It's likely nearly impossible to buy a motherboard these days that does not have modem chips built into the board. It's been that way for almost the last twenty years now.
To get around this you would have to specially design a custom board. I doubt they bothered to do that. It's a damned expensive way to build a computer when for $100 you can just use a standard mainboard off the retail shelf.
Of course, this means the machine is open to being hacked. They all are.
This is but one of the several valid reasons you should not use computers in your election process.
The boards aren't the problem (since they have no inherent connectivity) it was the active Verizon SIM card on the board which is the problem.
If it's not on paper and counted by 4 eyeballs it didn't happen in my book.
there is NSA malware that can use any set of circuits as a cellular antenna, and there are the blackbox functions of chips we are largely in the dark on, but most computer motherboards do not have overt, outright, cellular chipsets onboard. Those tellit chips are the same ones we use on some of our security systems cellular modules.
this isn't the hidden stuff, this is grossly out in the open.
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