I’m reading the new Bob Woodward book, Rage, and came across this unsettling quote:
“The NSA and CIA had evidence, highly classified, that the Russians had placed malware in the election registration system in at least two counties in Florida—St. Lucie County and Washington County. There was no evidence yet that the malware had been activated. It was sitting there to be used. The voting system vendor used by Florida was used by state election registration systems all around the country. The Russian malware was sophisticated and could be activated in counties with particular demographics. For instance, in areas with higher percentages of Black residents, the malware could erase every tenth voter, almost certainly reducing the total vote count for Democrats. The same could potentially be activated to reduce Trump votes in Republican districts.”.
I’ve read lots of warnings about attempts to hack into American voting systems, but hadn’t been aware of any successful penetrations.
This seems very serious to me. If it is determined, after the fact, that votes were miscounted or voters were not allowed to vote in a battleground state, what will we do?
Rage has been getting lots of publicity, but so far as I know no one has picked up on this passage, which even the author doesn’t make a big noise about.
Hopefully the counties that have been hacked (and all others using that brand of voting software) have had their systems scrubbed clean–it doesn’t say one way or the other in the book.