A short video clip of a Finnish ethical hacker using a USB stick to hack an election voting machine is being hyped by right-wing figures as proof that the US presidential election could be stolen.
But the machine in question has been discontinued, and has not been used in US elections for a decade.
The video clip, which has been shared by key figures who have pushed former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, was taken from an episode of the PBD Podcast first broadcast on YouTube last week. The show is hosted by Patrick Bet-David, a conservative commentator known for sharing conspiracy theories to his millions of followers.
The episode was released with the tagline “Never Trust, Always Verify,” and featured Harri Hursti, a Finnish ethical hacker who has spent years trying to highlight the vulnerabilities in voting machines.
“My confidence in the US elections is actually high,” said Hursti during the podcast. “Right now we have to improve the systems but we already know how to get elections done right with handmarked paper ballots. Since my colleagues and I started to expose the problems, more and more of [the] United States have transitioned to have handmarked paper ballots.”
The machine that Hursti hacked was an old WINVote machine, made by now-defunct company Acting Voting Solutions. That model was dubbed “America’s Worst Voting Machine” on account of its many flaws and has since been decommissioned. On the show, Hursti talks about the fact that the machine is an old model, and explains that it’s out of commission in part due to the work of hackers exposing its vulnerabilities.
While the podcast on YouTube has been viewed less than 250,000 times, the out-of-context clips of the machine hacking have been seen millions of times across social media platforms. On right-wing social media accounts, a short five-minute clip is being shared that shows Hursti using a USB stick to quickly hack the voting machine that he brought into the studio for the show. The key fact that it’s an old machine was mostly omitted from social posts promoting the interview, and as a result has been used by election conspiracists to further undermine confidence in the democratic process. One clip shared by PBD on X was accompanied by the text “‘Took Me 38 Seconds’—Hacker Reveals The Inside Secrets To A Hacking An Electronic Voting Machine,” and was amplified by Infowars’ Alex Jones. Hursti did not respond to a request for comment about how his appearance on the PBD Podcast was being shared.
“BREAKING: Someone just hacked a voting machine within seconds live on PBD's podcast,” George Behizy, a right-wing commentator, wrote on X when sharing the clip, garnering nearly 5 million views. “He only used a preprogrammed USB stick that gave him total access to do whatever he wanted, including flipping or creating votes out of thin air.”
“I pray for the day when we will finally ditch these machines and start handcounting all our votes like a serious country,” Behizy added.
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 adviser and election conspiracist Michael Flynn reposted 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 reposted 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 Truth Social, 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 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 past 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 his podcast episode, 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.”
