I lost faith in the US govt to tell me the truth re: election security when Comey & @EACgov testified that it wld be really hard to hack an election bc voting machines supposedly don't connect to the internet, & an expert explained on C-Span this was BS.1/

2/ Here is one of Halderman's C-span videos. https://t.co/xVkUmdBYr7
3/ It was like a death. Never in my life would I have thought my government would lie about something like this. Or, alternatively, be this incompetent. I spent the next three years feeling like I need to try to micromanage the situation bc I didn't trust them anymore.
4/ I know some people think it's bad for me to say this because it undermines voter confidence in elections. But guess what? I started out as an ordinary voter. This is what I found out. And I was horrified. There has been no reckoning for the lies.
5/ Reality Winner, who tried to bring a dose of reality to the situation, remains in prison. I do not trust our government re: election security. I just don't. They have never told us the full truth about 2016. They don't even try to be transparent.
6/ I discovered an objectively seriously problematic situation with America's largest voting machine vendor, ES&S, and not one person in Congress has reached out about it. The EAC wouldn't even comment. It is stonewalling on documents. What kind of banana republic have we become?
7/ PS. Of course I believe Biden won. All the polls predicted it. My concern is with the constant poll-defying Republican wins. And I feel we deserve to know if there was another attempt by Russia to hack this election. And I don’t trust the government to tell us.
8/ And I don’t like that Trump’s lies have scared experts into silence about real vulnerabilities. I’m not close with many of these experts, but I know enough to know that this is happening. Its real. And it’s a problem.
9/ I’d like to have faith that my government would tell me if any election was stolen. Until #RealityWinner is released and we are told a whole lot more about 2016, I will NOT have that faith. We shouldn’t have had to hear from Bob Woodward that Russians planted malware in FL.
10/ We shouldn’t have had to hear from David Shimer that Russia was in a position to edit actual vote tallies in 2016. Why is this info still classified?! Why is #RealityWinner still in prison?!
11/ Why hasn’t @POTUS helped #RealityWinner?
12/ PPS. I shouldn't have to have included post 7 to prove I'm not a Russian shill or MAGA. The burden should be on the government to provide evidence-based elections, making my "belief" irrelevant. Sigh.

More from Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢

Good news! The New York State Board of Elections voted yesterday to REJECT certification of ES&S’s ExpressVote XL all-in-one barcode ballot marking device (BMD), a glitchy & hackable touchscreen that ES&S has hoped officials would stupidly buy in lieu of pen and paper. 1/


I’m still trying to find out @NYSBOE’s reasoning, but I know one problem was that the ExpressVote XL runs on Windows 7 and can only mark ballots in English. If the XL were a person, it would be a MAGA. 2/

The XL has other problems. It runs the barcode “paper ballot” back under the printout AFTER the voter reviews it, which experts say means it could be maliciously programmed to eff with the barcode that is the only part of the “paper ballot” counted as your vote. 3/

Unfortunately, Philadelphia did choose the ES&S ExpressVote XL all-in-one ballot marking device (BMD), ignoring expert advice. I wrote about that unfortunate decision here in 2019. 4/

Here, for @NYRBooks, I also discuss problems involving the ES&S ExpressVote XL in PA in 2019. ES&S lobbyists had secretly donated to the two decision makers who then chose this system in Philly in lieu of #HandMarkedPaperBallots (pen & paper). 5/
IMO, the #SAFEAct is better on election security than HR1 bc it wld ban most touchscreen voting machines currently available. HR1 wld allow them as a primary in person system bc vendors call the paper they spit out a “paper ballot.” Pen & paper is safer #HandMarkedPaperBallots 1/


I have not looked at other aspects of HR1. It addresses more than election security. The #SAFEAct shld be the starting point for election security reform in my opinion. 2/

HR1 requires that all voters have the option to mark their ballots by hand. But it does not specify that, for jurisdictions with in person voting, the hand marked (pen & paper) option must be available for in person voting (vs it only being an option w/ vote by mail). 3/

HR1 may still be a good start. But it does not go nearly far enough on election security. Here are my suggestions for election security. Maybe these could be addressed in a later bill, but we shld keep them on our radar. 4/ https://t.co/mNdHrvwHcN


The key section is 1502. IMO, it shld add the following. “For jurisdictions that offer in person voting, the option to mark a paper ballot by hand must be offered at the in-person polling location; giving this option only for vote by mail won’t suffice for such jurisdictions.” 5/

More from All

1. Mini Thread on Conflicts of Interest involving the authors of the Nature Toilet Paper:
https://t.co/VUYbsKGncx
Kristian G. Andersen
Andrew Rambaut
Ian Lipkin
Edward C. Holmes
Robert F. Garry

2. Thanks to @newboxer007 for forwarding the link to the research by an Australian in Taiwan (not on

3. K.Andersen didn't mention "competing interests"
Only Garry listed Zalgen Labs, which we will look at later.
In acknowledgements, Michael Farzan, Wellcome Trust, NIH, ERC & ARC are mentioned.
Author affiliations listed as usual.
Note the 328 Citations!
https://t.co/nmOeohM89Q


4. Kristian Andersen (1)
Andersen worked with USAMRIID & Fort Detrick scientists on research, with Robert Garry, Jens Kuhn & Sina Bavari among


5. Kristian Andersen (2)
Works at Scripps Research Institute, which WAS in serious financial trouble, haemorrhaging 20 million $ a year.
But just when the first virus cases were emerging, they received great news.
They issued a press release dated November 27, 2019:

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