Well, folks, it finally happened. The hammer dropped, landing square on the rotten skull of our electoral system. In a Cabinet meeting that had jaws hitting the floor faster than a lead balloon, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unloaded a truth bomb that’s been simmering in American’s guts for years.
Those damn electronic voting machines? They’re rigged, tampered with, compromised to hell and back.
And here I am, five years deep into scribbling this same warning on every napkin, blog, and barstool I could find, getting canceled more times than a thrice-divorced reality TV star. Yet now, finally, someone with a badge and a backbone is saying it loud enough for the suits in D.C. to choke on their overpriced lattes.
Gabbard laid it out plain as day. Her investigation into election interference—part of a broader sweep of the politicized intelligence cesspool—has turned up hard evidence. These machines, the supposed guardians of our sacred vote, have been wide open to hackers like a screen door on a submarine.
“We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to exploitation to manipulate the results of the votes being cast,” she said, her words cutting through the room like a .45 slug.
She’s pushing for paper ballots nationwide, a move so obvious you’d think it was in the Constitution itself. But no, we’ve been stuck with these digital slot machines, praying they don’t rob us blind.
And don’t think this is some fresh revelation pulled out of a hat. Last year, the sharpest hackers on the planet descended on Las Vegas for DEF CON’s Voting Village, a three-day geekfest where they poked and prodded the machines slated for November’s showdown. What’d they find? A laundry list of holes so gaping you could drive a semi through them.
Harri Hursti, one of the brains behind the operation, was spitting nails over it. “There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening,” he told Politico, sounding like a man shouting into the void for years.
Scott Algeier, another tech wrangler, chimed in with the grim reality: fixing this mess ain’t a quick patch job. It’s not like Microsoft pushing an update to your grandma’s laptop.
It’s a slog, a bureaucratic nightmare, and the clock’s ticking louder than a time bomb in a spaghetti western. Back in 2017, DEF CON hackers cracked into voting machines faster than a kid busting open a piñata—90 minutes flat, one guy voting remotely like it was a damn video game.
Two years later, in 2019, NBC’s Jacob Ward stood slack-jawed in Vegas as the same crew showed off how easy it is to turn these systems into a hacker’s playground. And then there’s J. Halderman, the University of Michigan professor who took it to a Georgia courtroom in 2023, proving Dominion Voting Systems were so flimsy he could hack one with a pen.
His report? Votes altered, malware spreading like wildfire from county hubs to every machine in the field, a full-scale attack without even breaking a sweat.
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, had the gall to shrug and say he wouldn’t fix it before 2024. That’s correct–knowing the system’s a sitting duck, he kicked the can down the road like it’s someone else’s problem.
Meanwhile, Americans have been hollering about this for half a decade, piling up firsthand accounts thicker than a phone book. But what’s the response? Republicans twiddle their thumbs, Democrats smirk, and the rest of us keep feeding our votes into machines that might as well be running on Russian roulette.
Gabbard’s got the guts to call it what it is–a betrayal of every flag-waving, tax-paying patriot who believes their voice matters. She’s got “the best” on the case, and election integrity’s at the top.
About damn time.
They sold us a bill of goods—a high-tech democracy that’s nothing but a house of cards waiting for the next breeze. Paper ballots? Hell yes. Let’s ditch the gizmos and return to something you can hold, count, and trust.
Because if we don’t–we’re not just losing elections—we’re losing the whole damn country.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
Leave a comment