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# DEFCON tests voting machines and Arizona holds hearing on voting which mentions it
You may not have heard of [DEFCON](https://www.defcon.org/), but the short version is that it's a convention of people like me, who like systems, who like security, and who like breaking things. They get together to break things. Sometimes each others' things.
They've been banging on voting machines since 2007. By the 2019 convention, they had a lot of excitement.
Oh, yes, and they _like_ documentation.
https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf
All the times the media or politicos tell you "these systems are impregnable and no one could hack them enough to change a major vote, anyway"? They're not only idiots, they're ignorant. They haven't even done a modicum of looking into the facts.
But some people are, finally, talking about it in public.
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How much of that have you seen drift across your TV screen, your news feeds, your radio if you're retro?
This is where I should straighten my tinfoil hat and get into the tinfoil HAZMAT suit, because I'm starting to sympathize with the conspiracy theorists. Surprisingly, not about their pet conspiracies – but about the question of whether anyone would actually talk about them in the media or on the Hill if they were false. This is the kind of ridiculous, conspiratorial thinking I absolutely endeavor to avoid.
I resent being nudged to think that way, just like I resent being nudged to empathize (even if I disagree with) anti-vaxers. I'm coming to sympathize with a lot of people I never wanted to sympathize with because a lot of other people are engaging in behavior simply to stupid for most people to reject as intentionally coordinated. I recognize that they are largely the product of emergent systems within populations with similar education and family backgrounds, who just happen to have all congregated to the same types of jobs, which just happened to be large media outlets, entertainment creators, and journalism.
(Put like that, it starts sounding like conspiracy theory again because of the violations of [Bayes' theorem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/), but once you allow for the effect of survivor bias, that is those with a different ideological inclination discovered that there was a strong ideological homogeny that tended to exclude outsiders and used political belief as one of their signaling mechanisms, it's a lot easier to accept as emergent rather than intended.)
Regardless, you don't have to remain ignorant; you can be educated. You can learn. You can come to a certain level of awareness about how systems work, and in specific about how these voting systems work. I strongly suggest you do.
The next month or so is going to be very interesting for people who do not understand what people are talking about. You have the opportunity to understand.