BROADCASTS.com

Over the weekend in Las Vegas, at the annual hackers convention known as DefCon, thirty voting system computers (both voting machines and electronic-pollbooks) were made available to attendees to hack at will! And, boy howdy, did they. Every system was reportedly compromised in some fashion by the end of the weekend, several within just hours of opening DefCon's so-called "Voting Machine Hacking Village". We're joined today for some of the amazing details on what happened in Vegas by Dr. David Jefferson, longtime computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Chair of the Board at VerifiedVoting.org. Jefferson, a pioneer in the field of voting system security for some 20 years, serving as an advisor to five successive Secretaries of State in California (both Republican and Democratic), also presented at the wildly popular DefCon "Voter Village". He says he's extraordinarily pleased with the results of the weekend and a sea change he now sees when it comes to the understanding that the public, politicians and election officials now seem to be gaining regarding experts' decades-long concerns about electronic voting, tabulation and registration systems. But will the weekend's short order hacks of every voting system presented actually help the U.S. to finally move towards systems that are overseeable by the public? And what does that mean, exactly? Are new computer systems replacing the old ones enough? Are paper ballots, which voting systems experts call for, enough? Particularly given that we saw after the 2016 election that it's nearly impossible, even for a Presidential candidate, to have those ballots actually be publicly counted in order to confirm results. We hash it out with Jefferson on all of that and much more, including DefCon's plans to make the "Voting Village" a permanent fixture of its annual convention.\xa0 Also today: Trump fires his incoming White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci before he even officially begins in his new role, and the mop-up continues from last week's health care repeal disaster for Republicans in the Senate, as the White House issues new demands that the Senate vote on nothing else until they vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite a new poll finding Americans want Congress to move on, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' vow to introduce a single-payer healthcare bill in the U.S. Senate...