By In a disturbing investigative report, Politico writes that as New Hampshire prepared to overhaul its aging voter registration database ahead of the 2024 election, officials in the Granite State opted for one of the top—and few—available choices to do the update: a small Connecticut-based IT firm just venturing into election software named WSD Digital.
That’s when they uncovered a huge problem.
As the company scrambled to meet the deadline it began to take shortcuts, including outsourcing part of the work for New Hampshire’s election system to overseas contractors, including IT specialists in Russia.
The revelation prompted the state to take a precaution that is rare among election officials: It hired a forensic firm to scour the technology for signs that hackers had hidden malware deep inside the coding supply chain.
The probe 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.
Ukraine, of course, has a very large stake in the outcome of the upcoming elections in November and New Hampshire has been slowly moving towards becoming a battleground state in 2024. In a surprise move, Kamala Harris will be visiting the state on Wednesday, a move that belies the notion that the Granite State’s four Electoral Votes are solidly in the Democratic column.
Politico notes that the news revealed how insecure our elections could be: “the supply-chain scare in New Hampshire — which has not been reported before — underscores a broader vulnerability in the U.S. election system, POLITICO found during a six-month-long investigation: There is little oversight of the supply chain that produces crucial election software, leaving financially strapped state and county offices to do the best they can with scant resources and expertise.”
In Early August, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin ordered that all votes for the 2024 presidential election cast in his state be by paper ballot.
“The Virginia model for Election Security works. This isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue, it’s an American and Virginian issue,” Youngkin said in an announcement. “Every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines. In Virginia, we don’t play games and our model for election security is working.”
Fox News explained that “one of the most notable requirements of the security protocol is the exclusive use of paper ballots with a traceable chain of custody, offering a more concrete record of votes cast than widely-used electronic voting machines.
Other aspects of the Virginia voting security protocol include the use of DMV data to verify voter identity, offline counting machines and more.
‘We use 100% paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet. We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7,'” the governor said.
Like New Hampshire, Virginia is another “Democratic State” where polling has shown a closer-than-expected race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Vice President Kamala Harris holds a narrow three-point advantage over former President Donald Trump in Virginia, leading 47% to 44% in a head-to-head match up, according to a recent Roanoke College Poll. Her lead remains similar, at 45% to 42%, when other candidates are factored in, though both margins fall within the poll’s margin of error. The Trump campaign recently got a boost when Robert. F. Kennedy announced he’d be removing his name from the ballot in the Old Dominion.
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