What is Trump hiding?
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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How hard are paper ballots? While sure Canada has a much smaller population our Federal elections are all paper. I guess it's only a problem when you get rid of the staff and don't actually want democracy.
A lot of us vote on machine, but it also prints a paper copy that is submitted as well. Because the copy is produced by machine, it can be encoded to be directly and accurately tabulated by machine initially, but also can be hand counted, if need be, later. Speaking as a software engineer, exclusively electronic voting is a fucking terrible idea for any number of reasons, like malice, incompetence, good old human error, etc. But we don't do that. There is and should always be a paper trail to validate it.
I mean, you have 10X the scrutineers as well. It all scales.
The objections I've heard to it make as much sense as saying you can't scale a high school student election to the size of Canada federal elections. Well, yes you can, obviously.
The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
Just one more reason why Bill Pulte has been pushed into this position as "acting" DNI by Trump past unusually strong bipartisan opposition, to the point of canceling the nomination hearing for the real candidate.
This office is really what people should be paying attention to in the coming months, because it's all about the midterms.
For those who are unaware, Bill Pulte is a MAGA loyalist that goes after Trump opponents, and has ZERO knowledge of or experience in national security. As the head of Federal Housing Finance Agency, he is the guy who has been accusing those legitimately investigating Trump (Letitia James, Adam Schiff, etc) of unsubstantiated mortgage fraud.
Expect him to do the same with the ODNI.
When Tulsi Gabbard resigned (or was fired, who knows) another candidate to replace her as DNI was put forward, the Rs and the Ds agreed on him for the most part, and that confirmation hearing was supposed to have happened on Wednesday. It did not. It was canceled at the last second by Trump, allowing Pulte to become "acting" DNI.
While an "acting" DNI has time limits on how long they can "act" without confirmation, that legal end to the "acting" role of DNI comes after the midterms, so this essentially puts Trump's personal bully in the office for the duration of the election season.
Even the Republicans don't want Pulte, and with the Dems they also refused to renew a part of FISA in objection, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has access to all the surveillance tools and output this country ever got its hands on.
The consensus is that Bill Pulte is being chosen as DNI for the sole reason of being able to leverage that surveillance against non-favored candidates in the midterms.
Think about that for a hot second. All the surveillance powers of the Five Eyes leveraged against US political candidates that the orange administration doesn't like.
And now we see there's actually a second reason for Pulte's installation: to suppress facts gathered about our voting machines.
EDITED for clarity
“Report says Republicans won the midterms 5 months from now”
“Supreme Court rules Republicans win midterms before vote starts”
Electronics are superior to paper for many tasks but voting for your share of representation in government ain't one of them. Without indentifying who voted for who (red flag) and verifying it then you can only hope the software was counting properly at run time and not subverted. You can watch people miscount paper in real-time and call them out.
as xkcd put it:
I actually don’t like this XKCD, this is a bad answer to why electronic voting is bad.
Mostly because it is a largely obtuse process that most people can’t see or understand.
“Trust the magic rock is counting fairly and that bad people who would want to manipulate it in order to obtain power and conquer you haven’t had a chance to do so.” You cannot code your way out of that.
Everyone understands marks on paper. No one understands buffer overrun RCE, resistive touchscreen calibration, or database triggers and log sharding.
While I see what you're getting at, I still like this XKCD. I work as a developer, and have also worked in more "handy" fields. The thing with planes, elevators, and basically all other physical things is that they're limited by physics. A steel beam can't suddenly decide to spontaneously fail or disappear.
With code, that can feel pretty different. With experience, I've basically learned to assume that there is always some edge-case I haven't considered, that could trigger a bug. In a building, you can have redundant bolts, and over-dimensioned supports. A small mistake somewhere, a single missing bolt, won't cause a catastrophic failure. With code, it's different: A tiny, hard to notice mistake, can bring the whole think crashing down. Imagine if a plane could crash because the paint had a slightly non-uniform thickness...
A good example of software failing where traditional systems were more reliable is when Boeing tried to rely on it with MCAS on the 737 max
Every system can be subverted. Ballot boxes or stacks of votes stuff or lost... The integrity is in the checks and balances, verifiable oversight.
Electronic voting can be subverted at scale without a paper trail leading to you. People are going to notice you trying to hide the big ballot boxes up your t-shirt.
My country doesn't have electronic voting. Are the machines networked? One would hope not.
And with voting machines there is no verifiable oversight.
You just kind of have to trust that the software that is running on the voting machine is actually correctly tallying your vote, and not doing shenanigans behind the scene. Even if the code is open source, and everyone knew how to read code, you cannot reasonably guarantee that that is the software that is running inside the black box that is a voting machine.
With paper voting you can observe the entire process from start to finish. There are no black boxes which just spit out an answer that you simply have to trust.
The machine can print a human and machine readable copy. Then feed that into another machine after verifying and you have two independent digital counts that can verify each other. You also have the paper that can be manually counted if you need to be extra sure.
This is what we had for a few years. Now the first step is replaced by manual bubbling. Still have the scan for the instant digital count though.
And now you have moved the problem. Now you need to verify that the verification machine is also running the software you want and has also not been compromised. And you need to do this for every single voting machine in use, all of them.
With trillions of dollars riding on the result of an election, the motive for a group/nation to interfere is immense. Attacks against digital systems scale incredibly well, changing a handful of votes is barely different from changing all of them. This is not the case with physical votes, the more votes you want to change the more people you have to involve, and the likelihood you are caught goes up.
On your point about printing off a human readable copy that can be verified manually, you have now invented the worlds most expensive pencil. You'll always want to verify the manual copy, so why bother with the computer one?
A fun fact about why pencils are used in voting in the UK is due to paranoia about pens being replaced with ones containing vanishing ink. There is no evidence this exists or has ever been done, but it demonstrates the levels some countries work at to ensure that all votes are accurately counted, and probably so.
On your point about printing off a human readable copy that can be verified manually, you have now invented the worlds most expensive pencil. You'll always want to verify the manual copy, so why bother with the computer one?
This way the state can count the votes quickly and if there are any audits they have a physical analog to compare. Honestly if the state just randomly audits 1 county per election to check for issues they will catch anything weird going on and save a tremendous amount of time and money.
If the audit discovers something weird they can then count up all the paper ballots and fix the software.
Additionally in 2024 the UK had 28,809,340 votes cast. The US had 158,427,986 votes cast.
Why does the state need to count votes quickly? Votes should be counted accurately, not quickly.
Total number of votes cast doesn't really change anything, because total number of counters and witnesses can also be increased relatively. The USA has a 5 times larger population than the UK but that doesn't mean it takes 5 times longer to count.
And again, accuracy is more important than speed.
Why does the state need to count votes quickly? Votes should be counted accurately, not quickly.
You can have both
I don't know if I wholly agree. I think there's something interesting about the idea of using a (standardized, open-source) cryptographic system to prove that your vote was counted without revealing who you voted for.
But that would have to take place in a political system where people were acting in good faith, which is not what America has.
That can never work because the incentive to manipulate that system and then claim the results are fair because of it’s theoretical power of accountability, which it was sold on, cannot be broken and therefore we MUST accept the results is too great.
The moment someone cracks it, they become the new lords. Same problems as the current system.
Paper doesn’t have this problem, because you can see the paper. You can count paper with machines, but you can also verify with humans and - importantly - humans without PHDs.
Voting is the literal keys to the empire. I’m not letting some billionaire vibecode his way into the white house…again
This is.... All wrong?
Sure, if someone manages to "crack" a cryptographic system, they may be able to manipulate results, but like...that's really unlikely. And even when it does happen, a lot of times there are a lot of constraints on cracks of cryptographic systems that mean that the system still offers a lot of protection even if it should be revised (e.g. a crack may mean it only takes 5 years to crack something that we thought would take til the end of the universe to crack or something like that)
Paper is also manipulable? Like you can just forge someone's signature or have a different peice of paper and say it was theirs even if they voted for someone else really. Vote counters are fallible, what if someone casts two paper ballots counted by two different people? There are all kinds of ways paper ballots can be defrauded.
But vote fraud needs done at scale and really only works when the state is absolutely flailing in it's ability to maintain order.
A much simpler solution with many other benefits is to simply stricture society so that government positions are positions of service, not power...which is what all democracies claim to strive for in the first place, however disingenuously it is made when it's empires and settler colonies. But that is the key: one doesn't even need to be voted in if there is only service and not power in the role. They can just...sign up and will be thanked for helping society run.
Edit: also lmao at the idea of vibe coded cryptographic voting.
I’m not letting some billionaire vibecode his way into the white house…again
That literally never happened. He simply told people what they wanted to hear and told them who to blame for all of their issues. Those being easily verifiable lies didn't make a difference to enough people.
There wasn't a high tech exploit, or even a low tech exploit. Just the human exploit. The same thing that results in 99% of technology "hacks", social engineering. The human is always the weakest link.
I too believe Trump rambled about stealing the elections just for fun
I agree, I live in a country that still uses papel ballouts (Portugal if you're curious) and on election day representatives from.diferent parties, volunteers, and government officials count the votes by hand, the whole process is bureaucratic, time consuming, and incredibly complex, but that's exactly what makes it almost foll proof, there is no way you can alter votes in a meaningful way without a lot of people noticing, and even if by some miracle you did, the very next day all the votes get re counted in front of a judge and other set of volunteers chosen randomly.
In the Netherlands we had switched to electronic voting in the past, but we switched back to paper after some very serious security flaws were pointed out. These days there is some discussion on whether electronic counting of paper ballots should be allowed, but at least there is still a paper trail in that case and you could hypothetically double check everything by hand.
Some things are meat to be time consuming and hard. You cannot hurry things like learning or maturity, our current world has convince us that faster is always better, but that is not always the case. I always volunteer for voting counting and despite the fact that it takes from 7am to 10 pm on a Sunday I enjoy doing it, you feel like you are part of the cogs of democracy, doing your part to ensure the democracy works as intended, like you take part In something greater than yourself, you set aside your political filiation and do your part
I think using electronic counting (of paper ballots) can be an acceptable way to speed up how soon we know what the result will likely be after the polls close. But it is important that there always happens a manual count, and that that manual count should ultimately be the answer we trust.
If you think vote counting is conplex, just wait until you hear about embedded microcontrollers
Different kind of complex 😅 to be honest is more complicated than complex. Believe it or not it is done the old fashion way, we use string and lacker to seal the envelops like in medieval times, and the protocols dictate that all present must sign and write their recount of events. It's a lot of fun and paper
My state prints out a physical slip that shows the vote that's deposited into a box. It's tied to your electronic vote. Ideal system imo.
We get the speed and convenience of electronic voting and there's a secure analog form to audit
The idea of using zero-knowledge proofs to avoid identifying voters has been proposed. Don't know if this is just theoretical at this point or if machines implement it, but that would solve the issue you mention.
ZKP solves the math problem.
It does not solve the trust problem.
Well the implementation would still need to be audited, but you could argue this is more objective and practical than overseeing manual counting.
The problem is not that its impossible to establish trust in an electronic voting system. A qualified individual with the necessary knowledge in formal verification, cryptography, and computer science (maybe I am missing a field or two here) might be able to audit a system and verify that it adheres to certain standards and criteria.
But I cannot do that, the average adult certainly cannot, and the bottom 5% percentile (of whatever criterion/metric might be applicable here) is so far removed from the problem that they are probably already having trouble operating such a machine.
We were able to organize our own elections in elementary school to elect class representatives, and every kid understood how they work, and was able to observe the election process themselves, establishing trust in the system. If I have any doubts if my vote is going to be counted correctly in an election, I can go to my polling station and monitor the election as an independent observer or join the election board and do the counting myself. Every citizen eligible to vote has all the necessary tools available, both in terms of access to the polling station and counting of the ballots (which is public), and in terms of mental capacity and required prior knowledge. (Well, the last two points at least apply to a large majority of voters). I don’t need to trust the local government or dubious “experts”. The public’s ability to establish trust in the election system is essential in a democracy, and establishing trust cannot be delegated.
No, you could not. In any way.
It's been proposed for age verification too, but shockingly it doesn't seem to be a priority.
The key thing for elections is that all counts ought to be auditable and verifiable. It doesn't matter whether the count is done by humans or electronically. Enough information from each individual vote must be preserved so that counts can be verified, during the legal window for races to be confirmed.
I am old enough that when I first started voting, we used lever machines. You pushed a lever for your choice in each race, then you pushed a big lever, which "recorded" your choice and resets all levers for the next person. But, it recorded your choice on manual dials that showed the vote total. Sometimes, the dial has issues rolling over from "9" to "10", or "9999" to "10000". If your vote got swallowed by the mechanical dial, it's gone! There was no remedy. At the end of the election, the poll workers reported the counts off the dials. If they needed a recount, they looked at the dials and said "Yup, that's the count".
Today, I vote on a paper ballot, which gets fed into a machine. I can see right away if my vote is accepted -- if it is not, I can get a new ballot and try again. All those paper ballots are retained so if there is a recount, they can either be run again or physically inspected by hand. It is much better tha it used to be.
Just Fox News helping plant the idea of a stolen election again.
Anyone else getting paywalled on this article?
Tap for spoiler
WASHINGTON, June 19 (Reuters) - White House officials have for months delayed the release of a U.S. government report that outlines what it describes as significant vulnerabilities in the nation's voting machines ahead of the November midterms, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections.
Some White House officials have argued the report could undermine voter confidence, particularly among Republicans. Others have said they do not believe the report goes far enough in supporting President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, the three sources said. Some Democrats said privately they worried Gabbard’s probe into voting machines would be used by the administration to push states to use paper ballots.
Several court cases filed by Trump's lawyers failed to prove voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race.
The sources were granted anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who launched an investigation into the voting machines and searched for evidence to support Trump's false election fraud claims, steps down on Friday. Stepping in as interim director is federal housing regulator Bill Pulte. Trump has said he wants Pulte to investigate “rigged elections” during his time at ODNI.
It is unclear what Pulte plans to do with the report. He has been briefed on efforts by the agency to investigate flaws in voting machines, including the unreleased report, according to two of the sources.
Democrats and some analysts warn of possible interference by the Trump administration in the midterm elections, which analysts expect to deliver losses for Republicans.
Officials inside ODNI and experts who advised the agency advocated in meetings with White House officials that the administration begin fixing the flaws late last year in time to complete the process, which requires extensive coordination with states, before the midterms.
Asked about the delay in releasing the report, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement that the administration “continues to offer assistance to state and local election officials, including through the FBI and CISA, to ensure the security and integrity of all machines used in American elections.” CISA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
ODNI spokesperson Olivia Coleman said Gabbard has taken "actions within her authorities" to "support the President's directive to secure our elections — which includes identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure."
Pulte did not respond to a request for comment.
REPORT PART OF ADMINISTRATION ELECTIONS EFFORT
Some of the vulnerabilities detailed in the ODNI report have long been known to prior administrations, said one former senior Biden administration official and two of the other sources. The vulnerabilities include machines running outdated software and having the ability to connect to the internet, which hackers could exploit.
All of the sources said they were unaware of any evidence of vote manipulation in U.S. elections.
The report is part of the administration’s broader effort to investigate potential fraud in U.S. elections following Trump’s signing of an executive order in February 2025 that aims to give the federal government greater control over U.S. elections.
Under the U.S. Constitution, states have authority over how elections are conducted.
Senior officials at the FBI and the Justice Department have spoken publicly about their probes into potential voter fraud across the country. The report, which draws on data from open-source and classified intelligence, would be the first to detail the administration’s work on voting machines.
It is one of two reports ODNI commissioned on voting machine flaws. The other report, which is also unpublished, was written last year by a government contractor, Mojave Research, which studied voting machines seized from Puerto Rico.
Both reports have been referenced in White House meetings in which officials debated whether there was enough evidence to prove Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The Mojave report found no evidence the machines had been hacked, said two other sources.
NO AUTHORIZATION FROM WHITE HOUSE TO RELEASE REPORT
ODNI has briefed the White House on its findings over the last six months, but never received authorization to publish them, two of the sources familiar with the matter said.
The report says many states are using outdated systems, the three sources familiar with the matter said.
The intelligence agency used information from previously issued reports by CISA, the government cybersystems watchdog, that referenced hacking conferences in which the agency found some voting machines could be attacked through insecure hardware.
CISA has said it found no evidence that a foreign adversary interfered in the 2020 vote, and the agency joined other federal, state and local officials in declaring the election “the most secure in American history.”
ODNI and the White House have also not published the Mojave report. Mojave’s contract was terminated in October.
The software and coding vulnerabilities identified in that report led to the company’s recommendation that the administration implement an emergency remediation plan that would force states to immediately update their software systems. Two sources said that plan has not been implemented.