Behizy’s post caught the attention of some big names in the world of voting machine conspiracies. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who was named in a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting because of the lies it spread about its machines after the 2020 election, Behizy’s post amplified. Former Trump national security adviser and election plotter Michael Flynn tweeted Behizy’s post about the hack: “Our election system is vulnerable to nefarious actors,” Flynn wrote. “We MUST get rid of the machines! “It is total nonsense that we continue to use them.” Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, known online as Catturd, also tweeted Behizy’s post, along with a terse statement to his millions of followers: “Imagine that!”
Video of the successful hack (without key context) also spread across fringe news sites and platforms. Right-wing commentator Vigilant Fox, who runs Vigilant News, flagged the podcast clip to his 1.3 million followers on X as an “important story” that the media “hid from you today.” On TruthSocial, the news was distributed through links to fringe sites, such as “Slay News,” and was shared by “Freedom Force Battalion,” a QAnon account.
“To be fair, I haven’t listened to the entire interview yet,” one Truth Social user wrote, while sharing the short clip and claiming that all voting machines are compromised.
Voting machines have long been targets of election conspiracies. But in 2020, with the help of Republican members of Congress, right-wing sheriffs, conservative pundits and Trump, those narratives became popular.
At the same time, US government officials and agencies tasked with organizing and defending elections in the US called the 2020 elections “The safest in the history of the United States..”
State and federal agencies often turn to well-intentioned cybersecurity experts and hackers, like Hursti, to investigate election infrastructure for security vulnerabilities to make elections even more secure. This August, like every year, DEFCON “Voting Village” hackers, led by Hursti, identified some minor weaknesses in the machines. political reported That while it was unlikely that any of those weaknesses could disrupt the election, some experts worried that election conspiracy theorists would weaponize the results to promote their own narratives about the system.
Over the past four years, a massive network of election denial groups has been created at the national and state levels, formed with the belief that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, these groups have gone into action ahead of the November vote, pushing conspiracies about immigrant voting, trying to remove thousands of names from voter rolls and even spying on mailboxes in swing states.
Throughout the podcast, Bet-David repeatedly attempts to push conspiratorial claims about why voting machines are so insecure, suggesting that unnamed “they” are deliberately trying to keep the system insecure.
Hursti continually responds, pointing out that computers by their very nature are vulnerable and that rather than trying to create a perfect system, officials are working to mitigate risks wherever possible.
“Every computer in the world can be hacked if you have access and there are no mitigation measures,” Hursti said. “When we hack machines, it is with the purpose that we can improve and if you cannot improve the system, then you have to improve everything related to the system, have a mitigation strategy and how to defend the system.”
Citing vulnerabilities that Hursti has revealed in dozens of voting machines in recent years, Bet-David pushed the well-known conspiracy that in 2020 “the winners were changed because someone hacked” into the machines.
But the Finnish hacker responded, dismissing the suggestion and pointing out that without adequate regulations to ensure voting machines met basic security standards, the idea that elections were vulnerable to cyberattacks was enough to damage democracy.
“The (concern) here is denying the result or making a false accusation,” Hursti said. “This is very dangerous because it fuels public distrust and, in democracy, any distrust damages participation and democracy is about participation. Distrust is causing apathy. “Apathy is something harmful to the functioning of democracies.”
