope you realize those replies are the body of the linked article. It was too much to individually quote but I’ll try to go back and make that more apparent.
Why would the left wing need a reason why Kamala lost? Any reason that isn’t “because neoliberalism has failed again” works against the interests of the left. To the extent that this idea has any believers whatsoever, it comes from the centrists who desperately need an excuse.
Yeah there seems to be a real disconnect about the usage of “liberal” and “left wing” particularly on Lemmy. My guess is that it’s due to a large international presence in which liberal has different meanings in different political arenas.
That said, I don’t see how your point stands anyway because “left” voters would still want a free and fair election, unless they’re just straight up anarchists or other flavor that doesn’t care about elections.
It’s too early to just accept this as fact. It may be true, and may not. It may be true but didn’t swing the election. What’s absolutely true though is that the race shouldn’t have been close enough to even make a Republican win remotely believable.
The Democrats made it close by putting wealthy interests ahead of voters to the highest degree they thought they could get away with. Dance long enough on the Cliff’s edge and eventually you fall in - or maybe you get pushed. Not a lot of difference ultimately.
Well, . . . IF it’s true, it very definitely did swing the election - that being the entire point of it.
The perceived platform of the Democrats notwithstanding.
This appears to be the larger body working on it:
If every aspect of what’s being alleged is entirely true, then yes. The thing is, it’s a huge collection of different allegations that range from probable to unhinged. They aren’t all going to be 100% true.
The fact that they spend so much time in their video on Trump saying they don’t need votes is a big red flag to me. They put so much effort into priming people to believe that I don’t think they have quite convinced themselves.
All of these allegations combined actually pale in comparison with the impact of media consolidation and establishment manipulation of coverage. Our primary process is an absolute travesty that can be trivially manipulated on the whim of the establishment to get whatever outcome they desire.
Which parts read as unhinged to you?
Agreed on the media part, but that’s a very old conspiracy.
Agreed on the media part, but that’s a very old conspiracy.
I hate to use the word “conspiracy” on it - first because it implies that it’s a “conspiracy theory” when most of it happens in plain sight, and second because it’s less of a cabal and more just a bunch of rich folks with common interests acting in common ways.
Which parts read as unhinged to you?
Jumping right from claiming that Trump over-performing (compared to down-ticket races) more in swing states than other states leads straight to the conclusion that a “vote changing algorithm” must be responsible for the difference is a big one. There are other perfectly plausible explanations. For instance, maybe anti-establishment sentiment is part of what makes a purple state purple, and anti-establishment Trump voters are more likely to split their ticket. The analysis offered is incredibly shallow, and seems to rely entirely on statistical analysis without considering sociological context. I’m also curious why a group so competent as to be able to pull this off wouldn’t have tipped votes in down-ticket races as well.
On the other hand, a lot of the voter suppression claims are very plausible, and some are even obviously true. It’s almost not revelatory at all to say that Republicans use voter suppression to win races. Specifics of particular instances are worth questioning, but Republicans have been doing it in the open for decades, and it has definitely blown up in the time since the court gutted the voting rights act.
There is also the general over-reliance on a single expert, who is apparently “the leading U.S. expert in election forensics”. Looking at his citations, that title is not justified by his academic career. What I see is some mild success early on, and a decade+ drift towards irrelevance. I see a career that could maybe benefit from a prominent association with a media frenzy over a stolen US election.
Oh just conspiracy in “two or more parties working together towards a harmful act” sort of thing. Doesn’t have to be secret.
The part about a particular number of votes being needed to trigger the algorithm is an interesting part of it. In that reply to the second substack post he explains why Elmo’s 20 million investment in the Wisconsin supreme court runoff didn’t pay out for him, and it was about volume of votes.
There’s also this graphic which is interesting.
I haven’t read up on the expert academic but having a stalled career doesn’t discount anything for me if so. The numbers and facts should speak for themselves anyway.
I’m just gonna say it: Everything about everyone involved in this administration screams people who are hired for their loyalty, not their skillsets.
The theory that they used Uninterruptible Power Supplies to modify the vote, and that they had enough people involved to pull this off, yet everyone kept their mouth shut, is not the level of competency I have seen from anyone in Trump’s orbit.
As someone with a background in tech, I find it hard to believe. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. They can make up all the stories about they want in their own heads, until there’s some proof of it, it’s just as bullshit as Trump’s claims of election fraud.
If Eaton pushed an update to those UPS units, it could have gained root-level access to the host tabulation environment—without ever modifying certified election software.
So yeah, we’re gonna have to have a hell of a lot more to go on than “could have” here. Also I’m skeptical on the claim that Windows automatically trusts any connected UPS and skeptical about the “root level access” claim (including the fact that it is called administrator access on Windows, Windows doesn’t have “root” accounts).
Part of the reason I’m skeptical on the root-level access claim regarding a UPS. If you could do this with any old UPS, this would make any and every UPS in existence a major attack vector to every computer and computer network in existence. I find it hard to believe that cybersecurity experts would have somehow missed this in the last 20 years that commercial level UPS’s have been in use. That it was just somehow conveniently overlooked that you could override server administration with a UPS. I don’t buy that.
EDIT: All this being said, I think a court case to reveal any evidence that is there is important. It’s highly improbable but not impossible and so I hope the court case moves forward quickly.
Ups software probably installed as system so that it can perform script execution and shutdown properly. That software communicates with the UPS directly. UPS vendors wouldn’t be at the top of my list of security-minded companies.
The execution path isn’t impossible.
I mean, the article focuses more on how the UPSes have SNMP enabled network cards.
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SNMP is Simple Network Management Protocol, which is for, well, simple network management, not computer administration, which are different things.
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SNMP can definitely be an attack vector, so it’s generally considered good practice to disable it on any ports it’s not absolutely needed. Further, it’s mostly able to be abused for DDOS, although there are some possibilities for network penetration. Network, not computer, once again. Controlling the router isn’t the same as controlling the Server., although it can help you move towards controlling the Server. Still a lot of hoops to jump through from network to server.
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Every election is run on a local level, and this would mean that in enough swing states, one of two things was happening: either the election cybersecurity team in all the states affected was technically incompetent or they were somehow in on it and all kept their mouths shut. Both of those are highly unlikely when it comes to the frequency at which this happened all over the country.
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While you generally have a good point about script execution via a UPS, once again, does that mean every single cybersecurity team in every state affected was foolish enough to be giving a UPS administrator script execution capabilities? Because just executing a script doesn’t mean the user executing the script has admin rights. Once again, either every team was inept or somehow the famously loose-lipped Trump team was sitting on a zero-day exploit to gain admin access and somehow kept it quiet.
I don’t consider snmp to be a big issue, unless someone set up “public” with write access.
The ups software running on the windows machine would be running as system and would be able to execute whatever it wanted. Usually it’s connecting to the ups through some method (IP, usb serial) to figure out what state it’s in, how much runtime is remaining, and if it needs to execute any stored scripts.
How do you get a compromised UPS to upload scripts to the windows machine? That I’m not too sure about. I don’t think I’ve seen an ups management system that has that capability.
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