Daniel Miller spends the bulk of this Late Night Coffee Talk on the one issue he says everyone is suddenly talking about and the TNM has been screaming about for years. With 2000 Mules screenings filling rooms across Texas and election integrity symposiums everywhere, he finds himself repeating a line on a loop: this is exactly what we told you. So he rolls the tape back to a report the TNM published in 2019 under the headline that your vote is not safe. The source was no fringe operation. It was DEFCON’s Voting Village, the white-hat hacker project launched in 2017, with findings compiled by researchers from Georgetown, the University of Chicago, and Nordic Innovation Labs. Over two and a half days the hackers compromised every single electronic voting machine in the room, using exposed external interfaces and brief physical access, in ways that could alter vote tallies, change the ballot shown to a voter, or rewrite the machine’s software.
Miller walks through the report’s own conclusion: it is beyond the current and foreseeable state of the art to build a computerized voting device that resists tampering, and the only fix is paper ballots backed by risk-limiting audits. He plays video from a Colorado demonstration his election integrity team attended, showing an investigator open a Mesa County election database with a free Microsoft tool left sitting on the machine, browse every choice on the ballot, and edit the stored numbers as easily as a spreadsheet. His point is that the TNM warned about this before the 2020 election, that the Legislature responded by weakening penalties and expanding electronic voting rather than fixing anything, and that Texas counties already have the legal option to ditch the machines and go to paper. He wants supporters taking that fight to their commissioners court, because a TEXIT referendum drawing 60 percent support is worthless if the count can be hacked.
Before the questions, Miller works the runoffs and down-ballot races. He makes the case for Raul Reyes in Senate District 24, framing it as a proxy war with Dan Patrick over the unfinished business of Pete Flores, and notes Reyes signed the Take Texas Back pledge while Flores did not. He adds honorable mentions for David Hamilton, a 2016 convention ally now running for Fort Bend ISD school board, and Ryan Hansen, running for city council in Van. His rule for everyone watching: he does his candidate shopping from the pledge signatories, and a candidate who won’t put their name on the line for the right to self-determination doesn’t get his vote.
Questions answered in this episode
- Where in the Texas Election Code does it say a delegate cannot be forced to pay to attend the Republican state convention?
- Of Alma Perez Jackson and Dr. Dana Myers, who would be the most TNM-friendly choice for the party position I am voting on as a delegate?
- In an independent Texas, would social services for the disabled be funded with the money that currently goes to Washington?
- Is the ES&S ExpressVote system solid, or can it be manipulated like the others?
- Assuming TEXIT happens, what would our voting system actually look like afterward?
- How would a Texas independence referendum avoid the scenario where Ottawa cheated Quebec out of its win?
- Is piecemeal disentanglement from the federal government, like rejecting federal education funding, a viable tactic to run in parallel with TEXIT?
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