Mike Lindell, already a stark example of wealthy men who gave everything to Trump and lost it all, was found guilty of defaming a voting machine company employee and is on the hook for millions of dollars in compensation. Jurors had no problem reaching the verdict, though didn't award the $60m prosecutors called for. — Read the rest

Sadly, people like Marlene Bourne are being taken seriously, which seems to be the new normal.

This short segment on The Daily Show would have been baffling ten years ago or so. Nowadays, however, this is what the United States has become. — Read the rest

Tina Peters (previously), a county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, was found guilty Monday on seven charges related to her attempts to hack into Colorado's election system after the 2020 election. She claims she was trying to prove a conspiracy to deprive Donald Trump of victory, so jurors didn't have to think long or hard about it: it took them only four hours to crank through her rap sheet. — Read the rest

Arizona loser Kari Lake's quest to overturn her electorial defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial election was turned away Monday by the Supreme Court. Her lawsuit, challenging electronic voting machines, was already dismissed by two lower courts, which found that neither Lake nor fellow Republican Mark Finchem were harmed. — Read the rest

Trump won't help the co-defendents who went all-in to help him, even at the point where helping them would seemingly improve his own chances of getting out from under the Georgia election interference charges. Scott Hall, one of 18 facing charges with the ex-president, has pleaded guilty to tampering with electronic voting machines in a deal that requires he testify against the bigger fish. — Read the rest

This story is pretty wild. A guy saw Dominion voting machine up for auction on a Goodwill website. After buying it for $7.99 he resold it via eBay for $1200. Naturally, authorities in Michigan, from where the voting machine was sourced, are trying to figure out what the heck is going on here. — Read the rest

The county clerk of Mesa in Colorado, Tina Peters, "could be in legal trouble" after allowing an unauthorized person into a secure facility during an "upgrade" of the county's voting machines. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold reported that this unauthorized person then released the passwords for the underlying voting machine software online. — Read the rest

Here's a bonkers Sunday Morning political talk show clip for you. Fired Trump 'attorney' Sidney Powell of losing 'Kraken' lawsuit infamy tells Mike Huckabee that voters in the state of Georgia should be wary of voting in the January runoff election unless all the voting machines go away. — Read the rest

For three years now, cryptographer Matt Blaze (previously) and his colleagues have hosted a Voting Village at Defcon, the annual hacker con in Vegas, in which all comers are welcomed to try to compromise a variety of voting machines that are in actual use in American elections.

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) is America's leading voting machine vendor; they tell election officials (who are county-level officials who often have zero cybersecurity advice or expertise) not to connect their systems to the internet, except briefly to transmit unofficial tallies on election night.

When the North Carolina State Board of Elections asked the voting machine companies whose products were used in state elections who owned those companies, both Election Systems & Software and Hart Intercivic claimed that the answers to the question were proprietary, confidential trade secrets that would devalue their companies if they were divulged.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says that after the Mueller Report was published, the FBI came to him to explain its conclusion that at least two Florida county's voting machines were hacked by Russians during the 2016 election, but that they swore him to secrecy so he can't reveal which counties and which machines were hacked.

No one knows who wrote this Unisyn optical vote-counting machine manual that has appeared in multiple sites served by the California-based vendor, but only because Unisyn won't comment on whether they wrote it.

Why does Ivanka Trump need trademarks for nursing homes, sausage casing, and *voting machines* in China? Or do we not want to know.

$100 or so a pop. Here's a nice up-to-date Diebold machine. And here's a stack of the voter access cards that go with them. Brian Varner reports on how much can be learned from such items.

The hard drives had not been wiped.

Back in 2012, Symantec researcher Bryan Varner bought some used US voting machines on Ebay and found them to be incredibly insecure and full of real, sensitive election data; in 2016, he did it again and things were even worse.

When security researchers report on the ghastly defects in voting machines, the officials who bought these machines say dismiss their concerns by saying that the tamper-evident seals they put around the machines prevent bad guys from gaining access to their internals.

Every year, security researchers gather at Defcon's Voting Village to probe voting machines and report on the longstanding, systematic security problems with them, in order to give secure voting advocates the ammunition they need to convince Congress and local officials to take action into improve America's voting security.

I've been fighting with voting machine vendors since Bush v Gore, when companies like Diebold brazenly sought to subvert the Supreme Court's order to standardize a secure design for US voting machines, going so far as to send out thousands of fraudulent copyright notices in a failed attempt to silence whistleblowers who'd reported defects in their systems.

A federal lawsuit brought by voting security activists against the State of Georgia has revealed breathtaking defects in the state's notoriously terrible voting machines — and, coincidentally, the machines in question were wiped and repeatedly degaussed by the state before they could be forensically examined as evidence of their unsuitability for continued use.