Trump Appointees Asked a Federal Agency to Acquire a Voting Machine and Hack It | Hacker News Reader

Trump Appointees Asked a Federal Agency to Acquire a Voting Machine and Hack It

propublica.org

29 pointssoundworlds5 comments

dfe and yepyoukno are sanewashing [1] and oversimplifying the administration's actions by ignoring the self-interested and malicious motives behind them.

Avoid getting so distracted by the penetration test angle that we overlook the part where none of the government's findings about our right to vote are supposed to be secret from the public, never mind the manufacturer of the voting machine.

If we assume for a moment that the administration's motives in this case are overwhelmingly good, at best what we're left with is NOBUS [2][3] for our voting machines. Now a moment has passed. Ask yourself why you do not attribute malicious motives to the people who want (worse than) NOBUS for our voting machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanewashing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

[3] https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/

The fact that government employees are shocked that the political appointees want to perform an industry-standard penetration test on the systems they are responsible for tells me everything I need to know.

What is the reason for the shock? I’m afraid we can only speculate.

What an absolutely insane narrative framing by propublica.

To be fair, I was with you for a minute there, but we both missed it on first reading I think...

> "The agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws"

That lack of responsible disclosure is not industry standard, afaik. That is slightly suss.

This is kind of funny.

Hate the administration or not, this kind of thing should be happening and the tone of those shocked that standards for security should be examined is ironic at least.

There must be some sort of term for the type of derangement where you witness an administration doing the absolute worst at literally every possible opportunity but every single time they do something new which is degenerate you must come out and say "What if they just really care about election integrity? This is all normal guys. Promise."

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