Democrats criticize Trump’s claims of election interference

During his speech, Donald Trump also repeated his unsubstantiated claims that voting machines, used to tabulate ballots, are “vulnerable” and “easily compromised”.

Part of the declassified document dump that the White House released last night included details that Venezuela was trying to take advantage of a vulnerability in a voting system used in the country, but not in the US. As my colleague Aram Roston has reported, it’s part of a long-running conspiracy theory that Venezuela’s leadership controls electronic voting software worldwide and caused his 2020 election defeat to Joe Biden. A key part of the debunked claims is that Smartmatic, which had the contract for electronic voting machines in Los Angeles, and Dominion, which ran voting in many other parts of the country, had been created or influenced by Venezuela to fix elections. A reminder that a judge in 2023 ruled that several conservative news outlets had to pay hundred hundreds of millions in total damages in defamation claims for airing baseless accusations about these voting machine companies.

“Like every piece of technology, our voting machines are not invulnerable to attack,” Becker noted. But this is the reason why there are “systems by design that confirm and verify everything those machines do”.

Becker underscored that voting machines are not connected to the internet, they are kept under intense security and they are tested before each election.

He also noted that every voter in the US, with the exception of Louisiana, votes on paper ballots. “Those paper ballots are auditable. Every state conducts audits,” Becker said. “They check and make sure through hand audits, reading the ballots, confirming the counts by hand under transparent observation … They do that transparently in public, and then they compare it to the machine count to make sure it worked.”