LastWeekTonight
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2020–2023
19:22 · 6.5M views · Nov 4, 2019
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.
Cited in election security threads as a watchable overview of voting machine problems.
4 comments from Hacker News
We don't know in the sense that we can't know anything for sure that is not the fruit of a controlled experience but we are very confident in the fact that it was all about a rich childish prick who cannot accept defeat or being denied something he wants and making sure to fleece his supporters one last time. There was no evidence of any real fraud. If there's no evidence it's either a conspiracy to hide it, or that there was no such thing. Thing is, conspiracies are hard to pull off and we end up knowing about them (and nobody really cares and we forget about them, they're called "scandals") I do find myself agreeing on voting machines though.The Last Week Tonight on voting machines was quite something to watch: this video
Voting should never , ever be electronic... If you wanted to sway an election with electronic voting you would just have to hit a few points versus going through the hassle of voting in person... Or even voting by mail. Plus, the problem is lazy, stupid humans. You could have the most secure system on the planet, but if the password is password then it's worthless. Social engineering is a HUGE thing. Look at defcon videos where they "hack" via pretending to be someone in the company and make a phone call. It happens so fast(minutes). Also, there's a video on electronic voting , it might be a vice video or jon Oliver... districts left voting machines easily accessible, not under lock and key, no cameras, nothing... this video America should do what Germany does with voting make the ballots easy to read/use, none of this stupid chad shit. There are big circles on our ballots to mark the vote, it's simple/clear. The xkcd comic sums it up perfectly too. [LINK]
"Overthrow the United States government" is a very rich interpretation. Anyways I'd say there's very little reason other than blind faith to trust any election result that uses voting machines. Here's a John Oliver clip featuring: - Hitting "remind me later" on critical Windows security updates for over a decade - Administrators not believing the voting machines are connected to the internet, just connected to a "secure modem" - Mappings of candidates vote counts being reversed, so candidate A gets all of candidate B's votes and vice versa. - Machines being left unattended and having easy override procedures that allow anyone knowing the procedure immediate admin access this video
Not exactly an article, but John Oliver's concerns over the security of voting machines in the US (November, 2019): this video Personally I had not seen anything from him stating he believed the security holes were fixed on a broad scale, or on any scale. But his recent video in November 2020 suggests he no longer had any substantial concerns regarding voting machine security: [LINK]