Electronic voting systems lack the transparency needed to promote public trust in election outcomes (US)

Together, illusory contracts, FOIA obstruction, and denials of access create a structural environment in which grave technical weaknesses can persist indefinitely without detection or remediation.

• Mesa County’s case demonstrates that unauthorized software (SSMS), global SQL exposure, disabled logging, and mass deletion of audit trails can coexist with EAC/VSTL “certification” and state assurances precisely because the public and independent experts are blocked from seeing the full system state and history.
• CISA’s data confirm that unpatched, exposed, and poorly configured systems are common across the subsector, meaning that Mesa County is almost certainly not an outlier but one of the few instances where a clerk preserved images before a vendor state process wiped logs and thus made the failures visible.

In this environment, the EAC’s security analysis is compromised not only by technical gaps but by an information regime designed to prevent effective external challenge, converting what should be verifiable critical infrastructure security into an untestable set of assurances.