Show your sources… Election Edition

Term papers, research papers, papers through college… My teachers and professors always told us that we had to show our sources. Writing this makes me think about those papers from school. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school and college that I started to enjoy writing papers.

The evening of Thursday 7/16/26, Trump made a speech and presented his evidence as to why and how the federal elections in the US are not secure. On one of the documents that focused on the Venezuela’s Electronic Voting Manipulation Capabilities from 2004-2020, it’s a CIA note where not only are many were many portions of the document are redacted, the entire last page with the sources is entirely redacted.

I don’t want to get into the content of the documents… I will do that in another post.

What I want to focus on is how the information is presented and ways to validate that information. In this case words matter. Many times in his speech Trump said that our elections were rigged because foreign countries had not only access to the data but inferred through his speech that just because it’s possible and capable that it was done. So the question I was hoping that Trump would answer and provide the information for was whether election results were changed and if they were how was it done. In my opinion that wasn’t provided.

I will summarize the Trump’s claim from a paragraph from his evidence below. (Source of paragraph will be notated at the end)

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[redacted] CIA analysts assessed in 2006 that certain capabilities regarding electronic voting manipulation were technically possible and operationally feasible. Specifically, [redacted] that voting machines in Venezuela had unspecified artificial intelligence components installed, were designed to alter vote tallies, could detect when they were being audited, and could provide printed receipts without registering, recording or transmitting those votes. While CIA analysts judged these capabilities were theoretically achievable, this assessment focused on technical feasibility rather than confirmation that such features were actually implemented.

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It’s important to note here that the assessments and information presented as evidence show how it could happen yet there was no proof that it did happen. This strategy is taken often in IT Security. Companies hire firms to do exactly that, if someone was going to hack into our corporate network how could they do it? Find all of the vulnerabilities we have so we can fix it. Hopefully we have tools in place to detect if an security event were to happen and ways to audit the process.

To summarize… Words matter and how information presented and the words used to present that information matters. In this case we can conclude that just because there are vulnerabilities in the voting process doesn’t mean the previous elections are invalid or that systemic problems have occurred, it just means that it’s possible and they explained how it could happen.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/election-integrity and https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Vulnerabilities-in-Electronic-Voting-and-Ballot-Counting-Systems.zip (this is a zip file with the documents). Document name CIA Note - Venezuela Machines Intel Memo_29JUNE2026_DECLASS_REDACTED.pdf