Imagine you bank at a financial institution where nobody checks whether the numbers add up, the software hasn’t been updated since 2005, and the company running your account was caught bribing auditors to keep their contract. You’d snatch your coins and run.
Now imagine that institution is American democracy.
Nathan Taylor didn’t set out to be an election watchdog. The cybersecurity professional and Army veteran was minding his business until Election Night 2024, when over 200 bomb threats—traced to Russian email domains—targeted polling locations concentrated in swing-state cities. Taylor started digging. What he found wasn’t just alarming. It was structural.
Taylor co-founded the Election Truth Alliance (ETA), a nonpartisan volunteer outfit of data scientists, cybersecurity experts, and statisticians. Using peer-reviewed methods developed to detect fraud in Russian elections, ETA applied the same forensic lens to the United States—and four of seven swing states lit up like a slot machine.
In St. Lucie County, Florida—one of two counties where U.S. intelligence confirmed Russian malware in 2016—35 of 61 precincts recorded more votes than registered voters. Investigators found voters registered to a UPS Store. To a boat marina. To a house still under construction whose owners said they voted in an adjacent county. About 25,000 active registered voters vanished from the rolls after the 2024 election with no documented explanation. That’s roughly 10%—the same percentage the malware was reportedly designed to purge.
Meanwhile, the software counting 70% of American votes has over 430 known source code vulnerabilities. New York State’s independent audit of ES&S software turned up those vulnerabilities — and Pennsylvania used the same core software in 2024. The Election Assistance Commission’s technical requirements haven’t been updated since 2005. And ES&S, the dominant vendor, has been caught making illegal undisclosed campaign contributions to officials who approved their contracts. A South Carolina election commissioner received over $19,000 in flights, hotels, and meals from ES&S since 2009. In Philadelphia, the Secretary of the Commonwealth received lobbying money paid for by ES&S — then approved the ES&S contract. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s the business model.
“Security is not synonymous with accuracy,” Taylor told us plainly. And he’s right. You can lock the vault and still steal what’s inside.
This isn’t a left or right issue, no matter how hard both parties try to make it one.
Taylor and his colleagues have met with five secretaries of state across the country. The response is almost always the same: we ran a clean election, therefore the election was clean. That’s not verification. That’s vibes. And vibes don’t hold up in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, where ballot scanners failed across all precincts, officials processed nearly double the expected ballots, and the final reported count still left a gap of over 9,000 ballots with no public explanation.
ETA is currently in litigation in Pennsylvania, pushing for a hand inspection of original paper ballots in the counties with the wildest anomalies. The ask is simple: let us look. The resistance has been anything but.
Canada hand-counts its ballots. Publicly. Officials hold each one up and call out the name. No proprietary black-box software. No cellular modems embedded in scanners. No 430 vulnerabilities. Just people, paper, and transparency.
What does the U.S. have? Wireless modems and black boxes.
Your vote is supposed to be the one thing in this country that belongs entirely to you. Not your landlord, not your employer, not a private equity firm holding a contract with your county. You. The least we should be able to do is verify it was counted. Right now, we can’t. And the people responsible for fixing that keep telling us everything is fine.
Everything is not fine.