On the third day of the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month, two men spoke out about pundits’ deepest concerns about attempts to access election machines after the 2020 election.

Use copies of election software

erroneously removed from multiple counties

that circulates among election deniers, they presented

for their audience

an unfounded story they had

discoveredfound

evidence of fraud and foreign interference. They also discussed their goal of securing jobs as election officials and assembling a team of computer experts to access election systems in more than 60

more

provinces to prove their theories.

“This is exactly the situation I warned about,” said election technology expert Kevin Skoglund

,

a senior technical adviser to the National Election Defense Coalition. “Having the software available allows people to make wild claims about it. It creates disinformation that we need to be aware of and contain.”

Skoglund is one of the election security experts concerned that bad actors are using the time between the 2020 and 2024 elections to study election systems and software to produce disinformation during the next presidential election, such as fake evidence of fraud or questionable results.

Described as an election integrity presentation, the event was not on the official CPAC agenda or endorsed by the organization, but took place

in a guest room

at a nearby hotel.

Some CPAC sponsors hold their own sessions, which are planned and produced by them and not CPAC.

Only a small number of people attended the event in person. No less than 2,800 people watched live online from a distance

–

correct broadcast, according to that show’s host. That broadcast

including comments from election deniers before and after the presentation.

In the weeks following the 2020 elections, and at least the first six months of 2021,

organized arranged

to access federally protected election machines and copied sensitive information and software. It is not entirely clear what they intend to do with the information.

In two cases, courts or state legislatures granted access to the election systems. Trump supporters also convinced election officials or law enforcement officials to allow them access to election machines in Mesa County, Colo.; Coffee County, Georgia; Fulton County, Pennsylvania; and several counties in Michigan. It is not known how many other election systems across the country have been opened, copied and shared.

Cyber ​​security and election experts such as Skoglund

That

a full investigation into who accessed election machines in 2020 and 2021, who paid for the effort and how those involved intended to use the information is needed to prevent abuse.

While the FBI has helped with some local investigations, it doesn’t seem like it’s conducting a national investigation to feed election experts

‘

Making sure federal law enforcement doesn’t connect the dots

Problems in other states

.

The quality of the so-called evidence presented during the CPAC presentation was comparable to what was filed in dozens of lawsuits filed by attorney Sidney Powell on behalf of Trump after the 2020 election, Skoglund said. Of the 62 suits of Powell and her allies, all but one failed. Many judges pointed to the lackluster evidence provided to justify the lawsuits as a reason to dismiss the cases.

“They think something looks strange and assume the worst,” Skoglund said of election deniers. “That’s not a credible investigation. If you find something that looks odd, you have to follow it all the way to make sure there’s no other explanation for it.”

The event held at CPAC was immediate

rejected by the far-right commentators who broadcast it. Nevertheless, Skoglund was alarmed that it was happening.

“The next one might be more powerful than this one,” he said.

The presentation was symbolic of the broader effort to perpetuate a narrative about the potential for voter fraud across the country, said Harri Hursti, a cybersecurity expert who works with state-level election officials to test vulnerabilities in voting machines.

Several people who contributed to access to election machines after the 2020 election are still meeting with state legislators, local officials and the public to try

convince persuade

to opt out of electronic voting. In

In February, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors terminated its contract with Dominion Voting Systems and

weighs the counting of votes in the future by hand.

Hursti said the event hosts contacted him ahead of time during CPAC and asked him to look at what they thought they found. Hi

said hi

told them

That

there was a simple explanation for the so-called vulnerabilities they discovered: It was code from an antivirus program used to identify common malicious bugs that attack computers, he said.

“I told them, ‘You know, you should have looked at your own computer and see if you found the same malicious code on your own computer.

,

because guess what, it’s there,” Hursti said.

One of the presenters, Joshua Merritt, acknowledged the criticism that followed the presentation. Hey told

tt

He planned to ask questions through the presentation

hoping someone would watch the event and help answer them.

“We’re just trying to do the right thing to make sure people have safe elections,” said Merritt, whose statement about potential foreign interference in the 2020 election was quoted in

four

lawsuits Powell has filed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. “And that’s been my only motivation.”

The other host, former Florida congressional candidate Jeff Buongiorno, did not respond to requests for comment from

tt

Hey Times. He said during the presentation that the information referenced came from copies, called forensic images, of production servers from three counties. He would only name one

:

Coffee Province

in Georgia

.

“We have forensic images from multiple counties,” he said

during the presentation. “We’re not going to name the provinces.”

Some came from courtroom evidence and other images that he and Merritt obtained themselves, Buongiorno said.

“Sometimes you have Good Samaritans inside who care about you,” Buongiorno said.

Merritt told The Times that his portion of the presentation was based solely on images of Mesa County’s election system, which were distributed at an August 2021 cybersymposium held by

Trump ally and

My pillow

C

called

E

managerial

and ally of Trump

Mike Lindell, and is still accessible online. At the event during CPAC, Merritt did not dispute Buongiorno’s claims

that their presentation used information from multiple counties, including Coffee County

go

.

Little is known about who took the information in Coffee County,

go,

which contained copies of every part of the county’s voting system. Skoglund, who is an expert witness in an ongoing case involving Georgia’s voting machines that exposed the county’s unauthorized access, said he was unaware that Merritt and Buongiorno had access to that system.

“They weren’t on the list of people I’d had that software up to that point, which just goes to show that it spread farther than the dozens of people who had it that I know of,” Skoglund said.