| Hey y’all. Elon Musk wants to get rid of all electronic voting machines, and election officials think that’s a bad idea. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Spending on data centers will soar to $250 billion a year, fed by demand for AI and cloud computing, KKR says
• Elon Musk must face claims in court that he fired former Twitter executives to cheat them out of severance pay.
• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway keeps selling Apple shares, cutting its stake in the world’s most-valuable company by 60% this year. As
the US presidential election fast approaches, Elon Musk keeps claiming,
with scant evidence, that internet-connected voting machines are
vulnerable to hacking and that the country must switch back to paper
ballots for better security. Having spent much of my time lately learning what it’d actually take to hack these devices —
speaking with election officials and machine makers and visiting a
vendor’s factory — I can assure you Musk’s claims are quite unfounded. It’s
not that election computers are advanced to a level of impenetrability;
rather, what makes them so ironically safe at scale is that their
functions are intentionally limited and dependent on an absurd degree of
bureaucratic logistics and analog-world redundancies. Keep
in mind that most voters (98%!) tomorrow will cast their votes on
paper, the majority using pens and Sharpies to mark their choice on
slips of paper. The precinct tabulators scanning those sheets are
offline (often lacking even the hardware for Wi-Fi, Ethernet or
Bluetooth) and undergo pre-election logic and accuracy testing. And all
ballots are preserved for backup so authorities can confirm the digital
and physical counts match. These votes are usually separately recounted
at central county offices, anyway. Since throwing his weight behind Donald Trump, Musk has made voter fraud a key point of his stumping
in swing states like Pennsylvania. Unfounded ideas about rigged voting
systems are not new among Trump supporters, but Musk’s Tesla Inc. and
SpaceX tech background makes him a uniquely effective and highly
misleading messenger of these conspiracy theories. “I’m normally someone
who favors technology — I’m a super 21st-century technology boy right
here,” Musk said at an October campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “And I’m
saying: no machines for voting.” Even
if you managed magically to slip by workers and surveillance cameras at
a poll site to insert some undetectable, malware-laced thumb drive into
a machine to manipulate votes, you’d still have to figure out how to
fake loads of corresponding physical ballots while destroying the real
ones. And then, so what? You’ve only broken into one machine. You’d
next have to replicate that in-person hack on thousands of additional
voting machines. “It’s bull!” said Jerry Feaser, the recently retired
elections director of Dauphin County, PA, where Musk has also
campaigned, when I asked him about the X Corp. owner’s claims. “There would have to be so much collusion among so many different people and levels.” Nevertheless,
practicalities haven’t stopped Musk from playing into voter fears. “The
last thing I’d do is trust a computer program because it’s just too
easy to hack,” he’s said, ignoring that system regulations and
certifications are insanely rigorous and slow-moving, and that even tiny
machine or software changes require months of lab evaluations and
government paperwork. “If
you have voting machines that are connected to the internet, and you’ve
got super advanced AI that can potentially affect those machines, I
think that’s very dangerous,” Musk has also claimed, urging the US
to shift entirely to hand counts of only physical ballots. This
last suggestion most frustrates folks involved with managing elections.
Hand counts are incredibly labor-intensive and error-prone—not to
mention ripe for corruption. When I asked Ben Hovland, chairman of the
US Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that oversees
voting systems, about Musk’s proposal, he said the process would be
extremely inefficient, particularly given that each ballot has way more
contests on it than just Trump versus Kamala Harris. “Even for just a
medium jurisdiction, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of
ballots with, let's say, 30 to 60 races on them,” Hovland explained.
“There’s a reason banks don’t count all their money by hand.” Despite
Musk’s claims to the contrary, he added, computer scanners can help
tabulate votes far more accurately and securely than humans. And if
you’re ever worried about any possible discrepancies or alleged
interference, that’s when you can go in and hand-count everything.—Austin Carr |