Who owns the voting machines?

[Dawn Meredith]

I consider one of the dogs that did not bark on this issue was the lack of Democratic opposition to the voting machine scandal. Opposition did not exist from the top Democratic leadership. The second non-barking dog was Sen. Kerry not contesting the 2004 election despite serious voting irregularities in one county in Ohio -- a swing county. Kerry 'graciously' accepted defeat without a word of protest. The dog that was going to bark was Mike Connell, the Republican operative who set up the intermediate server system. I did bark once as his plane was going to splatter on the ground just before he was to testify as to his role: "Fuck."

The Democratic leadership had been told, IMO, to keep their yappers shut.

Yes this is true but Clint Curtis, the inventor of the flip -the- vote software program is alive and well and did testify before a very small group, in Ohio. Of course the media made no mention and so it went. The beat goes on.

Voter fraud is will continue.

Dawn

[Lauren Johnson]

President Barack Obama may have voted for Mitt Romney yesterday when he cast his Early Vote at the Martin Luther King Community Center in Chicago's 4th Ward. Nobody knows for sure. Even him.

He cast his vote on a 100% unverifiable touch-screen e-voting system made by Sequoia Voting Systems (which is now owned by a Canadian firm named Dominion Voting.) It is scientifically impossible to ever know if his vote was recorded accurately, as per his itent, or not on that type of voting system.

"I can't tell you who I voted for," the President joked, as noted by our colleague Mark Crispin Miller in a short blog item today wryly headlined "Obama votes for Romney". The President's joke may not have been nearly as funny as he had intended it.

We confirmed with the Chicago Board of Elections that Early Voters in the Windy City must do so on the oft-failed, incredibly-vulnerable, and easily-hacked (see below for details) Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen voting system which is still used =All+Types&vendor[]=All+Vendors&model[]=AVC+Edge&vvpat=all&submit=Search&rowspp=20000&topicText=&stateText=]according to VerifiedVoting.org's database for Early, Disabled-Accessible or Standard polling place voting in some 234 jurisdictions across all or part of some 13 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

On Election Day, the Board's Communication Director told The BRAD BLOG, voters are allowed to vote on their choice of either paper ballots (also tallied by Sequoia's incredibly faulty computer tabulators --- the same ones which announced losing candidates as "winners" in 3 different elections in Palm Beach County, FL earlier this year) or Sequoia's 100% unverifiable AVC Edge touch-screens.

The Intellectual Property of those Sequoia systems is still a proprietary trade secret owned by a Venezuelan firm named Smartmatic, which has been tied to the country's long-time President Hugo Chavez. That point was lied about by Sequoia's then CEO Jack Blaine when he was asked directly about it by a Chicago Alderman some years ago, as The BRAD BLOG detailed exclusively back in 2008.

Sequoia has since been purchased by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting, which also subsequently lied about the company's Intellectual Property being owned by the Chavez-tied company when they announced their takeover of Sequoia in 2010. Dominion confirmed as much when we called them on it after their announcement. And, yes, we are still the only ones to have reported that as well.

A few other quick points of note which should deeply concern every voter in the nation --- of any party, or none at all --- about the 100% unverifiable Sequoia touch-screen voting systems that the President foolishly entrusted yesterday to accurately record his vote...

• That's the same 100% unverifiable voting system that flipped Oprah Winfrey's vote in Chicago in 2008 before her very eyes.
  

• That's the same 100% unverifiable voting system which has a "Yellow Button" on the back which, if pressed in a specific sequence, will go into Administrative Mode and then, as an election official explained to us when The BRAD BLOG first reported this in 2006: "You can then vote as many times as you want. You won't ever have to stop until someone physically restrains you from voting."
  

• That's the same 100% unverifiable voting system that the Computer Security Group at the University of California Santa Barbara showed, on video tape in 2008, how a single person with simple insider access and a USB thumb drive could hack every voting system in the county at once, in about 10 seconds, such that even a 100% hand-count of the systems' "Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails" (which are never actually counted after an election, results are based on the internal numbers recorded separately) would be unlikely to reveal that, in fact, the entire system had been hacked. As the video shows, UCSB found they could easily insert "virus-like software that can spread across the voting system, modifying the firmware of the voting machines. The modified firmware is able to steal votes even in the presence of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT)."
  

• That's the same 100% unverifiable system that was decertified by the Secretary of State of California in 2007 [PDF] after a study by world class scientists and computer security experts (including the UCSB group) commissioned by the state, found that, among a host of "multiple vulnerabilities" on the systems, the expert reviewers "demonstrated that the physical and technology security mechanisms...were inadequate to ensure accuracy of integrity of the elections results" ... "contain serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities, which attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes" ... including "significant security weaknesses...the nature of which raise serious questions as to whether Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections" ... "lack reliable measures to detect or prevent tampering" ... "lacks effective safeguards against corrupted or malicious data injected into removable media...with potentially serious consequences including alteration of recorded votes [and] adding false results...when the malicious data is loaded for voting counting" ... that the "cryptography used to protect the integrity of precinct results can be easily circumvented" and that the reviewers "were able to bypass Sequoia voting system elections management system controls to compromise the server host, despite vendor assurances to the contrary" and "were able to create a working exploit on the Sequoia Edge that shifted votes from one candidate to another and was not detectable on the voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT)."
  

• That's the same 100% unverifiable voting systems that is still used, despite all of the scientifically verified findings detailed above, across the entire state of Nevada, which, again this year during Early Voting, has already resulted in reports of votes-flipping (in favor of Obama, in this case), just as it did both before the 2008 election and, more recently, in the contentious 2010 U.S. Senate race between Sen. Harry Reid and Sharron Angle. At the time, before the 2010 election, we detailed the justifiable concerns of both Republicans and Democrats about those very same NV machines in "Hacking Harry Reid (Or, Sharron's Angle)".
  

• Similarly 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems made by other companies will once again be used to record the votes, accurately or otherwise, nobody can ever know, form some 30 million voters, or 1/3 of the U.S. electorate.
  

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9667

[Lauren Johnson]

I consider one of the dogs that did not bark on this issue was the lack of Democratic opposition to the voting machine scandal. Opposition did not exist from the top Democratic leadership. The second non-barking dog was Sen. Kerry not contesting the 2004 election despite serious voting irregularities in one county in Ohio -- a swing county. Kerry 'graciously' accepted defeat without a word of protest. The dog that was going to bark was Mike Connell, the Republican operative who set up the intermediate server system. I did bark once as his plane was going to splatter on the ground just before he was to testify as to his role: "Fuck."

The Democratic leadership had been told, IMO, to keep their yappers shut.

Yes this is true but Clint Curtis, the inventor of the flip -the- vote software program is alive and well and did testify before a very small group, in Ohio. Of course the media made no mention and so it went. The beat goes on.

Voter fraud is will continue.

Dawn

The Clint Curtis Story

[Peter Lemkin]

A Hostile Takeover of our Country -- Treasonous, Noxious, Thieving, Tyrannical
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/29/2012

American democracy is under assault.

In one super-PAC alone, Karl Rove and the Enron grifter Ed Gillespie, have assembled $200 million from big polluters and Wall Street moguls to buy the 2012 election.

Two of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, pledged $130 million to elect candidates who favor unrestrained corporate profiteering.

The senators and congressmen they fund and elect are not representing the United States -- they are representing Koch and its oil industry cronies, Big Pharma, and the Wall Street banksters currently mounting a hostile takeover of our government.

I have no problem characterizing these corporate-centric super-PACs as treasonous. We are now in a free fall toward old-fashioned oligarchy; noxious, thieving and tyrannical.

The most corporate-friendly Supreme Court since the Gilded Age had declared in its notorious Citizens United decision that corporations are people and that money is speech. Those who have the most money now have the loudest voices in our democracy while poor Americans are mute.

And the money is talking; in 97 percent of federal elections over the past two decades, the best-funded candidates were victorious.

America, the world's proud template for democracy and a robust middle class, is now listing toward oligarchy and corporate kleptocracy.

America today is looking more and more like a colonial economy, with a system increasingly tilted toward enriching the wealthy 1 percent and serving the mercantile needs of multinational corporations with little allegiance to our country.

These radical forces already dominate the national press, with Fox News and talk radio snugly in the pocket of the corporate Right.

This is the first time in American history that corporate and media interests have been so clearly and so perilously aligned.

With the media in their hands, and unlimited money, the final strategy of Rove, Koch, the Chamber of Commerce, and others of that ilk is to permanently cripple representative democracy by stopping Americans from voting.

A boatload of new Jim Crow laws target Democrats by erecting impediments that deter poor and minority communities, senior citizens, and students from exercising their franchise.

Voter suppression is a crime.

In Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, Greg Palast details each of these devious scams for disenfranchising vulnerable voters ... but also, crucially, Palast here follows the money that powers the machinery of democracy's destruction.

This is not a partisan issue. Clearly the GOP agenda is to suppress votes, as Karl Rove has repeatedly and unashamedly signaled. But Billionaires & Ballot Bandits exposes the vote-count blindness, biases, venality, and ballot gaming by Democrats as well. I don't believe there are Republican children or Democratic children.

Every American citizen ought to have the right to vote and everybody ought to have the right to clean air and clean water, to integrity and transparency in the marketplace, and to a functioning democracy.

[Lauren Johnson]

According to statistical analysis, Romney is the Republican nominee because of electronic voter fraud. See how it was done in this article by Michael Collins.

Part I of this series suggested that there may well have been massive vote flipping for candidate Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries (Rigged Elections for Romney (10/22/12) The article and the initial research analysis were received broadly. In addition, highly motivated citizens across the country and a team of high school students contacted the authors for help replicating the research in their states. The researchers, Francois et al., point out that this can be done with their open source techniques.

The basic argument is straightforward. If you look at precinct level voting data arranged from the smallest to the largest precincts, you will see Romney's gains increasing substantially as the cumulative vote increases. For example, Ohio and Wisconsin show this clearly as do eleven other states presented here. This extraordinary vote gain from smallest to largest precincts is so out of line, that the probability that this would happen by chance alone is often less than 1 out of a number represented by 1 preceded by 100 zeros and a decimal point, a value beneath the statistical package's lower limits. As a result, the researchers termed the suspected vote flipping for Romney the "amazing anomaly." (The Amazing Statistical Anomaly)

The research team's observation of Romney gains based on precinct size is not unique. The anomaly was raised previously concerning the Republican presidential primaries by a commenter on a political discussion forum.
Richard Charnin, posting as TruthIsAll, first noted the pattern with an analysis of the 2005 special election for a vacated seat for Ohio's 2nd district, in the House of Representatives. The candidates were the liberal-populist Democrat Paul Hackett versus a right-wing Republican, Jean Schmidt. Charnin noticed that Schmidt's votes and percentages increased substantially from the smallest to largest precincts in that district. This was a patently absurd pattern of vote accumulation since the liberal Hackett wins were in highly conservative counties that rarely voted for any Democrat. (See Precincts with the most votes favored Schmidt at nearly 100%)

Vote flipping is a form of election fraud that occurs "when votes are changed [without the voter's knowledge or consent] from one candidate to another or several others during electronic voting and vote tabulation." County election officials conduct computerized vote tabulation as precincts submit their voting results, but cannot detect the fraud because only the total number of votes is checked and vote flipping does not affect the total votes. The activity is suspected in many of the critical Republican primaries in 2012.

In each case, Mitt Romney was the beneficiary. For example, without vote flipping, Romney would have lost the Wisconsin, and Ohio, and Illinois primaries as well as primaries in other states. A comprehensive review will appear in Part III of this series.

Critics of the analysis presented in the first article claim that there is a perfectly logical expectation: that Romney would be more popular in suburbs. Hence the votes increase as precinct size increases, indicating a move to supposedly Romney favorable urban areas. Part I of this series mentioned that the research group anticipated that criticism and had factored out urban density from the analysis. The article linked to a fairly complex research analysis from the team. Here is a much simpler explanation, via example.

Mitt Romney was a candidate in the 2008 Maryland Republican primary. The race shows no statistical anomalies in vote accumulation from smallest to largest precincts for Romney.



In particular, you can see that Romney's flat lined in the 2008 Maryland primary. There is no indication that precinct size played any role in his accumulation of votes. The demographic criticism fails on the basis of extensive statistical analysis presented by the research team and linked in the first article illustrated by the graphic representation above.

What is the Likely Explanation for the Amazing Anomaly?
Which step in the vote counting process best explains suspected vote flipping?

The researchers, Francois et al., maintain that the likely culprits are central tabulators used by county election departments. Typically, election precincts submit their individual results to a county-run central tabulator. The central tabulator combines the precinct totals for a county total for every candidate on the ballot. That information is then transmitted to state election officials. The candidate vote count produced by the central tabulators is the critical element in the election process.

The central tabulators are computing devices owned or serviced by private companies such as Dominion, ES&S, and Hart Intercivic. The operational details and software engineering are almost always the exclusive knowledge and intellectual property of the private companies. As a result, public officials and citizens lack the type of access necessary to monitor the vote process.

In addition the intermediate data between the precinct machines and the central tabulators is stored in a proprietary obfuscated binary format unavailable to even the county registrar of voters. That represents a loss of the "electronic chain of custody" of the votes.

Their evidence from Francois et al. is straightforward and powerful.

The researchers asked two questions: Did a county vote distribution violate the laws of probability in terms of increased vote totals for one or more candidates based on precinct size (an amazing anomaly)? And was the county using a central tabulator or not? The answer the second question moves us in the direction of isolating a locus for the process.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has a number of counties that do not use central tabulators. One of those counties, Outagamie, is the sixth largest county in the state.

Tabulator versus No-Tabulator Counties in Wisconsin Milwaukee Compared to Outagamie
The entire state of Wisconsin displayed the amazing anomaly of Romney gains as precinct size increased. Central tabulator counties make up the vast majority of votes and voting precincts in the state. This graph below, from Part I, displays that phenomenon. It is worth reviewing briefly. The slope of Romney's line is an amazing anomaly. As you can see with the red oval, the anomaly produces a trend that leads to victory for Romney. Without the amazing anomaly, Romney would have lost Wisconsin by 53,991 votes: Romney 34.29%, Santorum 41.14%.

The graphs below show candidate vote accumulations from the smallest to largest precincts in the county. The graphic representation of the vote accumulation in Outagamie (left) is well within the realm of statistical probability. The graph of Milwaukee County, below right, shows the amazing anomaly for Romney, as seen above, for the entire state. These two graphs represent the same election, same day, same state.


(Note: An outside volunteer independently downloaded the data from Wisconsin's counties and came up with the exact same results. (Click for larger images)

(Click here for Excel of Wisconsin by precinct with amazing anomaly calculations)

In Outagamie County, WI Santorum won with 10,673 votes to Romney's 9,750. Romney won Milwaukee County 48,424 to Santorum's 28,491. Several other no-tabulator counties in Wisconsin fail to show an amazing anomaly increase for any candidate from smallest to largest precincts.

Milwaukee County, on the other hand, used ES&S electronic voting machines and an ES&S Unity Server central tabulator as part of the county elections division. In Milwaukee County Romney's vote totals and percentage for precincts increased at a highly improbable rate from the smallest to the largest precincts.

In non-central-tabulator counties, precinct workers report the election data to county elections officials, who then enter the data on an Excel spreadsheet and display directly on their county website. They also transmit that data to the state elections officials. As a result, there is no opportunity for private parties to manipulate the vote count in a central tabulator.

Voting in Outagamie County is done on a mix of paper ballots and optical scan voting machines, which have a real paper trail, the optical scan forms that voters fill out. There is no observable amazing anomaly occurring in precincts using either paper ballots (with some optical scan machines) or optical scan machines only. (See pdf from volunteer for all Wisconsin counties by paper ballot versus voting machine results for the amazing anomaly.)

Iowa and New Hampshire
The Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary also display the amazing anomaly. Each showed signs of suspected vote flipping.

The Iowa Caucuses are run by the Republican Party. After meeting in precinct areas for debate, Iowa Republicans cast their ballots for candidates on paper ballots. These are counted at the caucus site and transmitted to the Republican Party, which then tabulates the vote.

There was little in the way of transparency in the Iowa central count that produced the final result. The Republican hierarchy chose to conduct the count in total secrecy and, possibly, out of state in Kansas. Party officials said the secrecy and mystery location resulted from fears that some Occupy movement would disrupt their counting.
Fortunately for citizens, Watch the Vote 2012, a voting rights activist group, was present to monitor the caucuses. They had a presence in approximately half of Iowa's counties.

That allowed a check of the relationship between precinct size and vote accumulation for each candidate. The records also allowed a check of precinct totals against those produced by the secret tabulation of precinct totals.
The precinct voting by activists did not match up with the party data presented. Edward L. True, a caucus participant, was wise enough to photograph his caucus count. It was different from the party count; the discrepancy resulted in a recount that changed the outcome from a Romney to a Santorum victory. The finding was too late to do any good but it made an important point.

The New Hampshire primary was also monitored by the WatchTheVote2012 activist group. They monitored hand counts at voting places. This allowed a comparison of hand counts, created without any computerized intervention, with the count of the central tabulator for the state provided by a private company, LHS Associates.

The hand count precincts showed no amazing anomaly, while the central tabulator producing totals for precincts revealed the amazing anomaly, progressive and highly improbable vote gains for Romney as precinct size increased.

The results from these two states demonstrate that central tabulation does not necessarily require computer involvement to produce highly questionable results. In this case, questions persist due to secrecy and the potential for human interference. In the case of New Hampshire, citizen diligence and involvement made the difference in detecting irreconcilable differences between no-tabulator results and results produced by a central tabulator that appear to make no sense. .

Are Central Tabulators Vulnerable to Hacking and Manipulation?
The best way to hack a central tabulator is to buy an elections equipment company. These privately held, unaccountable firms provide the majority of voting systems in the United States. ES&S acquired Premier, successor to the ill-reputed Diebold franchise, but was forced to sell it to Dominion. These two plus Hart Intercivic dominate the market for elections systems, from voting machines to central tabulators to service contracts for full election management.

What better place to control an election outcome, tailor made for whomever.

These firms sell or otherwise provide equipment with the provision that the software behind the machines is their sole intellectual property. County and state election officials are unable to inspect the software at multiple levels due to this restriction. This is truly secret voting outsourced to private firms who operate behind the scenes and have limited accountability. There is no true public accountability.

In his Ars Technica article on the subject, "Miscounting the Vote," Jon Stokes outlined methods of attacking a central tabulator. These apply today. Blackboxvoting.org has demonstrated the vulnerabilities to system hacks, even showing how a trained chimp could perform the task.

Francois suggested his own variations on hacking a central tabulator in an effort to update Jon Stokes.

"Method #1: Using an optical scan voting form, DRE, or absentee ballot, encode the form or use the keyboard to issue commands to the central tabulator (CT). Therefore the VOTE ITSELF is used to hack the CT. For example: the Riverside 2012 General election includes 20 elections. Fill out the ballot for each of the first 10 elections as follows: 1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2,1,2 This wakes up the CT'. Then fill out 3, 1, 4, 2, 2, 1, …' which commands the CT as follows: in election #3 flip candidate #1 up; in election #4 flip candidate #2 up; in election #2 flip candidate #1 up' and so forth.

"From that point, the CT software knows exactly what to do. It won't bother with candidates with less than 10% of the vote. But, it will flip progressively as a function of precinct size and try to flip just enough to win, etc. By communicating commands through votes, NO INTERNET to the CT connection is required. No local accomplices at the County level are required. The fix' could have been programmed in the CT software as far back as decade ago, with no knowledge of this year's political candidates.

"Method #2: Using a DRE only, enter any kind of odd entry. For example, enter 5 over votes in a sequence to wake up' the CT. The voting machine rejects them all and then turns into a special, secret maintenance mode. At that point, commands will be directed to the CT at the end of Election Day when the election data memory cards are transferred, physically or electronically and vote counting begins.

"In a variation of method #2, embed a command for vote flipping in a voting machine or other fraud prior to the election. Have the activation react on the receipt of a code word or phrase like All hail the king.' That activation triggers any vote flipping or other fraud desirable.

"Method #3: Use a power line communication and chips to transmit anything you want to a compromised central tabulator. Again, this alleviates the need for an Internet connection to the CT." Francois, October 30, 2012
Between private firms operating in secret, one a foreign firm, and demonstrated vulnerabilities, there are reasons for serious concern. These elections belong to us but our officials are unable to determine the accuracy, fairness, and security of the process.

A Second Look at Explanations for the Amazing Anomaly
The research group's conjecture is that central tabulators are the locus of the amazing anomaly for Romney in the 2012 primaries. The comparison of no anomaly results in Wisconsin no-tabulator counties is convincing evidence.

Data recently acquired by François et al. replicates the presence of the anomaly in the Wisconsin statewide count. Furthermore, it seems to indicate that partial or full use of paper ballots predicts an anomaly-free result. Further work on this just-received analysis will be forthcoming.

In addition to the suspected role of county-based central tabulators, there are other factors that lead to unexplainable election results.

First and foremost is the absence of open elections with every step of the process available to citizens for examination and evaluation. Watching the vote count is guaranteed in many state constitutions but it is rarely if ever offered. The ability to watch elections is denied outright by proprietary software and hardware held behind a corporate firewall of "intellectual property." Even with that restriction, citizens have to right to be present at vote taking and counting. That is often a struggle and always incomplete when electronic voting and tabulation are involved.

The fundamental cause of the suspected amazing anomaly and any of the other forms of election fraud is a fundamental disregard of the rights of citizens to vote and know that their vote counted.

Ironically, the politicians (supported by regulators and academic consultants) who make decisions about election systems are the very same people who are elected again and again by these flawed approaches, software, and equipment. Our public elected and appointed officials are the ultimate virus in the electoral system. It needs a good cleaning.

END

http://agonist.org/part-ii-rigged-electi...more-96348