iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I love it when people use my qualifications as a rhetorical weapon (“you can’t understand because you’re a lawyer”), but I love it even more when they’re wrong about those qualifications (I’m not a lawyer).

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The postmark situation has gotten significantly worse. Apparently mail is now routinely postmarked at sorting stations, not at local post offices as used to be the case. So it may be dated later. You can apparently still request at hand stamp at at retail window, but that requires standing on line.

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I get the impression that you aren’t reading or understanding the words in my posts, so I’m not going to bother sending any more of them to you.

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If you think I’m some sort of apologist for the administration or the postal service, I invite you to to Google me. I’m just trying to do my part to help the election be free and fair. And that requires knowing what’s actually happening, not just accepting what someone finds “obvious”.

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By all reports, the USPS has been complying with the court’s injunction and has been accepting and delivering election mail for the November general election. Any evidence of systemic destruction or refusal to deliver ballots would be a very big deal and extremely newsworthy.

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Personally, I would regard returning my ballot by mail this year to be a last resort if I had other options available. But not everyone does (especially rural voters in exclusively vote-my-mail states).

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Yeah, that was one of the reports I was thinking of. As far as I can tell, there’s been a general degradation of service, but not focused on election-mail specifically. And fortunately, by all indications they’ve been complying with the injunction on the new election mail rules.

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There’s some data suggesting that USPS service has degraded in the past few years, and that’s certainly something to keep an eye on. But these one-off anecdotes are pretty meaningless. Isolated mishaps, incompetence, and mistakes happen in any large organization or operation. Nothing is perfect.

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 15/09/2026

Maybe Elon Musk has SECRET MAGICAL POWERS, unconstrained by physics, engineering, or how elections are organized. If so, that would indeed be disturbing news. But I am aware of no evidence that he (or anyone else) actually possesses supernatural capabilities, for better or worse.

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I admire the dedication of Sen. McConnell, coming back as he did from the dead to distract from Trump's loss on mail voting in the Supreme Court this evening.

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Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

It sure would make a lot of election administrators' weekends go a bit easier if the Supreme Court ruled today, rather than next week, rejecting the government's request to put its disenfranchising USPS rules into effect for the already-begun 2026 elections.

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Two all the way, a coffee milk, and a Del's @ri.oldfolkshome.org · 11/09/2026

Seriously. I say again to people — sign up to be a poll worker so you can see how things actually work.

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 11/09/2026

For the record, while there are indeed vulnerabilities in some US election systems, susceptibility to “lasers from space” is not one of them. Musk’s alleged claims here would not constitute evidence of election fraud, but rather evidence of a serious detachment from reality on his part.

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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

"Building Safer Technology: A Field Guide to Failing Well" is here and you can get it wherever books are sold (35% discount code for you in this thread). I've spent 20 years dealing with terrible things on the Internet and I've learned a lot about how to build things which really *work*.

A pile of books with the title "Building Safer Technology: A field Guide to Failing Well" in a cardboard box

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 23/08/2026

Philip Stark on RLAs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVGO... Wareham and Gulati on investigating Puerto Rican election systems: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja3Q... Marks & Springer on de-anonymizing the secret ballot in Georgia: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8sG...

07 VV26 DAY 1 7 Philip Stark - Evidence-Based Elections and Risk-Limiting Audits

Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 23/08/2026

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A few (of many) notable highlights from the Voting VIllage: EFF's Tori Noble on the DMCA and election security research: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FNg... Josh Benaloh on End-to-End-Verifiable elections: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyND...

02 VV26 DAY 1 2 Tori Noble - What Election Security Researchers Need to Know about DMCA Section 1201

Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 23/08/2026

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02 VV26 DAY 1 2 Tori Noble - What Election Security Researchers Need to Know about DMCA Section 1201

Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 22/08/2026

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Didn't Eisenhower warn us about the Military/Ballroom Complex?

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 21/08/2026

The election deniers don't know what to make of us. They're all over the election system vulnerabilities and other issues we discover, but then get enraged when we fail to embrace their completely unsupported conclusion that some particular election was rigged.

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 16/08/2026

Videos from all the talks at the Voting Village at #DEFCON34 are now up! A YouTube playlist can be found here: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Big thanks to all our speakers for their contributions to a terrific program this year, and a special shoutout to George Balbona, our heroic videographer.

Voting Village 2026 Talks - YouTube

The talks program from the 2026 Voting Village @ DEF CON 34

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 19/08/2026

Wow, the person who came across as a bad-faith troll turned out to be a bad-faith troll. Who’d have imagined?

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 19/08/2026

Getting yelled at by election deniers. Notably, you can't generally tell whether these are people who claim 2020 was stolen from Trump or 2024 from Harris. The script is exactly the same. Claims of "overwhelming" (but unspecified) evidence, bogus statistical nonsense, logical jumps. Generic disinfo.

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 16/08/2026

Voting Village 2026 Talks - YouTube

The talks program from the 2026 Voting Village @ DEF CON 34

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 14/08/2026

ICE is apparently bringing back Corruption of Blood.

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Proper audits (with the right equipment) can tolerate flaws. Unfortunately, not all jurisdictions do these audits, or have the right equipment yet. Progress though!

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It's also worth noting that US elections are getting better and more secure precisely because we're openly discussing problems and weaknesses rather than denying any problems exist. There's been enormous progress over the last decade. There's still work to do, but elections have improved greatly.

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The four things people are yelling at me about today: - Hiding the fact that Trump stole the 2024 election - Helping Trump steal the 2024 election. - Hiding the fact that Biden stole the 2020 election - Helping Biden steal the 2020 election.

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This is confusing and nuanced, but it's the unsatisfying reality we're in. Making these systems better - something we know how to do with things like paper ballots and risk-limiting audits - is probably the only viable path forward.

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 11/08/2026

There are serious vulnerabilities in some voting systems used in some US jurisdictions, and some could be exploited to alter election outcomes by an adversary with significant resources. This is a real problem, and minimizing it doesn't serve anyone. But there's no evidence this has happened.

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Videos of this years #VotingVillage talks should be up in the next week or so, AV gods willing. A couple people asked about my my "Intro to Election Security" slides. They don't make complete sense without the talk, but for the impatient, here they are: www.mattblaze.org/papers/vv202...

mattblaze.org

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 10/08/2026

We don’t have a discord, no. But many of the issues with this particular machine were described in this talk from last year’s village. m.youtube.com/watch?v=nYL8...

m.youtube.com

14 Springall, Davis, Marks -- Simple Hacks, Daunting Recoveries vv25 d2s5

Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 03/08/2026

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Voting Village returns to #defcon34! In addition to the voting machine lab, we have some terrific talks this year. Come hear about de-anonymizing ballots in Georgia, and the inside scoop on the (unpublished) Puerto Rican election systems report, among many others. info.defcon.org/defcon34/vil...

info.defcon.org

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Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 @patigallardo.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

@hallny.bsky.social is speaking at the DEFCON Voting Village!!! «Watching Norway's Election» by Hallvard Nygard

DEF CON 34
Aug 7
12
Aug 8
14
Aug 9
16:30 PDT - 17:00
Watching Norway's Election
Hallvard Nygard
LVCC - L2 - W220 (Voting Village Talks)
Creator Talk/Panel
Voting Village
HT
1

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Matt Blaze @mattblaze.org · 03/08/2026

info.defcon.org

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(The ADA, weirdly, doesn’t generally apply to election polling places).

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Ironically, the biggest accessibility benefit when Philly switched to a BMD-based system was that the new machines were so heavy and cumbersome that they had to make sure all polling stations were wheelchair accessible, because there was no other way to bring the machines in.

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The solution for voters who need BMDs are BMDs. Just as the solution for voters who need any other assistance is to provide it as best possible.

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Again, I’m not saying that undetectable software-based fraud with a BMD system is EASY or LIKELY. And the burden should be on those making claims to support them. But it is possible. And the problem is completely avoided simply by using hand-marked ballots (and RLAs).

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The ability to refute (or confirm) claims that an election was stolen via malicious software seems self-evidently important these days. BMD-based systems deny us this.

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There are non-software-independent elections systems in use today, and the best we can do is “do the best we can”. But we can do better than that. It’s unfathomable to me why, in 2026, anyone would deploy a new system that isn’t software independent.

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The problem is that complex software (and automation generally) is useful, but also inherently untrustworthy. And this is a problem that has existed well before computers were used in elections.

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That’s simply not true. In a system with hand-marked paper ballots, you can examine the ballots and have complete confidence that no software defect affected the election. With BMD based ballots, however, the ballots are suspect because they were produced with software.

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Tina Peters, as kooky as she is, knows all this full well. She was an election official before she embarked on her life of crime. She knows there is no practical way to make major changes to election equipment or procedures 3 months before a general election. This is theatre.

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- CISA has no authority to force sates to do anything about election operations and neither, for that matter, does the rest of the executive branch. This is why Trump's elections executive orders keep being stopped in court or ignored.

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