This does not fill me with confidence in the sturdiness of our democracy, From CBS News:

After nearly an hour and a half, Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT-University of Copenhagen, successfully cracked into a voting machine at Las Vegas' Defcon convention on Friday night CNET reports. Schürmann penetrated Advanced Voting Solutions' 2000 WinVote machine through its Wi-Fi system. Using a Windows XP exploit from 2003, he was able to remotely access the machine, CNET reports.

An hour and a half? What the hell is wrong with Professor Schurmann? Does he have a hangnail? Carpal tunnel? Of course, we are the World’s Greatest Democracy, so he probably had to stop playing Fortnite with his left hand while he cracked the voting machine with his right.

Synack, a San Francisco security platform, discovered serious flaws with the WinVote machine months ahead of this weekend's convention. The team simply plugged in a mouse and keyboard and bypassed the voting software by clicking "control-alt-delete." "It's really just a matter of plugging your USB drive in for five seconds and the thing's completely compromised at that point," Synack co-founder Jay Kaplan told CNET. "To the point where you can get remote access. It's very simple."

Joe Raedle Getty Images

“Remote access” is the latest thing of which we’re not supposed to be worried. Luckily, though, the president* is on the job. From NBC News:

But current and former officials tell NBC News that 19 months into his presidency, there is no coherent Trump administration strategy to combat foreign election interference — and no single person or agency in charge. In the statement, the White House took issue with that, saying a strategy was put in motion when Trump took office. No such strategy has been made public — or even mentioned before. After terrorists struck on 9/11, the U.S. government passed laws, boosted funding, and reorganized itself with the goal of making sure such an attack could never happen again. But no wholesale changes have taken place in the nearly two years since Russia sought to manipulate the 2016 election, cyber aggression that some lawmakers have called an act of war.

Way down in the list of causes for this criminal negligence, even deeper than the president*’s deep and abiding affection for his Russian landlords and his utter contempt for democratic norms, is the simple and obvious fact that, as a self-governing people, we simply do not give enough of a damn about our elections. The available evidence is that a lot of us don’t vote, and even fewer of us vote for offices like secretary of state or the local election commission. By and large, we have hand-waved the atrocities that led to Bush v. Gore, and we hand-waved that preposterous decision, too.

We have watched a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court put into law his long-standing animus against the voting-rights legislation for which people literally died. Around the country, we have voted in state legislators and governors who actively suppressed the franchise. And we have completely failed in making the fundamental integrity of the most basic democratic activity a serious matter of national security. Ninety minutes.

The coal mine is loud with the death screams of a thousand canaries.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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