Starlink and the 2024 election

Starlink will appear in most conspiracy-theories

A video went viral claiming Starlink was rigging votes. It’s gone sufficiently mainstream that AP News has tried debunking it. I thought I’d write up something.

First of all, the claims are gibberish. AP calls the claims “unsubstantiated”, but it’s worse than that, they are “incoherent”. Nobody can tell what’s actually claimed. The video that sparked the conspiracy-theory spews buzzwords like “IPv6”, “Linux”, and “signals” in ways that make no sense.

Technology doesn’t work as claimed. Network traffic is encrypted on the ends, so any router (like a Starlink terminal) can’t decrypt it, eavesdrop on it, or change it. Routers can see some metadata, like the Internet addresses on either ends of the communication, but they can’t otherwise see or change the content.

All routers run some sort of operating-system, like Linux, Windows, BSD, Cisco IOS, Juniper OS, and so forth. The choice of operating system doesn’t matter, they all forward traffic the same way, and as said above, they cannot really spy on or change traffic.

What they can do is connect computers to the Internet.

I think this is the real fear. Starlink can’t rationally do anything to change the vote, but it’s an Internet router that can easily connect any computer (theoretically, even election computers) to the Internet, where hackers lurk.

This isn’t happening — but can look like it. The problem is that voters may enter a precinct to vote and note a Starlink antenna on the roof or notice a nearby STARLINK WiFi network on their phones. They’d leap to the conclusion this means the election computers are connected by Starlink.

This is silly. WiFi is everywhere. If you check your phone walking into any. voting location you’ll see a bunch of WiFi networks available. None of them mean that voting machines are connected to those WiFi networks. A nearby Starlink network doesn’t change this — they just see Starlink is more threatening.

Voting machines, those used to mark ballots, or those used to tabulate votes, are not connected live to the Internet. It’s been a constant conspiracy theory since 2020, and it really doesn’t happen, at least not in the important swing states that we are all concerned about. That’s not to say there are no threats of this happening here, it’s just that by and large it doesn’t happen. If you think it does, you need evidence, not conspiracy-theories.

But there is one type of election computer that may be connected live to the Internet the “pollbook”. This is the app (or physical paper) that they use to verify that you are at the right voting location, that you are registered to vote, and to mark off your name so that you can’t vote twice.

Some states allow you to vote at any precinct, so these specific pollbooks need to be connected to each other, so that when you vote at one location, you can’t vote at any other. Arizona is one place that allows this, and notoriously had a problem with the 2024 primary where they were down for a few hours, preventing people from voting.

These Arizona pollbooks connect securely to the Internet with VPNs, and if hacked, would still allow people to cast provisional ballots, so there’s not a lot of threat here from hackers. They can’t change votes by hacking pollbooks.

Arizona did use Starlink to connect these pollbooks in Coconino, Apache, and Navajo counties. That’s where Starlink is so great, easily connecting rural locations to the Internet.

So technically, there were some election computers that were indeed connected through Starlink to the Internet.

However, no voting machines were connected, no ballot marking machine, printer, or tabulator. Nothing that could change the outcome of the vote was connected to the Internet.

Starlink will start to feature in more and more conspiracy-theories. It’s run by an erratic billionaire and makes Internet connectivity easy anywhere on the planet.

Yes, satellite Internet has existed for 40 years. However, it had a lot of problems, not the leas of which was the requirement of a professional installer with the right tools to correctly point a dish to a “stationary” satellite out in space.

Musk’s Starlink has reinvented that. It’s not a satellite dish but a “phased array” antenna that doesn’t need to be pointed anywhere. It just needs to see a large part of the sky.

It means there are all these places world-wide that didn’t have practical Internet access which now do. This includes soldiers fighting against a Russian invasion, election e-pollbooks in rural Arizona counties, villages in the heart of Africa, and researchers living on the south pole.

It’s universal nature, making Internet access quick and easy from anywhere, means it’s going to pop up again and again in conspiracy-theories.