Election Results

[msquared]

So what happens if this audit finds that the count was essentially correct.  Meaning the actual totals may be different but the results are the same EG Trump got more votes than originally shown, but not enough to win.

Or if it shows Biden won by more than shown?

Do you  trust the results that this company finds, considering their found says fraud exists and this company has never done this before?

[TheDrake]

People that think the election was a fraud will interpret any possible outcome to confirm their beliefs. Nearly any audit will find discrepancies, some of which are benign and normal, which the conspiracy theorists also call "evidence" of fraud. Then it might uncover an instance or two of true fraud, like someone returning an extra mail in ballot, and that will be the "smoking kraken". If there isn't much of either one, they may resort to esoteric statistical arguments or outright disinformation. That will also be called proof of widespread fraud. If there isn't even any of that, they will call the absence of fraud evidence of fraud, because we can't detect it and all mail-in ballots are fraudulent by definition because a notary didn't examine someone's ID and countersign it.

[yossarian22c]

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/882060850/federal-investigators-search-rudy-giulianis-apartment

Federal investigators in Manhattan executed a search warrant Wednesday at Rudy Giuliani's apartment as part of a probe into the former New York City mayor's activities involving Ukraine, his attorney told NPR.

Robert Costello said the FBI conducted the raid at Giuliani's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at around 6 a.m. and seized electronic devices. He said the search warrants are connected to an investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act tied to Giuliani's Ukraine-related work.

Does Trump encourage the people around him to commit crimes or does he just like hiring felons?

[rightleft22]

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/882060850/federal-investigators-search-rudy-giulianis-apartment

Federal investigators in Manhattan executed a search warrant Wednesday at Rudy Giuliani's apartment as part of a probe into the former New York City mayor's activities involving Ukraine, his attorney told NPR.

Robert Costello said the FBI conducted the raid at Giuliani's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at around 6 a.m. and seized electronic devices. He said the search warrants are connected to an investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act tied to Giuliani's Ukraine-related work.

Does Trump encourage the people around him to commit crimes or does he just like hiring felons?

His pre political history would answer that as a 'And' vice 'Or' equation.  His post political history indicates that hasn't changed. 
Unlike POW hero's he has a soft spot for those of his associates that have been caught 

[msquared]

And the first of the defamation suits gets settled out of court with Newsmax issuing a retraction and apology to the Head of Product Strategy and Security of Dominion. This was a personal suit, not the company itself, so he had a much lower bar to reach and I think Newsmax (and others in the future) are going to settle with him pretty quickly.  But I think this does not bode well for the others in his suit and the suits by the actual company Dominion and Smartmatic.  My guess is FoxNews will be next to settle. They have the deeper pockets.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/newsmax-settles-defamation-lawsuit-dominion-215114923.html

[msquared]

Well one case of voter fraud in 2020 plead guilty to the charge of voting for Trump in his dead mothers name.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/man-admitted-using-dead-mothers-192101504.html

So number of cases of voter fraud found 1 and found guilty. Benefactor of the fraudulent vote:Trump.

[cherrypoptart]

So either no Democrat at all committed voter fraud or every Democrat that did got away with it?

[msquared]

Or the number of fraud cases is so low as to not change any results.  See, the big lie is that election fraud was so large in so many states that Biden was able to steal the election.  No proof has been presented of any level of fraud, in any state, that would come close to this.  Even Powell's lawyers are saying that no reasonable person would believe what she said actually happened.  That is her defense.

What will you say when the company in AZ comes back and says that the totals there match up to all of the other audits and recounts done before them and that they found no fraud?  Of course we all know that is unlikely to happen since they are biased going in, have no experience with doing election audits or recounts, want to hide their process from everyone, and are actually violating standard rules of auditing votes (using blue ink pens, which can be read by the counting machines, when they should only be using red ink pens, which are not readable).

[yossarian22c]

So either no Democrat at all committed voter fraud or every Democrat that did got away with it?

It does show that people can get caught for double voting. Trump has half a billion dollars to investigate who voted in the last election. Why wasn't his team of lawyers able to flag 1 illegal vote?

[TheDrake]

Well it probably helps that Biden didn't encourage his supporters to vote twice but Mr. Trump did. So a very small percentage of Trump voters said "hey what have I got to lose! They can't detect fraud, so I might as well commit it just like the evil Democrats."

As to no Democrats committing fraud, that's probably unlikely. The argument would be that the corrupt Democrats are wily and use more reliable methods to commit fraud, and the Republicans just don't know how to get away with it.

One thing should be clear, registering under the name of a dead person and just voting away doesn't work under current systems - although there is ample evidence that it did happen prior to much more sophisticated electronic record keeping.

[cherrypoptart]

So one person gets caught and we relax and say that proves the system is working?

It seems more likely that if only one person got caught that means it's almost impossible to detect voter fraud.

[NobleHunter]

Only if you assume there's lots of voter fraud.

[cherrypoptart]

This seems like lots of voter fraud with lots of convictions:

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?state=CA

[yossarian22c]

This seems like lots of voter fraud with lots of convictions:

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?state=CA

17 million votes in California and 10 convictions around fraud. So about 1 in a million votes is tainted. Seems like the system is working pretty well. It could be better, but there is zero evidence of anything along the lines of 1 in 100 votes being fraudulent. You need fraud on a scale of 10,000 times what we're detecting to impact races. If you think the fraud is that large then Trump's team is super incompetent because they couldn't even find the tip of the iceberg. 

[cherrypoptart]

I haven't seen any evidence that there was enough voter fraud to change the results of the election or come anywhere close.

But...

This idea that we are catching more than a miniscule fraction of the actual voter fraud rings hollow.

For example, how much identity theft crime is committed compared to how much is actually prosecuted and results in a conviction? Robbery? Burglary? Rape? Even murder?

Some stats I'm seeing show that 40% of murderers get away with it.

995 rapists out of 1000 get away with it.

980 times out of 1000, people get away with robbery.

970 times out of 1000, people get away with assault and battery.

It would be interesting to know how often people get away with identity theft. If I had to guess I'd say that 999,999 times out of a million people get away with it.

When you think about it, voter fraud is a form of identity theft except it's even harder to detect. No money is stolen and almost always nobody notices anything is amiss.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

The point is that pointing to how rare it is for people to get caught and convicted of voter fraud isn't making the point you people think it's making. It's also rare for people to get caught and convicted of identity theft. Obviously that doesn't mean it's not happening on a massive scale.

[yossarian22c]

This idea that we are catching more than a miniscule fraction of the actual voter fraud rings hollow.

For example, how much identity theft crime is committed compared to how much is actually prosecuted and results in a conviction?

...

It would be interesting to know how often people get away with identity theft. If I had to guess I'd say that 999,999 times out of a million people get away with it.

When you think about it, voter fraud is a form of identity theft except it's even harder to detect. No money is stolen and almost always nobody notices anything is amiss.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

The point is that pointing to how rare it is for people to get caught and convicted of voter fraud isn't making the point you people think it's making. It's also rare for people to get caught and convicted of identity theft. Obviously that doesn't mean it's not happening on a massive scale.

Identity theft is largely done by foreign cyber criminals. And its detected when someone pulls up a credit report. Same thing with murders, even if people get away with it we realize when someone dies or when something is stolen. Your claim is that voter fraud is special in that it is literally impossible to detect. Yet no one has been able to describe how you could run an undetectable voter fraud ring that could impact 1-2% of the votes in a state to swing a national level election.

The problem you have isn't that we can't find the culprits, you can't identify the crime has been committed. The only way to pull off a massive voter fraud ring would be to have a list of legally registered voters that you know aren't going to vote then find a way to vote for them undetected. Otherwise there would be thousands or hundreds of thousands of people showing up to vote being told they already voted by mail or already voted in person. That would be evidence of a crime. If 1-2% of votes was fraudulent you should be able to find many of them through data analysis techniques. With a couple hundred million for legal challenges shouldn't Trump have been able to find lots of fraudulent registrations or stolen identities? I don't fault him for not finding the perpetrators but the whole problem is you can't show a crime has been committed.

Probably 99+% of voter fraud is people voting for a spouse or for an elderly relative with dementia. A single person double voting for a close family member they know aren't going to vote is pretty undetectable, but for the most part people are honest. So only a small percentage of people who are in position to double vote in that way would. And the double votes are likely to be evenly divided between the parties.
I would guess the break down of those votes washes out in the end. Neither political side could run massive voter fraud operations without someone talking eventually.

[TheDrake]

What yos said. Almost zero percent of murders go undetected, some of them are made to look like an accident though. We don't consider it a pressing problem that massive amounts of murder are happening in secret. Rape is trickier, because the victim often doesn't report it. Unlikely to be an issue with voting. Identity theft is spotted nearly 100% of the time.

You might not know who dumped a bunch of ballots into a collection box, as has been asserted. But you could detect it was happening. Every time somebody tries to make one of those claims they turn to smoke. Like wild accusations about truckloads of ballots, more people voting in a precinct than are registered. Those things would be detected, if they were real.

[yossarian22c]

What will you say when the company in AZ comes back and says that the totals there match up to all of the other audits and recounts done before them and that they found no fraud?  Of course we all know that is unlikely to happen since they are biased going in, have no experience with doing election audits or recounts, want to hide their process from everyone, and are actually violating standard rules of auditing votes (using blue ink pens, which can be read by the counting machines, when they should only be using red ink pens, which are not readable).

The recount potentially violates federal election laws by removing all oversite of the election materials from election officials and putting them in the hands of a partisan organization.

One issue is that ballots, voting systems and other election materials are no longer in the custody of election officials — a possible violation of federal law, which requires state and local election workers to store and safeguard federal voting records.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994246426/justice-department-shares-concerns-with-arizona-senate-audit-recount

So Republicans who cried fraud, fraud, fraud, when public officials counted ballots in public, in front of the media with lots of it live streamed to anyone who cared to observe are going to trust a private partisan company who insisted on conducting their audit in secret.

[msquared]

How else can they find fraud if they do not do it in private? With their own special process that no one else knows about?  I mean you can tell from the bamboo in the ballots that they were shipped in from China.

[cherrypoptart]

If voter fraud isn't going to make a difference then why are people going down to skid row to pay people to do it?

Did they not get the memo?

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-fraud-20181120-story.html

[NobleHunter]

Because they were paid by the signature. They're defrauding their bosses not the election.

[TheDrake]

First, this is a petition not an election. None of the so called "reforms" would even address this action. Even though it is much easier to do this, they still got caught and there were apparently only nine people involved. Petitions are overall just a matter of how many people you can pay, legitimately or illegitimately. Saturate enough parking lots and harass enough people your measure or candidate will get on the ballot. The stakes aren't nearly as high for something going wrong in that area.

I'm really confused as to the point of having a bunch of homeless people sign the petition, since they weren't using real names anyway. It suggests they were really quite concerned that they would detect similarity in their own handwriting, meaning they were concerned about getting caught with existing safeguards which are much less effective than ballots.

"The LAPD's Reina says its investigation started in spring after officers encountered long lines of people on Skid Row during off hours allegedly accepting cash, cigarettes and even snacks in exchange for bogus signatures."

AKA, widespread fraud is difficult to hide. Like allegations that truckloads of people are being bussed in to vote illegally, you'd kind of notice hundreds of people wandering around parking lots full of busses on election day.

They then gathered evidence by putting undercovers in the situation. Which is likely how one would uncover other widespread fraud. You'd plant people in "get out the vote" situations and then catch them offering cash for votes.

These people were exceedingly stupid in the way they went about this. Smart people capable of getting away with it would have no chance of actually risking up to 4 years jail time for the paltry sums offered for signature collection.

In other words, they did not get the memo.

[msquared]

The FEC wants to make the Trump Campaign's tactic of pre checked repeat donation boxes illegal.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fec-wants-congress-ban-fundraising-192812157.html

Trump once again leading the way on how to grift your supporters.

[Crunch]

YYYAAAAAAAWWNNN. How long was I out? Did I miss anything?

[msquared]

Not a thing. Trump is still spouting his big lie that the election was stolen with no evidence and Biden is still President.  The Trumpist in the GOP are having a progrom to remove anyone not loyal to Trump and will probably move to have the color of the party changed from red to orange any time now as well as having the part name changed to  POT (Party  of Trump).

[cherrypoptart]

This is interesting:

"So, basically, what happened is, as you mentioned, Arizona already did several different kinds of audits. They did audits on the machines, they did audits on ballots. Everything turned out 100% accurate."

100%. Wow. That's impressive. Maybe just a little too impressive.

https://news.yahoo.com/arizona-republicans-order-2020-election-135201008.html

[msquared]

So after 3-4 recounts and audits you do not think they would have basically the same results? Again, if the counts of each are off by a few votes, that does not show fraud.  Millions of votes and an error rate that has several places after the decimal?

Now being audited by a company with no experience and a hidden plan, run by a guy who thinks there i fraud, but has no proof of it.  Untrained workers, not following best practices.

yeah ,we can trust this count but not the 3-4 before it that were done by experts in the field.  Of course after this count is done, none of these ballots will be good for anything.

[cherrypoptart]

If the recount is off by a few votes or a few hundred votes that's to be expected. That's natural. That almost certainly happens in every election in every state. But that's not what the story said.

"So, basically, what happened is, as you mentioned, Arizona already did several different kinds of audits. They did audits on the machines, they did audits on ballots. Everything turned out 100% accurate."

An accuracy rate of 100% is unbelievably good. Perhaps they were exaggerating for effect.

[msquared]

We do not know of any one who ever exaggerated do we?  I mean the best economy every.  The most votes every, by any one.

[yossarian22c]

If the recount is off by a few votes or a few hundred votes that's to be expected. That's natural. That almost certainly happens in every election in every state. But that's not what the story said.

"So, basically, what happened is, as you mentioned, Arizona already did several different kinds of audits. They did audits on the machines, they did audits on ballots. Everything turned out 100% accurate."

An accuracy rate of 100% is unbelievably good. Perhaps they were exaggerating for effect.

Or were too lazy to type 99.999% accurate.

[Crunch]

Not a thing. Trump is still spouting his big lie that the election was stolen with no evidence and Biden is still President.  The Trumpist in the GOP are having a progrom to remove anyone not loyal to Trump and will probably move to have the color of the party changed from red to orange any time now as well as having the part name changed to  POT (Party  of Trump).

Have you considered switching to decaf? Some brands are very good now.

[msquared]

Don't drink coffe.  Not sure what this is referring to. That Trump is spouting the big lie that the election was stolen?  Just listen to him.   That the Republican Party is purging anyone who is not 100% behind Trump? See Liz Cheney and the Ohio Republican House member and what happened to Romney.  I know they are not killing them like the Soviets did, but that amount of vendetta is sure to bring a joyful tear to Trump's eye.

[Crunch]

It’s referring to your irrational response. Generally only something seen when people are over caffeinated. But, maybe you’re really freaking out. Blue anon guys are pretty out there.

[msquared]

Which part is irrational?  I mean the changing the party color to orange was sarcastic and the party name to Party of Trump was, for the moment, hyperbole, but the other things about purging members who disagree?  Are you not following the news?  That Trump is still promoting the big lie of election fraud?  Will you admit that Biden won by a legitimate vote or will you dance around like the RNC guy did when asked a direct question.

Yes or No.  Is Biden the legitimate winner of the 2020 election?

[msquared]

So no response from Crunch about a simple question.  Not a suprise. A lot of conservatives have been haveing the same problem answering that question.

Now to more voter fraud from Kansas.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thanks-kobach-trump-conservative-think-100000601.html

[cherrypoptart]

So something isn't adding up here about these voting machines.

https://news.yahoo.com/maricopa-county-voting-machines-gops-231624512.html

"Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said Thursday that the voting machines Republicans turned over to private companies as part of their audit of the 2020 election are no longer safe for use in future elections."

If this is true then why couldn't whoever had the voting machines before have done something to make them unsafe for elections? Because whoever had them before could be trusted but the people who have them now cannot? That doesn't make any sense. The whole point of this is that the people who had control of the voting machines weren't trusted by the conspiracy theorists and we were told that no it's not possible for the machines to be rigged in a way to manipulate the results but now this Democrat is saying that yes they can be rigged precisely so and there is no way to detect or fix it so the only solution is to throw out the whole shebang and get entirely new machines.

If she's telling the truth then she just made the point the voting fraud is possible crowd had been talking about all along.

I hope she's just being melodramatic for effect because if it really is impossible to find hacked code in the machines that is not good at all.

[msquared]

I think it is because the Cyber Ninja people are not certified to work on these machines.  It is like taking your under warranty car to a non certified mechanic.  He voids the warranty because he has no idea what he is doing.

She may also be saying that a partisan group, like Cyber Ninjas, may be willing to do illegal acts on these machines and then try and get them back into circulation.  I mean the founder of Cyber Ninjas says that fraud happened, and putting in his own software, unknown by the people responsible, could be one way for him to prove it.  He can swing an election to his guy and then show that the committed a felony in creating a fraudulent election. 

[cherrypoptart]

Yes, but she's saying that once they get the machines back there isn't a way to make sure they are safe to use. If that's the case then there isn't a way to make sure they are safe to use now and the people who had them for the last election didn't hack them and then undo whatever they did.

If the tech is reliable and trustworthy then it shouldn't be a big deal to run a code check or something like a virus scan and make sure they aren't tampered with in any way, shape, or form.

I'm pretty sure there is and she's just being dramatic. She's acting like the warranty people and saying they can't do anything with it now since you peeled off the little sticker. If it's really that easy to hide untraceable code or hardware in the machines then there is a bigger problem with the voting machines than we've been led to believe. I seriously doubt that though. Now maybe it's the case that recertifying them is more expensive than just getting new machines, though I doubt that too. But she's saying it can't be done.

[LetterRip]

Generally speaking with limited access to hardware it is difficult to permanently compromise that hardware.  With unlimited access you can swap chips or other sophisticated attacks.  The normal storage and custody of the hardware doesn't allow the type of access needed for sophisticated attacks.  The long term possession by an untrusted third party allows sophisticated attacks.

The audit requirements to detect such modifications are probably more than the cost of the hardware.

[TheDrake]

That other part sounds silly, you can easily wipe all the firmware, so that sounds like just being dramatic because they are pissed off.

Meanwhile... Milk those contracts!

The private firm overseeing the audit, Cyber Ninjas, said counting nearly 2.1 million ballots would take 20 days. After more than three weeks of counting, the auditors said they needed another six weeks, after counting less than half a million ballots. The audit is currently on a break, though, because the Veterans Memorial Coliseum arena where the audit has so far taken place was hosting high school graduations this week. Counting will pick up again next week and run through the end of June, according to the auditors.

[cherrypoptart]

If that's the case then the whole point of the massive voter fraud conspiracy theory stuff is that the people who have custody of the voter machines during the elections could have done something to the machines exactly like what they are saying these Cyber Ninjas could do. We aren't supposed to trust the Cyber Ninjas and that's fine but who says we can trust anybody else either?

If the machines are that easy to sabotage then they aren't as secure as what we've been led to believe and everything hinges on whether or not you trust the people who control those machines.

"It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who control the machines that count the votes."

[cherrypoptart]

Now just to be clear my belief is that when the dust settles they may find a little bit more fraud and a few irregularities but no massive voter fraud that would have been enough to change the election. The Cyber Ninjas won't make anything up either so it'll end up being a vindication for Biden winning more votes and winning the election not because of voter fraud but because of media fraud which is another story and a different issue and isn't illegal anyway.

[msquared]

Cherry

I disagree. I think Cyber Ninjas want to find something and will report that they found "traces" of things they can not explain and "could" be signs of what they were sent to find but since they could not ask actual voters to verify their vote, and were not given access to every line of code, and to every secure computer in the whole county, that is proof of a cover up.  The normal response so far from the Republicans when no evidence is found is that that is evidence of a cover up so large that no evidence can be found.

[LetterRip]

A skilled attacker can replace chips which won't be impacted by firmware updates.  Also hacked firmware such as of the SSD, HD or Internal USB can be quite challenging to detect and revert.

Cherry there is a world of difference from unfettered access without any supervision.

[TheDrake]

It's pretty far out there to think that someone is going to counterfeit silicon in such a way that the state machines inherently somehow know which candidate is which and skew things in their direction. Likewise with the storage, but even so most hardware has a firmware update that overwrites what is in place. Also if they are going to tamper with the machines, it would be to plant evidence of fraud, not corrupt a future vote.

Meanwhile Cherry asks why should we trust the election commission, which is a whole other level of conspiracy from there. Because those are duly appointed officials. Might as well ask why police should be trusted in the evidence room and equating it to letting a defense attorney wander around in there unsupervised. Are there certain checks and balances in both situations? There sure are. If someone is in the room, their presence is logged. I tried to look up the specific process, but couldn't find it. Apparently whatever that process is, was not followed by Cyber Ninjas.

[msquared]

I wonder why Cyber Ninjas did not follow accepted procedure?  Oh that's right, they have no experience auditing elections or election machines. No training, no equipment, no experience.  Just the people I would call to do this type of job.

[LetterRip]

Party affiliation is a pretty easy way that a state machine could reliably skew results - most ballots the candidates have party affiliation encoded.  You could also have it extract info based on correlation with known candidates (a list of all senators and sitting congress members would be small to encode and then you'd sample votes till you could figure out affiliation - pretty trivial statistical machine learning).

I agree the most likely tampering is planting evidence.

[TheDrake]

Party affiliation is a pretty easy way that a state machine could reliably skew results - most ballots the candidates have party affiliation encoded.  You could also have it extract info based on correlation with known candidates (a list of all senators and sitting congress members would be small to encode and then you'd sample votes till you could figure out affiliation - pretty trivial statistical machine learning).

I agree the most likely tampering is planting evidence.

There is no knowledge of database record fields there, and as soon as you changed that format with an upgrade it would be invalidated. Everything else is software, and thus able to be overwritten. There have been NSA level firmware hacks to snoop foreign storage devices, for instance. Even those would have been defeated by a firmware upgrade, and they required repeated remote access to retrieve data, and even then there was no attempt to write data. In Iran, they got their centrifuges busted by firmware or software modification but it relied on lack of detection as that hack also could have been easily corrected with a wipe. There are certain kinds of virus that can survive heavy deletion by hiding in firmware or in the master boot record that is rarely wiped because it required a very low level format of the file system itself. There are viruses that survive because companies can rarely afford to take all systems offline and wipe them simultaneously, but those challenges do not exist for voting machines that can be offline for months if necessary.

You really want to tell me that the people who designed the machine couldn't give a formula to restore the machine to factory defaults? The idea someone is going to plug in custom silicon that would also be capable of flipping votes on 300 machines, and that someone would consider it worth spending $20,000,000+ to cut masks and do a run of devices that are also indistinguishable from the real thing? That's paranoid insanity on the same level as thinking there are thousands of illegal aliens being bussed across state lines to vote.

At best, it is simply cheaper to replace the machines than to develop the procedure to examine and safety proof the existing ones.

[LetterRip]

You might read up on the topic here,

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44750/malware-that-can-survive-bios-re-flashing

Cracking open the device and using specialized equipment could potentially be used but the expense of doing so tends to rival new hardware.

I think you are misunderstanding the attack vector of how the editing and reading would be done.  Observing display buffer changes and input buffer changes and correlating those to memory changes allows you to know what variables to change prior to the database write.  These devices don't have in memory encryption.

At best, it is simply cheaper to replace the machines than to develop the procedure to examine and safety proof the existing ones.

Yes.

[TheDrake]

You might read up on the topic here,

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/44750/malware-that-can-survive-bios-re-flashing

Cracking open the device and using specialized equipment could potentially be used but the expense of doing so tends to rival new hardware.

I think you are misunderstanding the attack vector of how the editing and reading would be done.  Observing display buffer changes and input buffer changes and correlating those to memory changes allows you to know what variables to change prior to the database write.  These devices don't have in memory encryption.

At best, it is simply cheaper to replace the machines than to develop the procedure to examine and safety proof the existing ones.

Yes.

Or you could read this instead of asserting my ignorance on technical matters.

code signing

Code signing is a method of proving a file was created by a trusted source and has not been tampered with. This is achieved by creating a signature for the file: a token which can be verified but not forged.

We all use signatures in our day to day life, by scribbling our name at the bottom of our credit card receipts, contracts, and bank checks. These signatures can be verified quite easily by comparing them to previous signatures, but are hard to forge because they rely on an individual’s muscle memory.

Code signing uses cryptographic algorithms to achieve a similar goal. The resulting signatures can only be generated by people who know a given password, also known as a secret key, but can be verified as genuine by anyone.

When a signature is generated for a firmware binary, it is uniquely tied to that exact firmware. Changing the binary so much as 1 bit would produce a different signature.

With this in mind, if a device is given a signed binary and a signature and can verify both that the binary and signature are valid and that the binary was created by the correct author, then we know the binary has not been tampered with.

Now, I can't know if the company in question used code signing properly, because this has been found before:

A secure voting machine should prevent untrusted or unsigned software from being installed on it. But last year when Stauffer and colleagues examined an optical-scan machine that ES&S submitted to California for testing and certification, they discovered the system wasn’t authenticating code during installation or wasn’t doing it properly. They were able to modify legitimate ES&S election software and reinstall it on the machine unsigned. Although they conducted their test with physical access to the machines, because California machines don’t have embedded modems, Stauffer says an adversary with remote access through the modem would theoretically be able to do the same. Their rogue modification was designed to erase all election data from the machine at the close of an election. A ‘‘capable-enough adversary,’’ says Stauffer, might potentially go much further, with an update that would ‘‘make a candidate more favorable than the other.’’

The amount of effort, however, to reverse engineer the firmware sufficiently to also corrupt the actual production code in main storage is wildly prohibitive. Flash isn't going to be sufficient to hold the actual full application code. I don't think "CyberCoders" is up to the challenge, considering that they are trying to sleuth out bamboo paper.

Is it theoretically possible? Of course it is. It is also theoretically possible that thousands of fraudulent registrations are tilting the election, or that thousands of people are sneaking in and voting for other people because there's no voter ID.