| Hey y’all. Elon Musk wants to get rid of all electronic voting machines, and election officials think that’s a bad idea. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Spending on data centers will soar to $250 billion a year, fed by demand for AI and cloud computing, KKR says
• Elon Musk must face claims in court that he fired former Twitter executives to cheat them out of severance pay.
• Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway keeps selling Apple shares, cutting its stake in the world’s most-valuable company by 60% this year. As the US presidential election fast approaches, Elon Musk keeps claiming, with scant evidence, that internet-connected voting machines are vulnerable to hacking and that the country must switch back to paper ballots for better security. Having spent much of my time lately learning what it’d actually take to hack these devices — speaking with election officials and machine makers and visiting a vendor’s factory — I can assure you Musk’s claims are quite unfounded. It’s not that election computers are advanced to a level of impenetrability; rather, what makes them so ironically safe at scale is that their functions are intentionally limited and dependent on an absurd degree of bureaucratic logistics and analog-world redundancies. Keep in mind that most voters (98%!) tomorrow will cast their votes on paper, the majority using pens and Sharpies to mark their choice on slips of paper. The precinct tabulators scanning those sheets are offline (often lacking even the hardware for Wi-Fi, Ethernet or Bluetooth) and undergo pre-election logic and accuracy testing. And all ballots are preserved for backup so authorities can confirm the digital and physical counts match. These votes are usually separately recounted at central county offices, anyway. Since throwing his weight behind Donald Trump, Musk has made voter fraud a key point of his stumping in swing states like Pennsylvania. Unfounded ideas about rigged voting systems are not new among Trump supporters, but Musk’s Tesla Inc. and SpaceX tech background makes him a uniquely effective and highly misleading messenger of these conspiracy theories. “I’m normally someone who favors technology — I’m a super 21st-century technology boy right here,” Musk said at an October campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “And I’m saying: no machines for voting.” Even if you managed magically to slip by workers and surveillance cameras at a poll site to insert some undetectable, malware-laced thumb drive into a machine to manipulate votes, you’d still have to figure out how to fake loads of corresponding physical ballots while destroying the real ones. And then, so what? You’ve only broken into one machine. You’d next have to replicate that in-person hack on thousands of additional voting machines. “It’s bull!” said Jerry Feaser, the recently retired elections director of Dauphin County, PA, where Musk has also campaigned, when I asked him about the X Corp. owner’s claims. “There would have to be so much collusion among so many different people and levels.” Nevertheless, practicalities haven’t stopped Musk from playing into voter fears. “The last thing I’d do is trust a computer program because it’s just too easy to hack,” he’s said, ignoring that system regulations and certifications are insanely rigorous and slow-moving, and that even tiny machine or software changes require months of lab evaluations and government paperwork. “If you have voting machines that are connected to the internet, and you’ve got super advanced AI that can potentially affect those machines, I think that’s very dangerous,” Musk has also claimed, urging the US to shift entirely to hand counts of only physical ballots. This last suggestion most frustrates folks involved with managing elections. Hand counts are incredibly labor-intensive and error-prone—not to mention ripe for corruption. When I asked Ben Hovland, chairman of the US Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that oversees voting systems, about Musk’s proposal, he said the process would be extremely inefficient, particularly given that each ballot has way more contests on it than just Trump versus Kamala Harris. “Even for just a medium jurisdiction, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of ballots with, let's say, 30 to 60 races on them,” Hovland explained. “There’s a reason banks don’t count all their money by hand.” Despite Musk’s claims to the contrary, he added, computer scanners can help tabulate votes far more accurately and securely than humans. And if you’re ever worried about any possible discrepancies or alleged interference, that’s when you can go in and hand-count everything.—Austin Carr Disinformation is omnipresent in the 2024 US presidential election, with online instigators escalating doubts about the integrity of the electoral process as millions of Americans cast their ballots. Conspiracy theorists and foreign actors are amplifying unverified allegations of fraud that echo Donald Trump’s claims that the results can’t be trusted. Two videos that appear to show migrants voting in the US elections were fake and created by pro-Russian groups, officials say. Apple agreed to buy software maker Pixelmator, adding a popular high-end photo-editing app to its lineup. China’s BYD sold a record half a million plug-in vehicles in a blowout month. | 
