Voting Machines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

voting among other things it's the only way to get Sean Spicer off Dancing with the Stars Samba he's danced the red wedding the Woody from Toy Story after his third divorce and this [Music] cool he is dressed and dancing there like the Chernobyl musketeer please America put this man out of everyone's misery but now actually seems like it might be a good time to talk about voting because Election Day is this Tuesday yes there are elections this chubster depending on where you live you could be voting for your governor your state legislature or even your city comptroller which is a very important position they control the city without them the city would be completely out of control but but before you vote which you absolutely should it may be worth asking how much do you trust the system that counts your balance because the truth is many of us don't know the first thing about how our votes get counted when you cast your ballot how do you know that they're getting it right that they're getting it right yeah oh well isn't that their job do you trust that your vote is being recorded as intended what do you think I think so what are you basing that on how do you know that they got it right well I'm sure they do but how do you know they're getting it right I can't be like there's no such thing as being dead sure well I think I'm quite sure I honestly get the point the interviewer is trying to make but he is coming on pretty strong there how are you so sure they got your vote right is it cuz you're a stupid child in a dumb adults body this gives you a born yesterday in a voting booth and the first thing you did was vote like a newborn idiot before you go to bed do you put a tooth out with pliers place there's still bloody tooth underneath your pillow and then lie there waiting for the Tooth Fairy to suck you off do you do that did lose sleep waiting for tooth fairy then how do you know they don't you vote right but look please his overall point there is decent we don't always know how our votes are being counted and it's not unreasonable to have some questions about our election security we now know that in 2016 Russian hackers targeted election systems in all 50 states now what they were targeting back then was voter registration data as for the voting machines themselves to hear some local officials tell it they just could not be more secure I could set one of these machines in the middle of Red Square in Moscow and the Russians couldn't hack into it well don't do that because of course they can hack into it they're Russians there are precisely three things that they are good at hacking hockey and writing books so sad they make you want to drink a potato but as you're six tonight as you see tonight leaving our voting machines in the middle of Moscow or indeed the middle of America might not be the best idea because a Senate report found that some of our voting equipment is aging and vulnerable to exploitation by a committed adversary so tonight let's talk about our voting machines and first you should know there is no single standard voting system in this country in some places are you vote by filling out a paper ballot and feeding it into a machine and others you press a button get a printout and then have that scanned into a different machine and it's still others you press a touchscreen and that's it that's the whole voting process and what that last option may seem like the best it's actually for reasons that we'll get into later the absolute worst now the reason that most of us vote on electronic machines at all has to do with the 2000 election and for those of you too young to remember that first I've got to ask you is euphoria accurate are you all corny sparkly drug addicts I'm honestly curious I don't know any teens and I suspect the people behind you thoria don't either but but second very basically the 2000 election came down to just over a thousand votes in Florida which triggered a recount which turned out to be an absolute nightmare because unfortunately many key florida precincts used punch card ballots and a major issue with punch card ballots was the fact that on some of them little bits of paper or Chad's might not have punched all the way through leading to image like this and non-stop news coverage like this Gore's hopes hang by a chair dimpled Chad's dangling Chad's hanging chads indented chats lone chats another claim chad build up a pregnant Chad the race comes down to the chats yeah it's true much like the third elimination in every season of The Bachelorette it all came down to the chats Chad G you have the eyes of a murderer and Chad are your 5/8 Oh Chad R I'm afraid you have to go now one result of that mess was that America became understandably nervous about punch card ballast and in 2002 Congress passed the help America Vote Act offering states 3.9 billion dollars to help administer federal elections and buy new voting equipment which sounds great but the venn chair of the election assistance Commission which distributed funding for the new machines realized that there was a problem immediately I was forced to send 2.3 billion dollars to the 50 states to buy equipment even though the equipment was not ready to be bought so why'd you do it we had to do it we begged Congress let us do the research before we send the money and Congress said no so the politicians knew these machines wouldn't work the politicians don't chair Washington believes that the machines can't be that bad because after all it produced them so they won the race how bad can the Machine be the machine can't be bad because it produced me that is some faulty logic right there he's like saying reverse cowgirl is the best sex position because it gave us Abraham Lincoln I mean it absolutely did that's just a fact but correlation does not equal causation and reverse cowgirl does not equal Abraham Lincoln unless you're one of these two machines look he brought the log she brought the cabin that's just a history fact that I'm not willing to argue about so States rushed to buy electronic voting machines before they were ready to be bought and there were already some red flags one machine in Iowa had 300 ballots fed into it and somehow produced four million votes and to meet the demand at least one company out sourced production of the machines and his reporters later found quality controls were sometimes close to non-existent maraming better named Enoch Island a Pilipinas Tonga guiding and voting machine v-bar says he worked on thousands of voting machines shipped to the United States with what he says was virtually no testing done on them originally a fraction of the machines underwent a so-called vibration test and what was this quality control test a shake milling machine yeah that's it they tested the machine by shaking it which is weird because the only time you should ever shake a voting machine is when you're voting for Jill Stein in which case that's actually how you do it you walk in you shake the Machine and you leave trust me trust me the sheen will totally record your vote for Jill Stein just like you and I both want it to that clip is actually from 2007 but a shocking number of machines bought back then are still in use and aging machines can be a real problem some counties have found that the glue holding the touchscreen can degrade meaning that over the years the screen can slip out of place and register votes incorrectly and the danger isn't just machines going wrong by accidents there's also the threat of someone gaining control of them for their own ends because voting machines are technically computers and computers of course are hackable and it can be far easier to control a machine than you might expect as this hacker demonstrates on a model currently used in at least 18 states all they have to do this bad actor would be to of this machine by pressing this button right here when it's off removing the card reader removing this you don't need any tools to do this unplugging this again you don't need any tools to do this turning it on all you have to do is pick this lock here with a ballpoint pen open this up press the red button and we're gonna let it boot up here just click cancel and okay and now I have full I'm Annessa under two holy that should have been a lot more difficult you want hacking into a voting machine to be at least as difficult as breaking into Fort Knox which incidentally is really hard you need to build a big giant wooden horse yet you roll it up to the gate and then you wait for all the guards to say that's a a plus horse right there let's put that inside our fort where the gold lives and then while they're distracted trying to drag the horse in you sneak in the back door and you steal the gold it takes a lot of work but trust me it makes you value the gold much much more now hackus hackus find vulnerabilities in voting machines all the time and we've not always been great at responding a finish man named Harry Hearst II once found one of the most severe security flaws ever discovered in a voting system and he alerted the company who made the machine they created a patch to fix the vulnerability which is good unfortunately while they put the patch out in 2006 we know the state of Georgia just never installed it because a recent court case found their machines had not been updated since at least 2005 they've essentially been hitting the remind me tomorrow button on a critical security update for over a decade meaning Georgia's election systems operate at the same level of technical proficiency as every dad his laptop weighs 21 pounds he has a yahoo mail address that he can't open because it only receives porn and he has a hotmail address he can't open because it only sends porn to his yahoo address his life is a beautiful mystery and look voting machine companies and election officials will tell you that hacks like that one take place in very controlled settings and then it would be difficult to do that in an actual booth without people noticing but it is not always as difficult to get some alone time with a machine as you might think professor ed Felten of Princeton performs an exercise every election day he drives around Princeton to various polling locations and he follows the prominent signs that say voting here days before the election and then he takes photographs of unattended voting machines just sitting there and that's for him to document that anybody can walk up to these voting machines and anybody can manipulate them and nobody will know so to recap I've now shown you how to hack voting machines in less than two minutes and how to find unattended voting machines it's the kind of important educational work we do here at I really hope Putin doesn't watch this show with John Oliver and to be clear you don't you don't have to actually have hands-on contact with a voting machine to Hackett's if it's connected to the Internet you can get into it from anywhere although on that front many election officials insist you have absolutely nothing to worry about our machines are not connected to the Internet and they're not gonna be connected to the Internet no state is on the Internet I find it difficult to hack something that's not on the Internet our voting systems are never connected to the Internet ok so so first let's deal with this because I I am aware that that man is a lot he's his name and this is true is Stan Stan art and he's he's not in fact exact Galifianakis character he's he's a real human and was actually the clerk for the largest county of Texas until just last year this was his official photo and there is nothing I don't like about that picture besides the fact that it simply hasn't winked at me yet oh right back at just stand at the MANET although I will say this for a guy so sure that his voting systems are not connected to the Internet watch what happens when a reporter asks a very basic follow-up for the Harris County voting machines connected to the internet never says it ever connected to a modem nope well the I say that it is a secure modem where we dial to an old-fashioned landline to the one of our four drop-off sites you literally just described the Internet it's like he said I've never eaten a banana split only for that reporter to ask then what are you eating right now Stan why it's just bananas an ice cream topped with fudge I call it a fruity Fantasia but why so some machines that officials insists don't connect to the internet actually do connect to the internet and even some machines that don't connect directly to the internet are programmed with cards that have themselves being programmed on computers that connect to the internet so your voting machine isn't connected to the internet the same way your alexa isn't recording everything you say and sending it directly to Jeff Bezos it's totally not doing that except for when it's totally sometimes doing that the truth is every voting machine can be tampered with in some way or other if I may quote an extremely upbeat axe murderer pretty much everything is hackable so so the solution isn't to make unhackable machines that's impossible instead we should be make as secure as we possibly can while also creating systems so that we know for sure when a problem has occurred which is an issue because there is good reason to believe that at least one individual might try and exploit the vulnerabilities in our current system is Russia as Robert Miller alleged attempting to influence the 2020 elections in the United States I'm going to tell you a secret yes sure we're going to do that don't tell anybody [Applause] listen to the laughter in that room Putin is killing and not just in the normal his political rivals way now the good news is there is actually a consensus on what we should do here specifically that after each election we do what's called a risk limiting audit that's where we take a small percentage of the paper ballots at random and make sure that they match what the machines recorded it's pretty simple unfortunately most places don't currently do them and some actually can't because they use the machines that we that we mentioned earlier where you vote directly on the machine and there is no paper trail at all they are called direct recording electronic voting machines or dr es and they are very bad if something goes wrong with one of them you would basically never know because you can't audit the results and things have gone wrong in one local New Jersey election a husband and wife were both running for seats on their counties Democratic Committee the d-r-e machines said that they lost but they were in the unusual position of actually knowing that that was a mistake I knew 33 of the people that voted for us and we lost 33 to 10 and I knew that that wasn't the case the results had been switched with those of their opponents we started calling people that we thought we knew voted for us because it was just you this district of this Township and we know everybody in this district it's true that woman literally went around and got signed affidavits from people saying that they had voted for her which means one of two things either the machine switched the votes or people will sign anything to avoid a face to face confrontation hi Cynthia yes sorry about that election I was really sad because I totally voted for you what's that you want me to affirm that statement under penalty of perjury well that definitely sounds better than having this conversation so fine I'll sign anything to get you off my porch Cynthia but the fact is unless you happen to personally know everyone who votes for you on a paperless d-r-e machine there is no way to verify the results it's a pretty good case against them which makes it frankly completely insane that New Jersey not only still uses them for plans to keep using them for the 2020 election and it's not just New Jersey in 2016 20 percent of voters voted on paperless DRS and an estimated 12 percent will use them in 2020 meaning 16 million Americans spread out across all these states are said to be voting on machines that pretty much everyone agrees are deeply deeply flawed and if they malfunction there could be no way of knowing which is absolutely terrifying because what we have to do here is obvious it's so obvious in fact even this guy understands it one of the things we're learning is it's always good it's old-fashioned but it's always good to have a paper backup system of voting it's called paper not highly complex computers paper and a lot of states are doing that yeah he's right that's it he's just all the way completely right it is called paper paper is not a computer it's paper and a lot of states are doing it now I'm sure everything he said around those 16 seconds was some combination of wrong racist and horny but for a brief glorious moment he was just absolutely right and probably slightly horny and look look the good news is earlier this year the House approved 600 million dollars for States to buy new machines with the requirement they not connect to the internet and provide a paper trail for mandatory audits the bad news is the Senate has got its own plan providing less than half that amount of money with none of those requirements at all which is simply ridiculous we can fix this and we must fix this because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines and we should have more faith in our system for choosing our leaders than we do in the one that inexplicably keeps Sean Spicer doing the cha-cha on national television you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 5,627,535

Rating: 4.8676715 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: svEuG_ekNT0

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BoogsterSU2]

Ban voting machines. Permanently.

Bring back paper ballots, please!

[u/Gustacho]

the only logical consequence

[u/hmaster1332]

He brought the log she brought the cabin

[u/SenorNoobnerd]

Could Stan Stanart be telling the interviewer that their voting machine is connected via a modem not necessarily be connected to the internet, but an intranet?

Could it be a mistake from John?

EDIT: Grammar

[u/chaoticcranium]

Stan Stanart is the real life Gideon Gleeful.

Actually, the whole Stan thing makes the Gravity Falls connection even more amusing.

[u/SenorNoobnerd]

LMAO!

Is that a motherfuckin' Filipino reference?!?! Pinoy Pride!!! /s

Yeah, I heard rumors in my country that politicians have their people hack the machines, so they can get the win, but that's not the only way they get to win. Some people are easily bribed for cash usually ranging from 2 - 20 USD just for the election win where they can get back what they paid the voters two-fold or maybe ten-fold if they're lucky with their corruption schemes!

[u/paranoidandromeda1]

Can anyone provide a Canadian brother with some streamable mirrors?

[u/ReZ-115]

So any chance they actually ban voting machines or make some kind of change in the 2020 election?

[u/violue]

Every segment of this show is terrifying in its own, special way.

Except the one about Chiitan.