It doesn't just have an overlap with politics, this whole thing's 99% partisan political. Notice this part? "But the hacker soon discovered that WINvote machin

It doesn't just have an overlap with politics, this whole thing's 99% partisan political. Notice this part? "But the hacker soon discovered that WINvote machines all had the same password. The password, which could not be changed, was (you might want to take a deep breath) “abcde.”" This particular bit's got a lot of attention on Twitter for obvious reasons, and it's sort-of true - you can read the report about it here: https://www.elections.virginia.gov/WebDocs/VotingEquipReport/WINVote-final.pdf https://www.elections.virginia.gov/WebDocs/VotingEquipReport... There's plenty of other hilariously terrible security issues in that security report, but the particular thing I want you to notice is the date, April 14th 2015. This isn't news - it was discovered over a year before the 2016 presidential election, and it lead to the machines being pulled from service almost immediately. (See e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/virginia_nixes_highly_pwnable_voting_boxes/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/virginia_nixes_high...). There's no particular reason to believe the other machines are any more secure, since the only reason those were audited was because of an unrelated reliability issue, but those ones had already been pulled before the election. Despite this warning sign, in the run-up to the election the consensus amongst right-thinking people was that voting machines were essentially unhackable. Tweetstorms like this went viral: https://twitter.com/ashbylaw/status/787352959633981440 https://twitter.com/ashbylaw/status/787352959633981440 (On the WINVote machines, the "multiple interconnected counters" that tweetstorm claims make tampering impossible were editable fields in an Access DB with a short hardcoded password.) Publications like Wired insisted it would require a ludicrously impossible conspiracy: https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rigging-presidential-election/ https://www.wired.com/2016/10/wireds-totally-legit-guide-rig... Why? Trump was pushing the idea of vote hacking, and therefore only Trump-supporting conspiracy nuts would believe it. (A few hardcore infosec folks still understood how insecure the whole thing was, but they kept their mouths shut or were ignored.) It was only once Trump won and his opponents suddenly had a reason to dispute the results that this flipped over, and suddenly it became just as obvious and indisputable that the machines were horribly hackable. The audits and safeguards that Wired treated as infallable instantly became feeble and useless: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/hacked-not-audit-election-rest/ https://www.wired.com/2016/11/hacked-not-audit-election-rest... The underlying facts about the security of the election and voting machines didn't change - that terrible "abcde" password had been sitting there, public knowledge, since early 2015 - all that changed was the motivation to believe the election had been hacked.