State of Wednesday: THE THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS KEEPS HAPPENING

It’s a real whodunnit, eh?

Geoffrey Ingersoll

Jul 22, 2026

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THE THING THAT NEVER HAPPENS KEEPS HAPPENING

Sixteen hundred in Oregon. Fifteen hundred in California. There were more than 6,000 in Virginia. Some in Utah. Georgia and Michigan. Even Texas! A whopping 97,000 in Arizona marked as having shown “proof of citizenship” actually did no such thing. In fact, many if not most of those did the exact opposite. They marked “non-citizen” and were nevertheless still registered to vote.

The burgeoning voter roll scandal in New Jersey is very similar to an MO that’s now become standard: This isn’t happening. It’s “rare” and “isolated.” Oops, the thing that never happens actually happened quite a bit.

But don’t worry, it’s just a software bug! It’s just a few thousand!

Newly sworn in NJ Gov. Mikie Sherrill said that 6,600 non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey despite ticking “non-citizen” at the DMV because of a “software error,” and that she intended to “replace” the “vendor responsible.”

Just one small problem for Sherrill: The “vendor responsible” says Sherrill’s own Elections Commission is the responsible party.

It’s a real whodunnit, eh?

Not really. It’s the process that’s the problem.

Way back in the beforetimes of 2019 when people were probably a bit more honest than they would have been had they gotten a peek at the future, Kamala Harris said, “The best and most secure way to conduct elections? Paper ballots ... Russia can’t hack a piece of paper.”

Paper ballots indeed. Of course she wasn’t referring to in-person voting, but at the time, many of these machines were doing “electronic voting.” Kind of like going to an ATM kiosk.

But it turns out you pretty much can hack a piece of paper. In hacker circles, they’d call the way to do it a “man in the middle” attack.

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Gemini defines MIM as “a cybersecurity threat where an attacker secretly intercepts, relays, or alters communications between two parties who believe they are communicating directly with each other.”

So if Javier Vasquez is trying to be honest as he applies for a non-citizen driving license, all it takes is sticking the right people between Vasquez’s submitted form and the end point of voter registration and bango, you’ve got one more guy on the roll.

If you think about it just a little bit harder, you’ll understand that MIM is exactly why Republicans hate voting processes that put bureaucrats and activists between the voter, his or her registration and the ballot box.

While wrong on the details, Harris was inadvertently correct in the broader sense. Analogue means of voting are tremendously more difficult to hack. If 99% of voters show up in person, cast a single hard copy vote, and the ballot box has airtight chain-of-custody, there’s almost no way to steal an election.

(Compromising registration, chain-of-custody, and stuffing boxes, as Kennedy’s allies did to Nixon in Illinois, is still possible, but the barrier to entry is gigantic.)

The wiggle room on the sickly and elderly and deployed active duty servicemen would be a tight squeeze for anyone planning a MIM attack on absentees. Almost certain they’d get caught if 95% of enlisted personnel up and voted for one candidate, for example.

No, it’s not the vendor or even the state. It’s the process that’s the problem for Republicans and the advantage for Democrats.

There’s so much noise and so many moving parts to election systems that, in some states, discourage identification and traditional registration, and sources votes (or “ballots”) in streams that put several people between the voter and the box.

It’s why, in part I’m sure, Michigan Sen. (and career spook) Elissa Slotkin flat out admitted that going back to widespread analogue voting – in person, with ID, and a paper ballot – would “rig our democracy” to make it “hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election.”

The way Democrats want to run elections is the way ABC runs “American Idol.” Remember, you can vote ten times on Facebook and ten times over text!

The means of voting are so divorced from the civic act we all envision, how can you trust any of it? You really can’t.

But that’s not a “software error.” It’s a feature. One that Dems will increasingly rely on to win future elections.