Some of the world’s most skilled hackers gathered in Las Vegas, Nevada, from August 8 to 11 and breached the firewalls of secondhand voting machines, e-pollbooks and ballot tabulators.

The meeting was part of the def con 32 conference, the world’s largest annual security conference, where security professionals conduct workshops, have hacking competitions, and give presentations on vulnerabilities in computer security. Every year, the conference’s Voting Village program conducts research on voting equipment, and every year, they discover issues.

This year was no different. Voting Village cofounder Harri Hursti told Politico there would be “multiple pages” worth of vulnerabilities in its upcoming report on election machines, adding that they were consistent with findings from previous years.

Though def con (short for “defense readiness condition”) has been taking place since 1993, the Voting Village was only established in 2017 after theories spread about foreign election interference in the 2016 presidential election.

At their first conference, Voting Village officials quickly found vulnerabilities in voting machines and published a 19-page report that stated:

By the end of the conference, every piece of equipment in the Voting Village was effectively breached in some manner. Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources were quite capable of undermining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of these systems ….

During the 2020 election, however, Hursti denied the widespread fraud, despite election officials reporting multiple irregularities with their machines. He called any allegations that Joe Biden’s campaign rigged the election “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation.”

Yet Hursti still insists the machines have security defects.

At this year’s conference, he said:

If you don’t think this kind of place is running 24/7 in China, Russia, you’re kidding yourselves. We are here only for two and a half days, and we find stuff …. It would be stupid to assume that the adversaries don’t have absolute access to everything.

One of Voting Village’s hackers, Will Baggett, a veteran forensic examiner and former cia operative, explained that scrambling a voting machine’s tallies can be as easy as plugging in a Bash Bunny usb drive to overload the system. He said:

There’s a diversity of machines here …. We want the public to see this is what the software is. They’re pulled out from storage once every two years. Every so often, people vote on them.

But the biggest issue is that the problems will not be fixed before the November 5 election. Hursti said:

There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes, I’m worried about things not being fixed, but they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it.

“It’s not a 90-day fix,” explained Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology-Information Sharing and Analysis Center. He continued:

Even if you find a vulnerability next week in a piece of modern equipment that’s deployed in the field, there’s a challenge in getting the patch and getting the fix out to the state and local elections officials and onto the equipment before the November election.

Vice Chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (eac) Donald Palmer argues that “the systems that are being tested at def con are not the frontline systems.”

Because the program’s intended purpose is to expose vulnerabilities in equipment, manufacturers often criticize and stay away from the event. Some of the main voting system equipment companies, such as Dominion Voting Systems, es&s and Hart Intercivic, have refrained from participating in the program. Voting Village gets its machines secondhand from sites like eBay. Most of the tested systems can be found in at least one voting jurisdiction.

According to Palmer, the specific voting machines tested by Voting Village are not updated or “certified to eac standard” because they are “not supported by manufacturers.”

In the eac’s certification process, machines go through “penetration testing” and it is ensured that “any know vulnerability” is resolved. Although this certification is voluntary, Palmer insists the equipment eventually goes through eac testing by manufacturers.

But he also said the eac does not test for new vulnerabilities: “Right now, we don’t have any reports indicating the exploiting of vulnerabilities with voting equipment certified by the eac.”

Certain government and election officials insisted in 2020 that America’s voting machines were “perfect.” They said the 2020 election was “the most secure election in U.S. history.” Media sites like Facebook and Twitter began banning “false or misleading information” about the 2020 election and “unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying or certification of election results.”

Yet just this month, hackers were able to break into our voting machines. What does this mean for the upcoming 2024 presidential election?

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has warned that the Democratic Party will try to steal the election again this year. And they will most likely use technology to rig the results.

In his article “Ready for War,” Mr. Flurry explained:

Polls before America’s Nov. 8, 2022, midterm elections indicated a “red wave” would sweep the country. …

They were wrong. Outside of Florida, the red wave didn’t happen. About half an hour after polls closed, Nevada’s two largest counties stopped counting ballots because election workers were overwhelmed by an avalanche of mail-in ballots. Arizona’s largest county reported that 20 percent of its tabulating machines were malfunctioning. Georgia was hit with a mysterious last-minute ballot drop for Sen. Raphael Warnock. Several key races experienced anomalies with voting machines, delayed counts, suspicious ballot dumps and other concerning developments that virtually all favored Democrats—and that undermine confidence in the integrity of the elections. It was a sickening repeat of the problems that plagued the 2020 elections.

America’s elections are not perfect or secure. The vulnerability in the voting machines proves this.

“There is a war for control of America,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “At the heart of it are the voting machines. Either get rid of the machines or forget about winning!”

To learn more, read Mr. Flurry’s full article here.