Juno News - August 14, 2024


Could the US election be stolen？


Episode Stats

Length

14 minutes

Words per Minute

187.85014

Word Count

2,649

Sentence Count

143


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 And we are going to fight like hell against the tyrannical Democrats and any Republicans who do
00:00:07.280 deals with them. It will be your peril if you underestimate this movement again.
00:00:18.600 It's been four years and we're still talking about Donald Trump's concerns that the 2020
00:00:27.440 election was stolen. A majority of Republican voters certainly seem to think it was. And so
00:00:33.460 you think that the federal election commissioner would do everything in its power to ensure election
00:00:39.080 integrity this time around? Apparently not. Over the weekend, we learned that there are pages of
00:00:45.120 problems in the voting machines that will be used in the November vote. But apparently it's just too
00:00:50.240 late to do anything about it. In a democracy, trust in the system is nearly as important in the system
00:00:56.540 as a system itself. So the question remains, why does the managerial class care so little for both?
00:01:03.160 I'm Rachel Parker and you're watching Rachel in the Republic.
00:01:14.680 Hey everyone, welcome back to Rachel in the Republic. I wanted to start by taking a look at
00:01:19.920 the story that I didn't see getting a ton of media attention elsewhere. Probably the bombshell interview
00:01:26.380 between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was what everyone was paying attention to early this week. And
00:01:31.240 understandably so, there was a lot of good tidbits there. But I thought this story was important to
00:01:36.060 mention just because it's something I cover closely here in Canada and Alberta as well. This story was
00:01:41.420 from Politico released earlier this week. It said that some of the best hackers in the world gathered in
00:01:46.320 Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year's
00:01:50.960 election. And guess what? They found multiple pages worth of problems in the voting machines that will
00:01:57.560 be used. From Friday to Sunday, this event, which happens every year, it's called Voting Village.
00:02:02.640 Their hackers clustered around tables with all shapes and sizes of voting machines and equipment
00:02:07.160 to verify voters' identities or tabulate ballots, trying to get past firewalls or other security measures.
00:02:13.920 And just like every year since the Voting Village began almost a decade ago, attendees found problems.
00:02:18.940 Organizers of the Voting Village intend to put out a full report in the coming weeks,
00:02:23.760 detailing the vulnerability findings from the cycle. According to Voting Village co-founder
00:02:29.040 Harris Hertsey, these vulnerabilities ran multiple pages as of Saturday afternoon. And according to
00:02:34.740 Politico, the problem is that those findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before the
00:02:40.880 federal election on November 5th. Now, in order to try to reassure the public, Politico also mentioned
00:02:46.380 that this happens every year and that every year they find problems. That does very little to reassure
00:02:53.000 me and it should do absolutely nothing to reassure you. If they're finding problems every year, the
00:02:57.660 question remains, why are they not doing this further in advance of election day to try to figure out what
00:03:02.700 the issues are and solve them well in advance of November 5th? Additionally, why are we still using
00:03:08.780 voting machines in elections at all? We used to count the ballots by hand and we had a lot less problems
00:03:14.520 when we did that, as we'll get into later. Additionally, this also reveals that these problems
00:03:19.000 have been piling up for years and very little is being done to fix them. Voting Village organizers
00:03:25.220 told Politico that they are frustrated that despite years of security findings, voting machine vendors
00:03:30.520 aren't moving more quickly to make fixes. In a statement, Hertsey told Politico, quote,
00:03:35.300 there's so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening. So yes, I'm worried about
00:03:40.820 things not being fixed, but they haven't been fixed for a long time and I'm also angry about it.
00:03:46.340 So rather than being reassured that every year they find problems and the election cycle seems to go as
00:03:51.260 normal without issues, what this actually reveals is that some of these problems are being carried over
00:03:55.640 year after year and those responsible for fixing them, like the vote machine manufacturers, as well as
00:04:02.060 the Federal Election Commission, are doing nothing to fix it. The story goes on to say that there have been
00:04:07.480 no foreign cyber attacks taking wide swaths of voting machine offline on election day or evidence
00:04:13.200 of hacks that affected results, but the risk is always there. The organizer went on to say,
00:04:19.200 if you don't think this kind of place is running 24-7 in China, Russia, you're kidding yourselves.
00:04:24.680 We are only here for two and a half days and we find stuff. It would be stupid to assume that the
00:04:29.660 adversaries don't have absolute access to everything. So I think that really sums up the crux of the
00:04:36.100 issue. These are a couple of American hackers who spent a weekend working on this problem and they
00:04:40.700 found pages worth of problems in voting machines that will be used in the November 5th vote,
00:04:45.920 including some problems that had been found in previous years and weren't fixed. And they're
00:04:49.340 saying that America's adversaries, their foreign adversaries, are working on this around the clock
00:04:55.420 to try to break into these systems. So if they were able to find pages worth of problems in just a few
00:05:00.540 days, you can only imagine what a country like China, who might be spending a year working on
00:05:05.760 these problems, is able to uncover in these voting machines and the sort of havoc that they could
00:05:10.760 wreak if they desire to do so. Now, I just wanted to add one little bit of clarification. In Canada,
00:05:16.500 we do not use voting machines. In Alberta, we do use voting tabulators, which basically counts voting
00:05:22.340 results. But voting machines is a machine that's actually used to record votes in an election without
00:05:29.060 paper. And we'll get into the distinction a little bit more later when I explain what some of the
00:05:33.060 problems actually are. Now, the reason that this is so important is that voting machines have come
00:05:38.660 under a lot of scrutiny in the US since the 2020 election, when Donald Trump said that the election
00:05:44.180 was stolen. He continues to say that he did not have trust in the process. And we know that a majority
00:05:48.820 of Republican voters say that they did not have trust in the process as well. This largely had to do with
00:05:53.820 mail-in ballots as well. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, voters were able to send their ballot
00:05:59.480 in. And even if their vote was received past election day, but was postmarked on election day,
00:06:05.600 it was still able to be counted in some cases almost as to the Friday. So the election was held on Tuesday
00:06:10.660 and some states were counting votes on Friday. I think this just reveals that we really have a
00:06:15.140 crumbling system around us. We used to have an election day and we would know the results of the
00:06:19.620 election that night or early into the next morning. And in recent years, it's become more common to
00:06:25.340 accept the fact that it will take days to know the results of the election. Does that sound like a
00:06:30.000 situation that should happen in a free and fair democracy where it's days to actually know what
00:06:34.100 the results of a democratic election will be? And in this case, it was because states like North
00:06:38.780 Carolina and Georgia, they were continuing to receive these mail-in ballots well past election day
00:06:43.040 and they were still being counted. And that's, you saw that clip there where they're saying,
00:06:46.280 stop this deal. Donald Trump and his office began making calls saying, this is not fair.
00:06:50.140 We would like them to stop counting the ballots. We know that the ballots will continue to be
00:06:53.420 counted. This is a story from NPR at the time of the 2020 election. NPR wrote at the time,
00:06:58.520 North Carolina and Georgia, which looked like healthy Trump wins and then started to shift after
00:07:03.780 midnight. So that was really when we saw some panic begin to set in upon with Donald Trump and
00:07:09.820 the Republicans seem like they had won the election and then more ballots continue to come in.
00:07:13.980 But what a surreal thing to read. It seemed like they had won the election. And then after midnight,
00:07:17.400 things began to shift. They continued counting ballots until Friday. We know that Trump did
00:07:22.640 ultimately win North Carolina and Georgia, where a host of the mail-in ballots problems were risen.
00:07:28.560 It ended up going to Biden. So Donald Trump still maintains that he was right to be concerned
00:07:34.120 about the results of the 2020 election. Here's a clip of him talking just about 10 months ago.
00:07:38.160 Take a listen.
00:07:38.600 I listened to myself. I saw what happened. I watched that election and I thought the election
00:07:43.580 was over at 10 o'clock in the evening. You were listening to your instincts.
00:07:47.100 My instincts are a big part of it. That's been the thing that's gotten me to where I am.
00:07:51.460 So the truth about voting machines is that they have been littered with problems from the get-go.
00:07:57.320 If we take a look at the history of voting machines in America, they actually began in the late 19th
00:08:01.920 century with a sort of an automatic booth system where you would pull a lever and it would
00:08:07.160 automatically count your vote system. That originally did not have many problems. But as
00:08:11.760 soon as things started to become more updated, more elevated, more electronics involved, that is
00:08:17.120 when real problems began to emerge. First and foremost, with the punch card system that came
00:08:22.100 out in the 1960s. And at the time, it was sort of considered the great innovation. And it was thought
00:08:27.660 that these ballots could be counted by computer. So you would essentially go, you'd punch a hole in your
00:08:31.520 ballot to who next to the name of who you would choose to vote for. And a computer would then
00:08:37.160 count that based on the punch card where you had punched the hole. Now, that became very
00:08:42.600 problematic in the 2000 election, which was the only American election so far that has been decided
00:08:47.380 by Supreme Court. Essentially, that race came down to Florida between Al Gore and George Bush. It was so
00:08:53.400 close that it came down to the swing state of Florida. And ultimately, Florida, the count was so
00:08:58.680 close that they had to call a recount. And then the recount was so close that they called a further
00:09:03.700 recount. And it was at this point that they began pulling ballots. And they realized that 29,000
00:09:09.360 ballots were where the hole was punched improperly. 29,000 ballots had the hole punched improperly in
00:09:16.140 Palm Beach County, Florida alone. So just in one county, the machines were not doing an adequate job
00:09:20.940 of being able to count those ballots. And so eventually, the Supreme Court decided to uphold Bush's
00:09:26.760 electoral victory. And he became the president, as we know. But many Americans for years maintain their
00:09:31.640 lack of confidence in the system. And of course, the punch card system was no longer used because
00:09:35.880 of the issues that it caused. And so there you already began to see some problems and some fear
00:09:41.540 emerging among Americans that their electoral system, that their democracy was not safe. And
00:09:46.440 that in this case, it had been decided by the Supreme Court, with critics arguing that it was simply
00:09:50.200 decided based on party lines. Now, they tried to to fix that issue the following year with voting by
00:09:56.460 the iPad. In the wake of that horrible recount process, Congress passed the Help America Act,
00:10:02.220 Vote Act of 2020, which mandated higher standards for the voting equipment used in federal elections.
00:10:07.700 States and municipalities spent millions of dollars upgrading their voting equipment.
00:10:11.460 Not all of the new touchscreen voting machines were created equal. And software glitches produced some
00:10:16.260 glaring errors in voting tallies once again. Then in the 2016 presidential election, electronic voting
00:10:23.060 machines in 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers. As a result, several states have scrapped
00:10:28.320 their expensive touchscreen voting machines and switched back to paper-based ballots. So it just
00:10:34.460 seems in this case, everything that is old is new. Once again, I think that was sort of the comment
00:10:38.980 of the Elon Musk and Donald Trump debacle. Basically, we're going back to the days of listening to the
00:10:43.600 radio. Everyone's crowding around these little machines, listening to two people having a
00:10:47.500 conversation. Of course, it was over X. But it seems that everything that was old is new.
00:10:51.820 It is new once again. And in this case, certainly it seems that we really just need to go back to
00:10:56.640 paper ballots. People do not trust these voting machines. Now, when I was doing research on this,
00:11:01.900 it says that the Scantron of voting, which is essentially a vote tabulator. So in that case,
00:11:06.000 you enter in your vote and then you put it into a tabulator and it tallies the vote. And the purpose
00:11:09.640 of that is to save time on election night by spitting out the final tallies for a given
00:11:15.000 candidate and to save that time of manually hand counting the ballots. But we ran into our own fair share of
00:11:21.820 issues with those in Alberta. In Alberta, we do use tabulators. Our Premier, Alberta Premier Daniel
00:11:27.180 Smith, has promised to get rid of those tabulators. There's been legislation put forward that would do
00:11:31.460 that. But essentially, in our last election, which was last spring in 2023, we had these tabulators
00:11:39.160 used for the advanced vote anywhere. So you could go to any riding in the province and cast your ballot
00:11:45.460 for your home, your candidate back at home. And then on election night, the tabulators spit out
00:11:50.460 the tallies. However, we had our own issues on election night where results were delayed by
00:11:55.860 hours, typically in a provincial vote with only about four million people, not all those people
00:11:59.640 obviously even eligible to vote. You should have the result of the election fairly quickly, but the
00:12:03.820 results were delayed for hours on election night because volunteers then would receive the paper that
00:12:09.280 was spit out by the tabulator with the tally and they would have to manually enter everything
00:12:13.340 into a computer that was not connected to the internet. So it actually ended up delaying the
00:12:17.380 process by several hours. And I think in the case of Alberta, many conservatives, they don't trust the
00:12:22.840 tabulators. There's a lot of mistrust in technology that has been introduced into elections. So the answer
00:12:27.740 seems fairly straightforward to me. It would obviously be better to end this obsession with electronic
00:12:34.540 voting, with vote tabulators, with voting machines, and simply go back to the good old paper ballot,
00:12:39.560 vote on election day in person. And therefore we have the most trust in the process. You know,
00:12:46.200 I understand that America is an absolutely massive country, far bigger than Canada, but that also just
00:12:50.280 means there's more people who are able to volunteer on election day and to get those votes counted and
00:12:55.520 to ensure election integrity, which is really what separates us from countries where they are not
00:13:01.380 democracies and they don't have free and fair elections. So everyone, that is the topic of the day
00:13:06.120 today. Are you concerned about voting machines? Do you think that it is time to end reliance on
00:13:11.900 technology in our elections and to get back to paper ballots and counting by hand? Let me know what you
00:13:18.320 think in the comment section below. That's everything we have for you today. Thank you so much for tuning
00:13:21.660 in to Rachel and the Republic. I'll be back next week with more content. Have a great weekend and God bless.
00:13:36.120 Thank you.