FLASHBACK: John Oliver SLAMS voting machines, agreeing with Trump just last year
“We can fix this, and we must fix this. Because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines.”
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“We can fix this, and we must fix this. Because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines.”
John Oliver, the host of the TV talk show "Last Week Tonight", expressed deep concerns about the integrity of the election process in November of 2019, ironically agreeing with US President Donald Trump about election integrity and voting machine vulnerabilities.
(Warning, the video is definitely NSFW.)
"Many of us don't know the first thing about how our votes get counted," Oliver said.
During the segment, Oliver showed Rachel Tobac, the CEO of a cybersecurity company. She gets herself unauthorized access to a voting machine on camera in less than two short minutes.
Oliver talked about Harry Hursti, a man who discovered "one of the most severe security flaws ever discovered in a voting system." These systems are still currently in use in Georgia, and many have gone well over a decade without receiving critical security updates. Oliver quipped, "They’d essentially been hitting the ‘remind me tomorrow’ button on a critical security update for over a decade, meaning Georgia’s election systems operate on the same level of technical proficiency as Every Dad."
"Some machines that officials insist 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 been 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."
"We can fix this, and we must fix this. Because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines," concludes Oliver.
At 18 minutes, near the end of the video, Oliver, despite being vehemently anti-Trump on his show all the time, even shows a clip of the US President supporting the use of paper ballots. "Yeah, he's right! That's it; he's just all the way completely right. We can fix this, and we must fix this. Because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines," concludes Oliver.
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