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 on account of lies he spread about their machines following the 2020 election, amplified Behizy’s post. Trump’s former national security advisor and election conspiracist Michael Flynn quote-tweeted Behizy’s post about the hack: “Our election system is vulnerable to nefarious actors,” Flynn wrote. “We MUST get rid of the machines! Total BS that we continue using them.” Right-wing influencer Phillip Buchanan, known online as Catturd, also quote-tweeted Behizy’s post, along with a pithy statement to his millions of followers: “Imagine that!”
The clip of the successful hacking—minus key context—also spread across fringe news sites and platforms. Right-wing commentator Vigilant Fox, who runs Vigilant News, flagged the podcast clip to their 1.3 million followers on X as an “important story” that the media “hid from you today.” On TruthSocial, the news was distributed via links across fringe sites, such as “Slay News,” and shared by “Freedom Force Battalion,” a QAnon account.
“I haven’t listened to the whole interview yet, to be fair,” one poster on Truth Social wrote, while sharing the short clip and claiming that all voting machines are compromised.
Voting machines have long been a target of election conspiracies. But in 2020, with the help of GOP members of congress, right-wing sheriffs, conservative pundits, and Trump, those narratives exploded into the mainstream.
At the same time, officials in the US government and agencies charged with running and defending elections in the US called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Well-intentioned cybersecurity experts and hackers, like Hursti, are often tapped by state and federal agencies to probe election infrastructure for security vulnerability to make elections even safer. This August, like every year, hackers at DEFCON’s “Voting Village”—led by Hursti—identified some minor weaknesses in the machines. Politico reported that while it was unlikely that any of those weaknesses could disrupt the election, some experts were concerned about election conspiracy theorists weaponizing the results to advance their own narratives about the system.
For the last four years, a massive network of national and state-level election denial groups have built up, formed on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen. In recent months, these groups have kicked into gear ahead of November’s vote, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting, trying to remove thousands of names from voter rolls and even spying on drop boxes in swing states.
Throughout the podcast, Bet-David repeatedly tries to push conspiratorial claims about why voting machines are so insecure, suggesting that an unnamed “they” are purposely trying to keep the system insecure.
Hursti continuously pushes back, pointing out that computers by their very nature are vulnerable and that instead of trying to create a perfect system, officials are working to mitigate risks where possible.
“Every computer in the world can be hacked if you have access and no mitigation,” Hursti said. “When we’ve hacked machines, it is for the purpose that we can improve and if you cannot improve the system then you have to improve everything around the system, have a mitigation strategy, how you defend the system.”
Citing the 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 flipped because somebody got into” the machines.
But the Finnish hacker pushed back, dismissing the suggestion and pointing out that without proper regulations in place to ensure voting machines meet basic security standards, the idea that elections were vulnerable to cyberattacks was enough to damage democracy.
“The [worry] here is to deny the result or make a false allegation,” Hursti said. “This is very dangerous because it is feeding the distrust of the public and, in democracy, any distrust is damaging the participation and democracy is all about participation. Distrust is causing apathy. Apathy is something which is detrimental for functioning democracies.”