The work of J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering, has made the United States election system more secure—largely by uncovering vulnerabilities in equipment like voting machines and ballot scanners, and by advocating for best practices and technological advances.

Here are some of the key ways Halderman’s work has helped to strengthen election integrity in the U.S.

Election security is the cornerstone of democracy, yet it has come under unprecedented threat in recent years. A letter from Jackie Singh, the  cybersecurity lead for the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign, has added weight to growing calls for a forensic audit of the 2024 US presidential election.

Singh’s detailed plea to Vice President Kamala Harris highlights verified domestic and foreign election interference, including breaches of voting systems, a surge in rejected mail-in ballots, and more than 60 bomb threats targeting polling places – threats that the FBI traced to Russian domains.

These concerns are not confined to the United States. From Romania to Mozambique, democratic processes worldwide face manipulation from both foreign and domestic actors.

Frank Moseley president of Unirealm Information Systems announced a warning to 17 North Carolina counties that they must perform a special audit check because statistical anomalies indicate that presidential electronic ballots with no corresponding physical ballot may have been tabulated.

While we were off last week, another expert rang in. Jacqueline Singh served as the Lead Incident Response and Threat Analyst for the 2020 Biden-Harris Campaign. Last week she penned a brief, open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, urging them to seek "a comprehensive forensic audit" of the 2024 results, based on a number of issues that she argues "undermine confidence in the election results.” 

Please consider using your right to speak to make your voice heard during this crucial time for our democracy. Call for a forensic audit. Here is the number to call and a sample script.

Democrats continue with the big lie, that our elections are "free, fair, safe and secure.” There was nothing free and fair or secure about these elections, starting with the obscene amount of money unleashed by Citizens United, running through extensive Russian troll farms targeting voters, gerrymandering, massive purges of voter rolls, and finally, in the coup de grace, inadequate audits of the ballots to ascertain whether the voting computers counted the votes right. Democrats need to stop defending a broken Democratic system!  If they are in denial that they have a problem, how is anyone going to solve the problem?

COMMENT: In New York,  it used to be that the press and interested parties could examine the ballot images after an election to verify whether they matched the computer tally.  But since a bad ruling in the 2016 Kosmider v Whitney lawsuit, no-one can look at those ballot images or ballots, which are available for about two years  but are locked away.

Since then, bills have been introduced year after year  to establish that ballots as subject to FOIL (the Freedom of Information Law) and to make ballot images public  The bills never get out of the  Assembly Election Law Committee.

Example: New York FOIL Ballot Images Bill. S286A/A6589A  Clarify that ballot images and cast vote records are public documents subject to FOIL and  require public posting automatically shortly after vote count  (Senate passed June 1, 2021; to Assembly Election Law Committee March 19, 2021; amended, recommitted, and printed April 28, 2021)

Ada County, Idaho is doing it right o restore confidence among voters.

While the group of experts cite well-documented evidence of Trump supporters unlawfully breaching proprietary voting systems, copying its software and distributing it across the Internet following the 2020 election, in states including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado (for which several have been charged and/or convicted with felony crimes), Spoonamore's worries are a bit more speculative. He is concerned by his analysis of a reportedly high number of what are known as "Bullet Ballots", which include one single vote (in this case, for Trump for President) and for no one else on the ballot. He augments that concern with what he fears could be a related bevy of hoax bomb threats in largely Dem-leaning jurisdictions on Election Day, said to have come from Russian email domains, as well as the use of Trump supporter Elon Musk's Starlink Internet system in a number of places.

The same left-leaning nonprofit advocacy group that unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify Donald Trump from the November ballot in several states is now calling for a recount of the votes, alleging a mass breach of voting systems. 

Dear Vice President Harris, 

We write to alert you to serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections, and to identify ways to ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence in the result. The most effective manner of doing so is through targeted recounts requested by the candidate. In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

""Given what we know, that all of this horrible software has gone into the wild, the prudent election director will take absolutely every possible method to verify that the results are, in fact, correct." But, Buell explains, unless ballots are examined by hand, "we don't know that the results we are seeing are actually the results.”” Doug Buell

A group of computer security experts have written to Vice President Kamala Harris to alert her to the fact that voting systems were breached by Trump allies in 2021 and 2022 and to urge her to seek recounts in key states to ensure election verification. 
Following the 2020 election, operatives working with Trump attorneys accessed voting equipment in order to gain copies of the software that records and counts votes. The letter to Vice President Harris argues that this extraordinary and unprecedented breach in election system security merits conducting recounts of paper ballots in order to confirm computer-generated tallies.  The letter also highlights the fact that the post-election audits in many key states will be conducted after certification and after the window to seek recounts closes, and that therefore recounts should be sought promptly. 

As I am sure you are aware, New York is a swing state for Congress this year. There are a number of hotly contested contests where we expect there may be challenges to vote by mail, affidavit and absentee ballots.

Given the over-heated rhetoric around tomorrow’s election, we are continuing our volunteer Election Protection program past election day.  We are looking for people in your county to come to the County Board of Election’s ballot canvassing within the next couple of days.

The 2024 presidential election, only days away, is already unlike any other after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol nearly four years ago. Officials across the country are deploying stepped-up security tactics to ensure that this election, like the last one, will be free and fair.

COMMENT: Clear Ballot profiled here is certified in New York and is in use in Onondaga County.  It uses a paper trail based on hand-marked paper ballots, which is the gold standard for elections .".Voters feed their hand-marked ballots into the scanner, which is the size of a cash register and has a thick screen on top. It tabulates blackened ovals and captures a digital image of the entire slip for backup, then spits the ballot down into a bolted cabinet so it can be audited by hand if needed"

Unfortunately, the NYS Board of Elections also certified the ES&S Expressvote XL that is similar to the controversial machines used in Georgia in that it counts the barcode.  In Georgia, "Dominion’s ImageCast X lets voters tap choices on a touchscreen, then prints their selections on a summary receipt in plain text with a corresponding QR code. Voters deposit the receipt into a separate Dominion tabulator, which scans the code and tallies the vote. ..But anxieties over whether the QR data matches what people actually selected have led to a huge push to revert to pens and Sharpies”.  

The  ES&S ExpressVote BMD Terminal  used in Kentucky is a BMD (ballot marking device). “The easiest way to think about it is that the touchscreens are just an expensive ink pen,” Taylor Brown”.  It’s reassuring that Kentucky is using this system and not the ES&S Expressvote XL that  New York State Board of Elections certified last year.

Officials have been bracing for problems for months. In May, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned the 2024 election likely will be the most attacked by malicious foreign forces in American history. Now, some of those concerns have played out in headlines about multiple fake videos linked to a Russian disinformation campaign, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

"On Election Day, Civil Rights Division personnel will be available all day to receive questions and complaints from the public related to possible violations of federal voting rights laws. Reports may be made through the department’s website www.civilrights.justice.gov or by calling toll-free at 800-253-3931.”

The conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen is now mainstream on the right. Believers are undeterred by the fact that the election was free and fair and the lack of evidence of fraud. Those who seek to correct the misinformation become targets of Donald Trump and his allies.

After former President Donald Trump lost in 2020, he has refused to accept the outcome, falsely casting the results as fraud and the election as stolen. This message has been amplified by conspiracy theorists who have peddled claims that the use of machines to count ballots allows results to be rigged. Election workers have been intimidated and threatened.