'BradCast' 8/10/2026 (Alarming voting system vulnerabilities persist, with guest Susan Greenhalgh, election security expert)

The president made it clear that he views election security as a top domestic priority. Yet we saw his budget has cut CISA, the cybersecurity agency, by $700 million. If he's so concerned about possible foreign interference in our elections, why does his budget cut the agency that would be charged with preventing that? Well, isn't that a good question? That's why. I got the feeling of something right. Nobody. I'm so scared. From Pacific Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast. As heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A., 98.7 in Santa Barbara, 93.7 in San Diego. 99.5 FM in Ridgecrest and China Lake. Elsewhere in California, in Red Bluff and Reading on KFOI and Round Mountains, KKRN. Up in Oregon, on the Central Coast on K-Y-A-Q, Cottage Groves, K-E-R-K-W, Lanchester, Pennsylvania's W News, Maui, Hawaii's K-A-KU, and Columbus, Ohio, and WGRN, Palinville, New York, WLP, Rochester, New York, WRFZ. Down in New Orleans on WHIV out in Gallup, New Mexico, on K-N-I-Z, Concord, New Hampshire's WN-H-N-H-N-H-N-Fah, Fayetteville, Arkansas, K-PSQ, and Seattle, Washington, where it is Election Day this week, on K-O-D-X, Richmond, Virginia's, W-E-FR, Jainsville, Wisconsin's, W-A-D-R, also Election Day this week, and, of course, Minneapolis, St. Paul's. AM 950 KTNF, and yes, it is Election Day this week there as well. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker, and all around, swell fellow, says me from bradblog.com. Excuse me. Thank you very much for joining us today. For another thrilling edition of the Brandcast, it is a hell of a way to kick off another week here, though we're unfortunately sort of getting used to this sort of thing. A major 7.4 earthquake rocked Columbia. On Monday morning, just weeks after two brutal timblers struck neighboring Venezuela, killing some 5,000 people there in toppling buildings, the death toll in Colombia, which also saw buildings toppled. That death toll is expected to climb with over 100 confirmed as dead as of midday on Monday.

I think that number, I don't know, Des, have you been able to keep an eye on that number so far? The last time I checked, the death toll had risen to more than 111. Officials expect the death toll to rise. And it just is a reminder that, listen, you know, these incredibly big natural disasters can strike at any time. Another, speaking of, another major Pacific Ocean Typhoon dolphin is now slamming eastern China as we go to air. Massive evacuations underway there. Europe is set to experience its fifth heat wave of the summer this week. amid ongoing drought and wildfires out there in Europe. And the news is no better here in the U.S. where heat continues to grip much of this nation. And Lake Mead, a major source of drinking water for a number of states in the West, including out here in California, is now at an all-time low. More, almost certainly, on several of those stories on tomorrow's broadcast on our Green News Report with Desi Doyen. Hello, Desi. Hi. Last week at this time, the White House and the corporate national media, which parrots, whatever they say, were telling you that Donald Trump was just about to announce an end to his six-month-old war in Iran, that an agreement was about to be unveiled. Of course, it wasn't, and it isn't. And Iranian officials made that clear over the weekend. uh... that at this point with Donald Trump clearly having lost whatever it is that he thought he was trying to achieve there the Iranian government at this point is set to settle for nothing less than essentially complete and total surrender by Donald Trump exactly the same thing with Donald Trump claimed originally to be asking for. Perhaps more on that later today, if time allows, as we had been warning over the past two weeks while the Republicans in the Senate were playing out their kabuki theater, pretending to maybe, who knows, maybe they were opposed to Donald Trump's nomination of Todd Blanche, his personal criminal defense lawyer as the nation's next U.S. Attorney General, well, at approximately 4 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday morning, yes, when as few people as possible might notice. The Republican Senate voted to confirm perhaps the most obviously unqualified person to become the nation's top law enforcement official in U.S. history, one who, among other things, helped hide alarming allegations of pedophilia by his client, Donald Trump, in the Jeffrey Epstein matter. He continues to help hide that information today.

He engineered a still existing $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund to pay off, well, to be used by his client, Donald Trump, to pay off supporters of the insurrection that was incited by Trump himself after he lost the 2020 election, as well as an unprecedented immunity deal. from tax penalties forever for Donald Trump for his entire family and for their friends and associates and all of Donald Trump's hundreds of companies, saving him at least $100 million in tax penalties that you, the taxpayer. We'll have to make up for because Donald Trump doesn't like paying taxes. Todd Blanche's actions in that matter have been found to be a fraud upon the federal court. And Todd Blanche has already been referred to the New York State Bar Association by the federal judge in that case. And yet that man will now be actually is now your U.S. Attorney General was sworn in on Monday afternoon. So it'll be your attorney general, or at least Donald Trump's attorney general, thanks to the Republicans who voted to confirm him in the middle of the night over this past weekend, despite every Democrat in the U.S. Senate voting against Todd Blanche's nomination. Since we last spoke to you last week, primary elections were held late last week in Tennessee. And over the weekend in Hawaii, if time allows, we'll try to get to some noteworthy news there after speaking with our guest, who is joining us momentarily, on related-ish news, we'll call it, or it's possible we'll take some of your phone calls later on instead, as we haven't been able to open the phone lines here in a while to, well, anything you'd like to discuss. Though please note, we will have an expert in voting system security joining us momentarily if you'd like to ask them or me any questions about that. Now, 85 days out from perhaps the most critical primary elections in U.S. history. My number will be, as always, 818985-5735 if you'd like to queue up now before things get too busy. That's 818985. KPFK. And in more election news this week on Tuesday, voters in five states are heading to the primary polls for this November's critical midterms, now just 85 days away, in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont. And perhaps the swingiest of swing states these days, Wisconsin, where Democrats are having a crazy primary for governor, really crazy, as Wisconsin Native and National Affairs correspondent for the nation, John Nichols.

Talked about a little bit last week on this show. He has said he has never seen anything like it. John may join us again this week on the show to help make sense of election results after Tuesday night in Wisconsin and elsewhere. And Republican voters in South Carolina will also hold their quickie statewide replacement primary to nominate their candidate for the U.S. Senate following the recent sudden death of South Carolina's. Senator Lindsey Graham. Of course, as you know, Donald Trump and his Republican Party's party have been going to extraordinary measures to try and yes rig this year's elections in their favor from carrying out unprecedented mid-decade redistricting schemes to erasing. majority minority voting U.S. House districts from the map entirely in hopes of receiving an edge worth, at best estimates, currently about a dozen House seats that Republicans almost certainly would have lost this November. to Donald Trump's largely impotent executive orders attempting to prevent perfectly lawful voters from being able to vote under the guise of preventing non-citizens from voting despite the lack of any evidence that that actually happens in any sort of number that could even result in the theft of a tiny local election for the most part, much less a House race, Senate race, governor's race. or a presidential race and of course he is hoping to prevent the use of vote by mail voting anyway he can even though he likes to vote by mail by among other means ordering the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots in states where the state officials have not turned over voting lists for approval to the executive branch, which has no constitutional role in American elections. Thankfully, that has been blocked for now by the courts. The good news on that front... Is that those federal courts continue to block most of Trump's efforts to rig the elections via these executive orders and Trump's new U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and his corrupted Department of Justice continue to lose in court challenge after court challenge trying to enforce Trump's unlawful unconstitutional executive orders regarding elections. After 21 now, 21 federal district courts. And one federal appeals court panel have slapped down the Trump administration's attempt to grab state's unredacted voter rolls. The Department of Justice response has been remarkably consistent, according to the democracy docket, who has been keeping the tally as DOJ attorneys continue to argue that they understand civil rights voting era law.

Better than all of those judges. The department keeps advancing essentially the same legal argument from courthouse to courthouse, even as judges appointed by presidents of both parties, have rejected their theory over and over and over again. About 22 times so far, he is right now, as of now, about 0 for 22, and often for the same reasons each and every time. And as the pile of losses grows, DOJ has shown little interest in recalibrating its losing approach. Does that sound like anyone you know? That attitude was unusually explicit this past week in Washington State. The outlet reports during a hearing over DOJ's demands for Washington's complete voter database. U.S. District Judge Kimberly Evanson noted the department's extraordinary losing streak and asked whether there was anything meaningfully different about the case before her last week. Quote, By my count, she said, this is the 20th court to address this exact issue. The judge said, asking the DOJ attorney, quote, is there any meaningful basis on which to distinguish this case from the many other district courts and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals across the country that have dismissed the governor's complaints, I'm sorry, the government's complaints, or denied their motion to compel? Quote, no, your honor, DOJ attorney Raymond Yang admitted adding relevant facts are similar to all the other cases. But his explanation for why Washington should nevertheless rule differently in this case was simple. He said all the other courts essentially got it wrong. Okay, good luck with that. Mr. Prosecutor again and again, courts in Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Colorado, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C. have all rejected the DOJ's interpretation. of voting rights on civil rights grounds. Others have rejected the claims on similar but slightly different grounds. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled against DOJ's attempt. to obtain michigan's voting rolls and in the meantime the doj has not responded to the setbacks by modifying its interpretation in any way they just keep doing it over and over and over again and they keep losing over and over and over again and they keep losing

to judges who rule against them, appointed as noted by presidents of both parties. Isn't there a thing about doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result being insanity? Are you saying our president of the United States is insane? Yeah, I guess so. Kind of, yeah. And the DOJ, too. Kind of, yeah, his DOJ. Just this past week, the department filed nearly identical letters in its Ninth Circuit appeals court from losses in California and Oregon, acknowledging yet another batch of rulings against it before explaining why those judges were also totally mistaken. DOJ's remaining voter rolls cases have dwindled to roughly nine, nine states, including Delaware, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah. Minnesota, Idaho, and Vermont, with some proceedings effectively waiting for appeals courts above them to weigh in, but expect them to the administration to lose in those states as well, because the goal here is simply to get to their friends on the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time, the politics do not seem to be improving for Republicans either. The politics, the issues aren't going well with Donald Trump's approval underwater on just about every single issue, including immigration. Reuters reported over the weekend that for the first time in decades, voters see Democrats as better on the economy. Things are not looking good for Republicans this November. All might seem to be going well for the nation's pro-democracy forces, therefore, but is it? As you may know, by now, Donald Trump has gutted virtually every federal entity that oversees the integrity and the security of both campaigns and elections themselves, including those which are supposed to be overseeing the nation's sensitive computer-based voting systems at a time when nearly a dozen states have reported evidence of hacking into their public utility systems in recent days, including their public water system infrastructure. Some of those attacks are suspected of being carried out by Iran or its associates, and yet... The Trump administration does not seem to be interested in hardening national cybersecurity around this November's elections. And frankly, neither do the Democrats who seem to believe that discussing known vulnerabilities in voting systems somehow feeds Trump's big Stop the Steel lie.

And it's a very precarious moment, it seems to me. After spending roughly six weeks analyzing dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico's 2024 elections, Mojave Research, a firm, Mojave Research, came back to the Trump administration with findings that the company says startled its researchers, according to a NextGov report over the weekend. Don't know how it startled them since so much of what they found had long been known, but the systems they examined contained at least a dozen high or critical severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled, and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented, the company said. And in Puerto Rico... where the company had been contracted by the Trump administration to review voting systems used in that recent elections, the researchers found active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated. You've heard the story. Oh, these voting machines, these tabulators are never connected to the internet. Well... The evidence found in Puerto Rico, in any event, suggests otherwise. But despite confirming those vulnerabilities that had been long ago, most of them discovered by other voting system and cyber security experts, many of them that we have reported on on this show in recent years. Despite all of that, the small cybersecurity firm found no actual evidence in those Puerto Rican systems that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited. at least in the recent Puerto Rico elections, or that votes had been changed in any way. The company still, however, wanted more time to be certain, but as its chief technology officer explained over this past weekend at DefCon's Voting Village in Vegas, that's an annual hackers convention, well, the White House... After they heard that information about those vulnerabilities, they soon ended Mojave's probe thereafter. Vulnerabilities, we don't care. Evidence that someone actually changed the results, apparently they care about that, or at least they claim to. As Mojave had prepared to move ahead with their probe, the work was abruptly shut down once it became clear to officials working with the White House out of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI. that they were unable to find any evidence of actual manipulation of the system, at least in those Puerto Rican elections, where they used dominion voting systems similar to those used in parts of more than 20 states across the entire battlegrounds and across the entire battleground state of Georgia. As we've long been reporting, where Republican Secretary of Brad Raffensperger has refused for four years now to patch...

to apply security patches to those systems to use the security upgrades that were created by Dominion to patch some of these holes. And it was urged by the U.S. cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency that all states, including Georgia, immediately used those patches to secure their systems. That was four years ago. When Sissa made that recommendation, Georgia and many other locations have still not done so. And last month, you may recall... Though it seems like a year ago, Donald Trump delivered a prime time address to purportedly announce the findings of his years-long probe of the 2020 election, which he continues to claim without any evidence whatsoever was stolen from him by Democrats or Joe Biden or the voting machine companies or China or Venezuela or who knows. Rather than detailing any such evidence in his remarks last month, six years after the fact, he simply announced the release of certain previously classified documents and analyses that also, turns out, did not offer evidence of a stolen 2020 election, including a report from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, SISA. As Susan Greenhall, a longtime election integrity, security, and transparency advocate explained in a press release at the time at the nonpartisan government watchdog free speech for people.org, quote, a preliminary review of the documents reveals what we expected. There is no evidence of vote manipulation in the 2020 election, but... These documents, she writes, also expose what we have been warning about for years that our election systems are poorly secured and much can and should be done. to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Specifically, she notes, the SISA report, quote, debunks the widely held and often repeated notion that voting systems are not at risk to remote attacks because they are supposedly connected, supposedly not connected to the internet, but she notes the report reveals, quote, in multiple cases, SISA assessors gained full network control within hours or days. demonstrating that many state, local, and tribal territory partners remain soft targets incapable of stopping even moderately skilled adversaries. These documents, she notes, illustrate a significantly damaging and corrosive aspect of Donald Trump's big lie that is often overlooked.

The assertion of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen bred the false counter-narrative that our elections are adequately secured. Neither narrative serves our democracy, Greenhall warns. Joining us now, once again, is Susan Greenhall, senior advisor on election security at free speechfor-people.org. Susan Greenhall, welcome back to the broadcast. Thank you, Brad. Great to be here. So I know. We spoke not long ago with you, but there have been a lot of developments over the past month or so as we inch closer to this year's elections. I got a lot to ask you about today, including the stuff I just talked about. Maybe some of our listeners may ring in as well at 818, 985, 575 with questions, but I want to get to those reports and what to make of them and why it seems that neither Republicans nor Democrats at this point. want to discuss cybersecurity in our elections despite this perilous moment. I think that we are now at, Susan, and it's due to several factors. But there's a couple of developments over the last several weeks I want to ask you about. Let me start with a scoop that we broke on the broadcast last week. Exactly one week ago today with our friend and colleague Marilyn Marks of Coalition for Good Governance, she discovered how with the use of publicly available election results, publicly available poll book data, and the use of a simple AI chat app like chat GPT, she could essentially determine how every single specific voter in the state voted at the polls. using a flaw, exploiting a flaw that the Dominion paper ballot scanners seem to have in that state and in a number of other places like, yes, including Puerto Rico. Many of them have refused to patch these systems with the security patches that are made by Dominion years ago and strongly recommended by both the company and Sisa. Democrats, Maryland, tells me, really don't want to deal with this issue. And it's questionable whether Republicans want to either. Your thoughts on what I think was quite a blockbuster finding by Marilyn Marks, confirmed by Princeton University, shortly after Showtime, that few seem... to want to touch for some reason. Your thoughts on that for a start. Yeah, and so just to give a little more context, that...

vulnerability in the minion system Maryland found a very easy way to exploit is a consequence of Dominion, shoddy engineering and putting in place an ineffective random number. generator in the system. It's supposed to create a random number that's printed on the ballot, and it's not supposed to be traceable back to any specific time that the ballot is cast. Researchers at University of Michigan and Auburn University, Alex Halterman and Drew Springall and as well as Braden Kremens uncovered this problem. In 2022, they wrote a very well-respected research paper about it, and they tried to alert relevant agencies and election officials about it. Dominion did respond by making a software update, another version of their software, a newer version that included a... a competent random number generator. But the Secretary of State of Georgia, as Maryland told you, did not want to apply the patches. And a lot of other election officials have basically just hand waved it away and said, this is too complicated. You have to be a Princeton trained researcher to be able to make any sense of it. Not ordinary people are not going to be. be able to understand this. It's not really a problem. And Marilyn said that's not a good enough answer. As in the ages of AI, as you mentioned, she was able to apply chat GPT and uncover how a lot of people were able to vote. And she, we should underscore. And this was also done. Let me just underscore. She has no experience in, you know, computer coding, reading source code. She didn't have access to that. She didn't need access. All she needed was the public records and a chatbot, essentially, to be able to figure out how pretty much everyone in the state of Georgia voted so much for the secret ballot. Right. And so much for the idea that this is a very complex problem and only, you know, very dedicated and, you know, resource intense geniuses would be able to figure out. And Marilyn said, I'm just going to ask AI. And AI did it for her. So this is a problem for specifically, mostly for Georgia. There are other states that could have this problem. But Georgia specifically. um susceptible because it does make its ballot images and a lot of information public which is a good thing we're not trying to say they shouldn't be doing that we're saying that the vendor shouldn't be making their you know crappy systems with shoddy engineering and using bad random number generators and they should uh and when they are identified then this the election officials in the secretary state's office

should pursue the updated corrected product. Instead, they have not. And so there's, this is a big problem that exists currently in Georgia. But the problem, as you mentioned, is that we're seeing is that election officials and elected officials on both sides of the aisle are trying to ignore these problems, as well as the revelations in the documents that were released after Donald Trump's. bizarre of office speech about election security. We will get to those because there's still a few more items that have come up that I'm trying to make sense of here. Maybe related in this question to voting system security, but maybe not. And the fact that we don't really know for sure, that feels to me like one of the problems here. There was a very interesting result. Last week, out of the primary elections in Michigan, where a candidate, a Republican candidate by the name of Amir Hassan, was endorsed by Donald Trump for a U.S. House seat in a pretty competitive district with a sitting Democrat currently in that seat. This Trump endorsed candidate, Amir Hassan, lost that Republican primary by about 20 points, which was unusual in and of itself. But he lost it to a guy named Thomas Smith who had endorsed a third person in that race when Thomas Smith dropped out of the election weeks earlier. He hadn't campaigned. He had no campaign website. He had no money. But he ended up winning. over Trump's endorsie in a landslide. Now, many have chalked this up to pure Republican racism in this case. Amir Hassan was black, formerly a Muslim, although he converted to Christianity. And that is probably what happened here, why they would vote for someone who was off the ballot rather than the third candidate who that person who had dropped out had actually endorsed. I don't know. But these numbers are strange enough that it sounds akin to some elections we have seen over the years where an issue or the names of the candidates actually get mixed up in the database when they're tallied or when they're programmed. The problem is we would never know about... that if that is actually what happened, if the, you know, the candidates were just on the wrong lines, we would never know unless there was some sort of examination of the programming or the ballots, which almost never occurs. How would or how could the public get an answer to a question like that if anybody actually wanted to know that the voting systems tabulated a race like that accurately? Well, the easy and obvious way is to go back and look at the paper ballots and do a recount of the paper ballots to make sure that they align with the computer generated results to ensure that there wasn't some sort of programming error or bug or something that caused a miscount. Because it does happen. We've seen it.

With regularity. And the best way and the most definitive way is to go back and look at the paper ballots. And everyone says, don't worry, we have paper ballots. Well, the paper ballots are only good if you actually go back and look at them. If you're just going to take the number that is spit out by the computer, then the paper ballots are not serving any purpose. Now, the problem in Michigan is that they do their audits well. Well after the election, I don't think they audit primary ballots. I'd have to go and check as a regular course. I think if my memory serves correctly, it's only for general elections every two years. But they typically do the audit months after certification. So any information that you might find about a misprogrammed ballot scanner. is useless later, you know, after the fact. It would be too late. It's well after certification and well after somebody who might be seated. And in this case, the guy who had dropped out of the race but ended up winning the race, he won it by like 20 points. So it was not like it was, you know, close enough that there would be any sort of recount. In many states, you can't even request one, even if you, you know, fear something like that if the final result. results aren't within a certain bound. So there is unlikely to be a recount in that race. And I'm not sure how many ballots were cast by BMD touchscreen ballot marking device versus handmarked paper ballot. But it all just puts... so much smoke into these systems that it makes it easy, as I see it, for a bad guy like a Donald Trump to come out and make claims that are largely impossible for the public to check, or at least for them to know one way or another. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, the election security community, the computer scientists have long said, we need to have affirmative evidence of the election result that's spit out by the computers before certification in the form of a meaningful audit of the paper ballots. We're not just supposed to be trusting the computers because we know that they have flaws and we know that they're vulnerable to manipulation. Even, you know, strong computer security systems can be vulnerable to manipulation. But unfortunately, every time anyone looks under the hood of these machines, they're just aghast at how bad they are, like in the case of Dominion that you mentioned earlier. And we've also, you know, had other experiences with other vendors. I don't want to pick on Dominion because, you know, I think they all have their problems. Yeah. So. The problem is that we have a national mindset. We have been caused to think that we can just trust the computer generated results through a very effective PR campaign that has been going on for a long time, well before 2020, but it really ramped up into a special high gear. after 2020 because of Trump's big lie, as I tried to emphasize in the statement that you read, that we have fostered this very, very dangerous mindset that we can't ever question election results and we can't confront the known vulnerabilities because you'll be labeled a conspiracy theorist or you're giving credibility credibility to the big lie. And two things are true at the same time. The big lie is not true. Trump's own big reveal of documents show that. And at the same time, our election systems are vulnerable and really need... They should not be trusted without verification, and we need that verification, and we are not demanding it. Susan, let me take a quick break, and we will come back to talk about some of those concerns in particular. Those two reports, the one I mentioned from Mojave Research, commissioned by the Trump administration, and revealed at least somewhat over the weekend at the hacking convention in Vegas, and that report by SISA that was actually begun under the Biden administration. As I understand it, which neither the Trump administration nor Democrats seem to want to have anything to do with, although it seems to me that they should, particularly what Sisa suggests that they found. Susan has some thoughts on that as well. Also, if you would like to ask a voting system expert, anything you may be wondering about. Now is your chance. 818-985-5735. That's our phone number if you have time and if you have an interest. 818-985 KPFK. Susan Greenhall, stick around. Quick break here and we'll be right back. I'm Brad Friedman. You are listening to the broadcast.

Hey, this is Brad. Here at the Bradcast and Bradblog.com, we fight for election integrity all year around, like no other media outlet in the nation. But of course, we need your help to help us remain on your public airwaves and completely independent. Please help us continue that fight over your public airwaves by stopping by bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. And the spies came out of the water. But you're feeling so bad, because you know. And the spies hide out in every corner. But you can't touch them, though. Because they're on the spies. Welcome back. It's the Bradcast. Brad Friedman from Bradblog.com. We're speaking with Susan Greenhall, the senior advisor on election security at free speech for people.org, the nonpartisan advocacy group, good government watchdog. Susan, as noted in the previous segment, the folks from the computer security and research firm Mojave Research revealed over the weekend at DefCon's Voting Village. a hackers convention in Vegas that they found serious vulnerabilities in the dominion voting systems that the Trump administration essentially absconded with after a recent election in Puerto Rico, but that they did not find evidence that the machines were hacked or that votes were changed and after that finding. Though they found the vulnerabilities in these systems, the Trump administration told him thanks and essentially see ya. We don't need your work here anymore. Apparently wanting nothing more to do with Mojave. Your takeaway from those findings, both the vulnerabilities that were revealed over the weekend by the the way this White House is dealing with concerns about voting and election security when they claim to be so concerned about it. They seem to be behaving in quite the opposite manner, frankly. Yeah, the Mojave story is pretty interesting because this was an organization that had an existing contract with the ODNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for cybersecurity work. They didn't have experience in election systems or security, but they got tapped to analyze these machines once they...

that Russia was kind of interested in potentially interfering with the election in Donald Trump's favor, more than anything else. That's what you take away from some of these other intelligence documents. And with respect to the SISA report, that's a very interesting report because SISA had been invited by different election administrators to come in and assess their systems in their... election environment because one of the leading criticisms that we often hear of election security researchers who say, hey, these machines are vulnerable, people can get at them, they can be manipulated. And then we hear, well, They're not examining them in the environment where they're actually used. We have physical security precautions and safeguards, and they don't know how we actually run elections, and they're in an ivory tower university, in a lab setting. They don't understand how this is actually used. So all of these warnings should just be ignored and are worthless. But in this case, because this was working with the election administrators, they were invited in certain, you know, I'm sure they didn't do every single jurisdiction in the country, but they were working with different election administrators who said, yes, please come in and examine our systems for their security posture. And what SISA found was that they are inadequately segmented, which in Sissa speak means they're not cutting off the election system from the other things that are connected to the internet in the election office, like the email server and the printer and the blah-bidi-blah, every and you know in your coffee maker because Everything is connected to the Internet today. And they are internally networking the election system with these other entities or enterprises that are connected to the Internet. And as you read from the SISA report, SISA researchers were able to make quick work and get into the to access the actual voting equipment within a matter of hours or sometimes days because they were. poorly secured and because the election administrators who set up the networks didn't really do all the things that need to be done to properly ensure these systems are not connected to the internet. And so let me sort of make that as clear as I possibly can and see if I got this right, Susan. So essentially, you know, we've heard election officials say, oh, you know, they can't possibly muck with elections because the voting machines, the tabulators, they are never connected to the internet. Now, whether they are or are not, We may not know, but they may be attached to a printer that is attached to the internet. And if you can then hack into that printer via the internet, boom, now you're in the entire network. Is that generally what Cis was able to do? Yeah, and that's what they basically were describing. They said they called the network flat.

meaning that it's all basically on one connection. In some cases, they also said that in some cases they were able to find latent remote access devices or technology in the systems, which I know that you've talked about before because we know that some systems had. remote access. That's that thing where somebody said, let me take control of your computer so I can fix whatever's wrong with it. Well, something like that should never be on a voting system. But the vendors have sold their systems with this. And some of those remote access technologies still exist on voting systems today. And yet, so we've got these examples that both Republicans, including the guy in the White House who pretends an election was stolen from him through all sorts of crazy. means and claims through the you know smart thermostats on the wall or whatever who does not seem to be taking this question these concerns seriously. And at the same time, you've got Democrats who, it seems, have never really taken it seriously going back years. They became more interested in it. But then once Donald Trump started claiming the big lie that the election was stolen from him, now Democrats don't want to have anything to do with these computer vulnerabilities because it sounds like... They're joining in with the Stop the Steelers. It seems like neither major party was. Talk about this, Susan Greenhall. I'm wondering what you think about that, how we change that. And also, let me just take the opportunity to underscore how important it is that people like you, Susan, actually are paying to this. Never mind the politics on either side. Well, thank you. We're just trying to follow the facts and keep. Keep it all based on what the truth is. I think in the case of Trump and the Republicans, Trump is just setting himself up to have arguments when he may lose in the midterms or in scapegoats. It's not really about actually securing election systems or making anything better. It's to say, look, you didn't listen to me when I said that these systems weren't secure enough. And look at all the problems we've identified. In the case of the Democrats, it's really, it's just so unfortunate because for a long time, while there weren't a lot of really strong... Democrats trying to demand better election security. There were some. There was Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren to a degree. But once the, and especially that kind of ramped up after 2016 when we learned that the Russians were trying to hack into voting systems. And apparently that has not changed according to these intelligence documents that were released.

When the big lie started, everybody just shut their mouths and ran for cover. And all those problems that were identified before that are based in fact, suddenly were not of interest to any of the Democrats. And as you mentioned, this is a report which finds these really stunning revelations about, yeah, you can get into these systems even if you think they're not connected to the internet because they haven't been properly cordoned off from the internet. that we're not getting a response to deal with it. And most of this information was developed, as you said, under the Biden administration. And under the Biden administration, this knee-jerk reaction to counter the big lie by saying voting machines are perfectly secure and impossible to hack was being repeated very vociferously by the head of SISA under Joe Biden. Jenny Easterly. So that means that her own researchers under the Biden administration were uncovering these significant security vulnerabilities, and she was going out and publicly saying something else, which just, you know, is... It's really disheartening. Yes, it is. And, I mean, it's similarly disheartening that Trump has defunded the election security division at SISA, has disbanded the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force. All of these things, NSA fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command, all of these things that might have overseen our elections, the Federal Election Commission, the Elections Assistance Commission. while claiming that he is concerned about election vulnerabilities. And at the same time, the Democrats seem to be just caught flat-footed. Don't know how to answer this question one way or another. If they even speak to it now, they're concerned they will sound like to stop the Steelers. Not particularly courageous, if you ask me. Susan, I had a couple of callers. I don't know if they didn't have time to stick around, but Desi was able to sort of transcribe their... questions here. I'd like to run through one or two of them with you if you don't mind real quick, because I'm short on time. One caller asked, does California use Dominion voting machines? And I believe the answer to that is yes, although I can't remember how many counties, three or four counties at the very least. Do you recall that offhand? Dominion is used in California. I don't know how many counties. off the top of my head either, but I do believe Riverside, San Diego, I think. Yeah, if people are interested, you can find that information on the verifier. And other people, the verifier being over at verified voting.org, really helpful tool there to show you how every county essentially in the country, every town, every jurisdiction. votes, what sort of voting systems they use and so forth. Marilyn Marks, when she was on the show last week, breaking the story about the lack of a secret ballot anymore in many jurisdictions, many dominion jurisdictions, including the entire state of Georgia, said that no, California has also not.

updated or patched their dominion systems. I can't confirm that one way or another, but that's what Marilyn suggested. Another caller asked, why can't... I just want to speak to that just for your California listeners. It... I think that's right, if I recall correctly, but it's less of a threat in California because most people vote by mail. The lack of ballot secrecy, the traceability of the ballots is a problem that is specific to voting in a polling location in person. So you have less of a concern in California if you're going to vote by mail. You don't have to be concerned at all if you're voting by mail. If you're voting by mail and if you're delivering, hopefully delivering that ballot by hand as opposed to dropping it into a U.S. Postal Service box, if that's the only way you can do it, fine. Otherwise, if you can bring it to a voting center or your local county jurisdiction, deliver it by hand. It'll be a lot safer in this year when we know that Donald Trump is also going after the U.S. Postal Service to try to get them to stop delivering your vote by mail. ballots. Do I have one, I have time for one more here. A second caller asks, why can't L.A. County get together with other jurisdictions to do this work, this research together. Well, whether L.A. County wants to or not is another question because they also use some dubious touchscreen voting systems. But your response to that question, Susan? I wouldn't look to LA County to be a leader on any of these things. LA County has a pretty... a rotten record with the voting system that it's developed and contracted with. Just one little point. LA County spent a lot, a lot of money to build its own voting system and it was going to meet California's very rigorous voting system standards because California has the best standards in the country. The problem is none of the vendors that are commercially making product can meet them. So the Secretary of State has to just regularly waive the requirements in certain. stuff that doesn't actually meet all of California's requirements. So they were going to get a really good system that met all those security requirements. Well, guess what? After $400 million, the system that they got still didn't meet the California, you know, the standards it was supposed to be built to meet. And that just got certified anyway, and that's what you're using. And that's just one of the many problems with that system that we can get into on another call. Yeah, well, we will have to on another day, unfortunately, because we're out of time here. Susan Greenhall, a longtime champion of election integrity going back at least two decades now. She's been at this as long or longer than me. She is the senior advisor on election security at free speech for people.org. I will, of course, link to...

her statement on that CISSA report, which links in turn to the Cicester Report. You can also find her on the blue skies at Susan Greenhall, and you can find free speech for people at FSFP. Susan, always a delight speaking with you. Thanks for all you do. We'll do it again soon, I hope. Thanks, Brian. You bet. Thank you. All right. And my thanks to the folks who checked in, including, yeah, no, we're not going to have time for it, including Morris, our friends. Sorry, Mo, we're going to have to pick this up again next week. And to everyone else, thank you. Next time we have a chance to get at the phones. A lot more news to get to. That will have to wait until tomorrow's broadcast. Until then, thanks again to Susan Green. We want to share it with someone you know or love or hate. You can do so for free at bradblog.com. drop me email if you like i am bradcast at bradblog dot com and on the social medias especially blue sky i am the brad blog see you there until we see you here tomorrow i'm brad friedman good luck world

You're listening to the Bradcast. We are 100% listener supported thanks to listeners like you who drop by bradblog.com slash donate.