By Allegra Dengler
The great Mavis Staples sings Only the Lord Knows.
I pick up the paper, I put down the paper
Turn on the TV, I get confused
People on this side say the people on that side
They lyin', say they lyin', everybody's confused
The MAGA GOP is continuing their tiresome refrain. “2020 was stolen, the Democrats will steal it again. Trust us”.
The Democrats respond with “The GOP lost all sixty lawsuits challenging the 2020 results. Elections are free, fair and secure. Trust us.”
Why should we trust either party? Why can’t we just have elections everyone can believe in? Verified and verifiable, based on ballots hand marked by us and hand counted in public, on Election Day? Where we sign in to paper poll books, where we can proudly see our signature from every year we voted?
Other (functional) democracies do it this way.
Instead, our votes are counted secretly by vulnerable computerized voting machines provided by voting machine companies whose ownership is unknown? Counted with proprietary software that only the companies (and hackers) have access to.
And now there’s a new player in town. Not Republican or Democrat. Not Russian or Iranian or Chinese.
Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview is the most capable AI model ever built. Anthropic engineers with no special security training asked Mythos Preview to find security flaws and overnight it found thousands. With a simple prompt, it found vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser. All by itself. No human guidance needed. A hacker’s dream.
AI is coming for our votes.
Michigan Fair Elections Institute reports that hackers using AI do not need to fake a single ballot to change results. They can alter registration data in hidden ways. This action can block real voters on a large scale or create enough confusion to destroy trust in the final count.
Legislation passed by the New York Senate could help protect the vote and voters and give us some hope for elections we can believe in. Keep our paper ballots! But this significant legislation is dying in the moribund Assembly Election Law Committee.
Allegra Dengler