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Trump supporters accused of breaking into voting systems · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, April 29th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Some of Donald Trump's supporters say the 2020 election was stolen from them. This is not true, as courts and audits and even several hand recounts have found. But some Trump supporters, in search of non-existent voter fraud, are compromising voting systems along the way. A new investigation from "Reuters" uncovers eight known attempts to gain unauthorized access to voting systems in five states since the 2020 election. The attempts all involved Republican officials or activists who have pushed stolen election lies or conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines.
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  "Reuters" reporter Nathan Layne says they're driven by claims there could be data to prove voting fraud.
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  Nathan Layne: That's an unfounded belief, but they still believe that if they can get access to these machines, that they can find evidence to show that yes, indeed there was some orchestrated plot to use the machines to tilt the in election in Joe Biden's favor.
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  Layne told us about one of these incidents in Colorado involving Dallas Schroeder, the county clerk in Elbert. He's the top election official in the county.
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  Layne: My colleague found some previously unreported surveillance video, which captured him essentially kind of fiddling with cables and rifling through this equipment to try to essentially secure voting information.
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  Schroeder testified that he copied everything on the election server. The Colorado secretary of state is investigating him for possibly violating election laws and is now suing to get the data back. Schroeder said in a legal filing that he believed he had a statutory duty to preserve voting records. He declined to comment to "Reuters." Some local officials have defended him. He's now campaigning for higher office as a county commissioner.
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  There was another incident in North Carolina. In order to access a vote tabulator, which under law can only be handled by election officials, Layne says a local Republican leader threatened an elections director.
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  Layne: Basically saying, if you don't give me access to the equipment I'm gonna make sure you lose your job, I'm gonna make sure your pay is cut. It got to the point where the elections director and her staff are being escorted to their cars at night by the police.
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  The Republican official did not respond to "Reuters'" request for comment. Even though allegations of widespread voter fraud have been debunked over and over, Layne told us that the claims and campaigns are hurting the voting process.
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  Layne: For sure, all of this rhetoric, all of this talk about fraud is certainly weakening confidence generally in the election system that we have, but it's also causing great pain, discomfort, and other things for the elections officials that are trying to carry out their lawful duty.
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  As the "Reuters" investigation found, this right-wing movement suggesting our voting machines were rigged is, in part, drawing financial support from Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO. Lindell says he hasn't been personally involved in any data breaches, but he says he has spent about $30 million and hired dozens of people to try to prove fraud in the 2020 election. Layne points to Trump's ongoing false claims of fraud as a key driver of these attempts to break into voting systems.
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  Layne: Countless audits, his own administration says there's no evidence of that. And he continues to say that every chance he gets. So Trump's influence in all of this is incredibly powerful.
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  A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to "Reuters'" request for comment.
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  In April 2020, as COVID-19 was upending the world, reporter David McSwane was getting on a private jet. The plane had been chartered by a man who'd made a big promise to the U.S. government. Robert Stewart Jr. said he was gonna to deliver six million N95 masks to the Department of Veterans Affairs, the VA. This was at a time when masks were extremely scarce in the U.S., and McSwane asked if he could tag along and see how Stewart was going to get them.
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  David McSwane: As we took off from Dulles International, you know, we're just airborne, he says "Oh, I don't actually have the masks. They were bought out from under me." And I asked him "Well, why the hell are we going to Chicago [LAUGHS] to deliver these masks?" He says "Well, it's kind of a faith thing."
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  They eventually land in Chicago. Still, no masks, no clear deal. Stewart's making tons of phone calls.
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  McSwane: Basically, it turns from, you know, this faith and this energy that he had to sort of finger pointing, and I began to realize with each call that maybe this was a performance and he never had masks. And by the end of the night, I began to wonder if the whole thing was made up.
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  The masks never materialized. A year later, Stewart would plead guilty to three counts of making false statements, wire fraud, and theft of government funds. He was sentenced to one year and nine months in prison.
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  Now, that story sent McSwane down a rabbit hole to find other examples of people trying to pull off near-impossible tasks without the necessary skills or resources, all to profit off of a public health crisis. The federal government was caught flat-footed, totally unprepared in those early months of the pandemic, and this set off a chaotic and desperate search for PPE.
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  McSwane: We're so ill-prepared that the national response really becomes to throw money at anyone and everyone who claims they can get things, just like chum in the sea. If you claimed you had a line on masks you could get a contract for tens of millions of dollars, and that was our national response.
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  And as the government followed all these bad leads, it wasted money and resources.
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  McSwane: A lot of people have asked me, can you put a dollar figure, a number, on the contractors who got away or price gouged or whatever, and the answer is we can’t. I mean, this was so huge I couldn't approach it. And you can look at various federal programs and conclude that we're talking billions of dollars.
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  But McSwane says the most upsetting part is the time that was wasted, time that was especially precious in those first few months.
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  McSwane: We talk about government waste all the time. You know, forget the money, that's not the true outrage here. I mean, we wasted time when time meant body bags.
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  McSwane spent a year and a half reporting on this for "ProPublica" and ended up turning his work into a book out now called "Pandemic, Inc."
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  If you want to hear my full conversation with David McSwane, check out this weekend's episode of "Apple News In Conversation." There are so many more shocking details in his reporting, like the U.S. government sending masks to China as late as February 2020 instead of growing a domestic stockpile, and a government agency spending millions on faulty test kits. You can find the episode by searching "Apple News In Conversation" in the Apple News app or in the Podcasts app.
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  Earlier this year, security experts paying attention to North Korea's internet noticed that the country was having some serious connectivity issues. The country only has a few dozen websites, and most of them kept being knocked offline. Some assumed it must be a cyber attack launched by a foreign government, but it turned out to be the work of just one guy.
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  Andy Greenberg: A single American hacker who goes by the name Pax…
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  That's Andy Greenberg, who reported this story for "Wired." Pax declined to use his real name because he's worried about the repercussions.
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  Greenberg: …and was doing all of this, essentially from his home office, going back and forth between his computer and the office and his couch, where he was sitting and watching the "Alien" series and eating spicy corn snacks.
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  Pax says he was probably violating U.S. hacking laws, but his conscience is clear. Because as far as he's concerned, he's just getting even with what North Korea did to him, in a big hacking effort last year.
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  Greenberg: This was actually part of a larger campaign of North Korean hackers targeting Western and American security researchers to try to steal their hacking tools.
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  Pax says the hackers didn't steal any of his tools, but he was deeply unsettled that he'd been targeted. He was even more frustrated by what he felt was a lack of response from the U.S. government. He says they didn't help him assess the damage or offer tips for protecting himself in the future. The FBI told "Wired" it takes threats like this seriously and works to hold those responsible accountable.
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  But after about a year went by with no further word from the government, Pax says he eventually decided that not retaliating would be like inviting North Korea to try again.
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  Greenberg: North Korea is, despite its relatively small size as a country and it's complete almost disconnection from the internet, it's one of the most active state-sponsored hacking countries in the world. I mean, their hackers are incredibly aggressive and dangerous and have carried out some of the worst cyber attacks we've ever seen. They go after, very often, cryptocurrency targets and just try to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. They, kind of uniquely in the world, have a whole brigade of hackers whose job it is to steal money to try to fund the regime.
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  Pax says he knows his stunt was sorta performative and mostly harmless, like tearing down a government banner. But still, he says, he wanted to prove a point.
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  Greenberg: If you mess with American or Western hackers, then there will be a price to pay. We will hit you back. If that is a mere annoyance, then he's okay with that. I think he just wants to kind of throw some sand in the gears, digitally, of the North Korean regime.
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  This last story grabbed us with a picture. It shows a guy with a 1962 VW Beetle, and the weird thing is, it's plugged into a charging station. The "L.A. Times" has all these pictures of old cars that've been converted to electric: a classic Corvette, a 69 Karmann Ghia, even a "Back to the Future"-worthy DeLorean.
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  This story explains how electric conversions are a big thing now in the classic car world. Drivers want to reduce damage to the environment and they wanna spend less on gas, so many are now trying to convert their classic gas guzzlers into EVs. That is if you have the money to pay for it and if you're willing to sit on a long waiting list for a mechanic who can do it.
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  A surprising name pops up in this story: legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk. One of his favorite cars is a 64 Chevy Corvette Stingray. When he was a kid, he thought it looked like the Batmobile, except, unlike the Batmobile, his tended to break down after 20 miles. So now he's working on turning it into an electric vehicle. Oh, and if he ever changes his mind down the road, the person who runs the makeover shop says he purposely does a lot of these vintage jobs so that they can be reconverted back to combustion.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, and when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners. We'll talk with you again on Monday.
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