This is true. You can hack embedded systems with read only storage because you can just get into their RAM and you can undo any bits you might have flipped or it can even happen naturally as part of the ongoing churn and no one retains RAM records nor are likely to retain full logs of network traffic, interface IO, etc. Logs often can be deleted or backtracked as well. You can hack without leaving a full record.
What you might be able to do is find the discrepancy later running some other tally system or something but some kinds of fraud are really hard to pick up even with things like a recount. Anti-fraud is difficult and the election officials or workers have made it harder in a lot of places. To the point the onus is now on them to prove integrity. Where they have failed to maintain even the basic standard they've voided the process.
What people don't understand about computer systems is that they're just like slabs of blackboard. If you get into one you can usually just rub out and write anything on the board you like and when you leave you can put it all back how it was.
You really need specialised hardware for heavy auditing and there's not really much of that out there on the market. Sometimes you have the old physical measures like seals on the machine that basically leave forensics if they're tampered with and opened.
It's much the same as someone can have ten people each at a table counting ballots and you can collect their results. Then when you report it to the next person completely make it up. Extremely easy to do and if you don't have extra protections at each step of the way meaning you can trust or verify the pipeline, failing that have a very small window of where to look for fraud then the whole thing is a bust. Some of these glitches appear to be where they tried to do just that and got caught checking against results further back in the pipeline, etc.
This is true. You can hack embedded systems with read only storage because you can just get into their RAM and you can undo any bits you might have flipped or it can even happen naturally as part of the ongoing churn and no one retains RAM records nor are likely to retain full logs of network traffic, interface IO, etc. Logs often can be deleted or backtracked as well. You can hack without leaving a full record.
What you might be able to do is find the discrepancy later running some other tally system or something but some kinds of fraud are really hard to pick up even with things like a recount. Anti-fraud is difficult and the election officials or workers have made it harder in a lot of places. To the point the onus is now on them to prove integrity. Where they have failed to maintain even the basic standard they've voided the process.
What people don't understand about computer systems is that they're just like slabs of blackboard. If you get into one you can usually just rub out and write anything on the board you like and when you leave you can put it all back how it was.
You really need specialised hardware for heavy auditing and there's not really much of that out there on the market. Sometimes you have the old physical measures like seals on the machine that basically leave forensics if they're tampered with and opened.
It's much the same as someone can have ten people each at a table counting ballots and you can collect their results. Then when you report it to the next person completely make it up. Extremely easy to do and if you don't have extra protections at each step of the way meaning you can trust or verify the pipeline, failing that have a very small window of where to look for fraud then the whole thing is a bust. Some of these glitches appear to be where they tried to do just that and got caught checking against results further back in the pipeline, etc.