Yes, State Voting Machines Have Modems In Them That Can Be Accessed
Some ill-informed pundits and podcasters falsely claim that voting machines do not have modems inside them and even try to ridicule anyone who claims modems are inside state voting machines.
ElectionFraud2026.Com
9/26/20264 min read
The Senate Intelligence Committee recommended in a 2019 report that officials remove or disable any wireless networking capability in their voting machines.
Multiple states — including Alabama, California, Colorado, Maryland, New York and Virginia —have banned modems.
Mueller said voters should understand how their votes are counted — but secrecy around voting machine technology and software limits accountability surrounding a fundamental democratic process.
He calls that a “dangerous situation.”
“That should set off the red lights and strobes, alarm bells sounding, you know? People, wake up!”
The Elections Commission, a bipartisan committee tasked with administering the state’s elections, says the state’s election infrastructure is secure.
It cites the Election Security Planning Report as evidence of officials’ ability to overcome a range of potential crises.
At the beginning of September, the commission published a detailed report describing how the state has prepared for the Nov. 3 election, including a “candlelight” contingency plan on how to continue without some of the technical services it normally relies on.
Building on these and other sources, Wisconsin Watch sought out local and national election experts to answer the question: How secure is election infrastructure in one of the nation’s top swing states? The answers were mixed.
Wisconsin Watch found that:
Experts believe Wisconsin’s voter registration system, WisVote, appears to be secure from tampering.
Most counties are using or plan to use newly available federal funds to help them detect hacking and malware.
Machines used to tabulate ballots from about 1 million voters in Wisconsin contain modems that, unless properly managed, could make them vulnerable to attack.
Existing post-election audits may not be able to catch altered or incorrect vote totals.
Although Wisconsin’s election technology is generally seen as secure, the threats against it remain significant.
William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, warned in recent months that bad actors may try to compromise election technology as part of a broader effort to undermine faith in the results.
“This threat might take many forms,” Evanina wrote, “such as spreading disinformation, conducting hack-and-leak operations, or possibly manipulating data in a targeted fashion to influence the elections, and involves a wider range of foreign state and non-state actors than we have seen in the past, to include ideologically motivated entities and foreign cyber criminals.”
Internet Modems in Wisconsin Voting Machines
Most counties are using or plan to use newly available federal funds to help them detect hacking and malware.
Machines used to tabulate ballots from about 1 million voters in Wisconsin contain modems that, unless properly managed, could make them vulnerable to attack.
Existing post-election audits may not be able to catch altered or incorrect vote totals.
Jim Mueller was the administrator and clerk in the town of Middleton from 1999 to 2005.
Mueller’s concerns over election security helped lead to the formation of the grassroots group, Wisconsin Election Integrity.
At least six states — Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota — use modems to transmit results in a combined 36 counties, according to a POLITICO survey.
Rhode Island uses them statewide, and Washington, D.C., uses them citywide.
Wisconsin, which the nonprofit election integrity group Verified Voting identified as using modem-equipped devices, did not respond to inquiries about whether its counties use the feature.
“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” he said. “And we knew that wasn't true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to to report their results.”
Skoglund and his team developed a tool that scoured the internet to see if the central computers that program voting machines and run the entire election process at the precinct level were online. Once they had identified such systems, they contacted the relevant election officials and also provided the information to reporter Kim Zetter, who published the findings in Vice’s Motherboard in August.
It was an assurance designed to bolster public confidence in the way America votes: Voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”
Then Acting Undersecretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security Jeanette Manfra said those words in 2017, testifying before Congress while she was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system.
So many government officials like Manfra have said the same thing over the last few years that it is commonly accepted as gospel by most Americans. Behind it is the notion that if voting systems are not online, hackers will have a harder time compromising them.
But that is an overstatement, according to a team of 10 independent cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections. While the voting machines themselves are not designed to be online, the larger voting systems in many states end up there, putting the voting process at risk.
That team of election security experts say that last summer, they discovered some systems are, in fact, online.
“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical advisor at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News.
