Thread by @doctorow

One of the great ironies of the "stop the steal" conspiratorial fraud and its focus on Dominion's voting machines is that voting machines are, in fact, flaming garbage.

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For decades - since Bush v Gore and before - security researchers have been ringing the alarm about voting machine security and the terrible, bullying, incompetent, indifferent companies that make them.

cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/…

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Every year, the @votingvillagedc folks demonstrate the myriad ways in which voting machines are untrustworthy and not fit for purpose. Their landmark 2019 report is required reading.

media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027…

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But not all voting machines are equally terrible. Dominion's machines share all the information security problems common to electronic voting, but they use human-readable paper ballots that can be hand counted to verify their findings.

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There are other machines that do not have this safeguard: many all-in-one and ballot-marking devices do NOT produce these paper trails that can be audited during contested elections.

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One of the leading manufacturers of these extraordinarily bad machines is Election Systems and Software (ESS), America's vote-tech monopolist.

ESS is a garbage company, notorious for making bad systems and stonewalling when asked about them.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/14/wit…

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ESS sucks at making voting machines, but it excels at selling them to local officials, and part of that grift is a keen nose for opportunities to silence its critics.

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Dominion is suing a parade of trumpy conspiracists for knowingly making provably false statements about its machines. Progressives and other members of the reality-based community have been popcorn-eating-gif about it, all schadenfraudey to see these rotten people get theirs.

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Most people cheering on Dominion don't know much about voting machines, because most people don't know much about voting machines period. ESS is exploiting that gap by suing ITS critics, implying that anyone who criticizes voting machines is a trumpist insurrectionist.

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They've gone after the leaders of SMART Elections, a nonprofit that has been warning New York State about its insecure, unauditable ESS voting machines.

ESS calls SMART's critiques "false, defamatory, and disparaging."

freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess…

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Among the sentiments they wish to prohibit people from uttering: "ESS's ExpressVote XL is a bad machine."

Remember when Trump trolls created fake news sites and we publicized the link between trumpism and fake news, only to have Trump start calling his critics "fake news?"

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It's happening again, but in reverse. The outrage at Trump's baseless conspiracy claims about Dominion is being hijacked to discredit real election security advocates by a powerful, corrupt monopolist.

Don't be taken in.

eof/