New Hampshire has had its share of voting irregularities, both investigated (poorly, but still) and those not. But none of the local efforts to move to paper ballots, even in towns where it wouldn’t even begin to be a hardship (which is all but a few), have succeeded. People either don’t care to show up and vote, in which case, what’s it to them, or they can’t be convinced there’s a problem. There is. A problem.
In the age of mail-in ballot palooza, the State lets kids from California, Massachusetts, and Vermont (and everywhere else) vote here, and that’s not a problem? Our elections lost their integrity long ago, but before 2020, it wasn’t an artifact of the culture or part of the collective public consciousness. These days, anything that looks remotely suspicious is a problem. Not for the people in charge of voting. All they seem to care about is whether it will be “fodder for conspiracy theorists.”
Fodder!
New Hampshire engaged some software experts to update the voter registration system, and things didn’t go as well as they’d have liked. “The firm had offshored part of the work. That meant unknown coders outside the U.S. had access to the software that would determine which New Hampshirites would be welcome at the polls this November.”
[A forensic audit] unearthed some unwelcome surprises: software misconfigured to connect to servers in Russia and the use of open-source code — which is freely available online — overseen by a Russian computer engineer convicted of manslaughter, according to a person familiar with the examination and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it.
The company that conducted the scan, ReversingLabs, has also warned about those issues in a blog post and a talk at a hacking conference last year, though it did not specify the state and the vendor where the issues were found.
New Hampshire officials say the scan revealed another issue: A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the database, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with Kyiv.
No worries. Nothing illegal happened (very little is unlawful, so how could it?), and it’s all been corrected. We can rest assured that whatever unaddressed issues we had with our voting machines in 2020, and 2022 are still there and as likely as ever to create fodder for conspiracy theorists. And the voter registration database doesn’t have any Ukrainian anthems on it or backdoors to Russian servers.
Nothing to see here. Move along. All’s well. Long live the King (or something).
