Voting Machine FRAUD and Voter SUPPRESSION: little government regulation and almost no oversight.

The Washington Post characterized Hagel’s election in 1996 as the biggest upset of the election season.

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0301/S00166/senator-hagel-admits-owning-voting-machine-company.htm

The majority of voting machines being used throughout the nation are presently being manufactured, programmed and controlled by three major corporations owned and operated by Republicans: ES&S, Diebold Election Systems, and Sequoia Voting Systems.
Discovery: The McCarthy Group firm’s chairman, Michael McCarthy, was Senator Chuck Hagel’s [R-Neb] campaign treasurer.
www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0303/S00325.htm

Oct. 28, 2019
ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group, a private equity firm, whose revenue, profits, and salaries are not public.
ES&S, the nation’s largest manufacturer of voting technology.
ES&S – based in Omaha, Nebraska, and employing roughly 500 people – controls around 50% of the country’s election system market

In Georgia, ES&S-owned technology was in use when more than 150,000 voters inexplicably did not cast a vote for lieutenant governor.

In Indiana, ES&S’ systems brand-new machines faltered in ways that made it difficult to know whether some people had voted more than once.

in 2006 in Sarasota, Florida, ES&S machines lost around 18,000 votes; it is still unclear why. The loss was far more than the margin of victory, and a lawsuit followed that ultimately resolved little.

A ProPublica examination of ES&S shows it has fought hard to keep its dominance in the face of repeated controversies. The company has a reputation among both its competitors and election officials for routinely going to court when it fails to win contracts or has them taken away, suing voting jurisdictions, rivals, advocates for greater election security and others.

In September 2018, ES&S filed a federal lawsuit against Cook County, Illinois, after the county awarded a $30 million voting machine contract to another company. ES&S later dropped the lawsuit, but the dispute delayed the implementation of Cook County’s new machines, and the Chicago mayoral election this spring ultimately was conducted using the same machines that were meant to be replaced.

ES&S’ lawsuits and threats of lawsuits have helped delay or thwart progress toward better voting technology even when the litigation is unsuccessful, more than two dozen election officials and voting technology experts said in interviews.

for full article, see www.dcreport.org/2020/12/19/mitch-mcconnells-re-election-the-numbers-dont-add-up/
www.propublica.org/article/the-market-for-voting-machines-is-broken-this-company-has-thrived-in-it

voting technology and election security in South Carolina

A decade of evidence shows that technology made by ES&S was involved with repeated voting problems in S.C. elections,

Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as the 2019 gubernatorial election, there were a staggering number of Democrats voting Republican in 2020.

South Carolina’s fleet of more than 11,000 of the computers, made and maintained by ES&S, had repeatedly been linked to voting errors.

Buell reported many of the problems in his research and 2018 audit for the League of Women Voters.

Buell wrote that he found flaws with the code that led to votes being counted more than once, ignored or tallied incorrectly. Problems with
the external hardware became more frequent as the computers got older and also led to votes not being included in official counts, he observed.

Of the seven options submitted to the state in response to its request for proposals (RFP) last year, three vendors proposed the state buy their hand-marked paper ballot systems, also known as optical scan paper ballot technology. The hand-marked technology wasn’t just significantly cheaper than the BMDs: It also came enthusiastically reviewed by top scholars.

“We write to urge you to follow the advice of election security experts nationwide, including the National Academies of Sciences, the Verified Voting Foundation, and the many states that are abandoning vulnerable touchscreen electronic voting machines in favor of hand-marked paper ballots as the best method for recording votes in public elections,” the letter read.

Blaze went on to make the same recommendation the 23 experts had sent a year earlier to S.C. lawmakers. Simple technologies, like optical scan paper ballot technology, should be deployed to make sure elections are as strong as possible against external attacks.

Of the seven ES&S employees included in the “biography” section of the company’s paperwork, only one, the senior vice president of operations, seems to have obtained any sort of formal education in technology. He earned an associate’s degree in applied science and electronics, then graduated with a bachelor of science in business administration. The rest of the team either graduated with a bachelor of science in marketing or business, a bachelor’s of arts or an associate’s of arts.

Wallach was frank about the lack of good options on the market. There are federal standards for the technology, but they’re “old and inadequate.” Even so, the systems available for sale today are not built to the most recent guidelines, Wallach said.

Since mainstream technology companies have largely decided not to compete for the government contracts, and most counties shy away from creating voting technology in-house, if you’re a county looking to buy, all you’ve got are “new crappy things to replace flaky, old crappy things, and it’s the same vendor,” Wallach said. “The market for voting equipment is dysfunctional.”

One of the ways to improve it is with greater industry transparency, he suggested.

for full article, see www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/election/article246806162.html

Election Systems & Software

Oakland County, Michigan
Early voters in the 2008 Presidential election reported instances of malfunctioning machines. People complained that they voted for one candidate, only to have their selection switch to another. The clerk of Oakland County, Michigan reported inconsistent results with some machines during testing in October.

On April 14, 2010, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that “About 10 percent of Cuyahoga County’s voting machines … [had] failed a pre-election test
on December 22, 2011, the Election Assistance Commission recommended decertification of the ES&S voting machine if it cannot be fixed. From the findings
“The DS200 accepts a voted ballot but does not record the ballot on its internal counter. In addition the marks of the second ballot are not recorded.”

While election-management systems are not the voting machines voters use to cast their ballots, they are used to program the voting machines used in a county and to count and tabulate the results from the voting machines. By installing remote access software allowing the machines to be accessed via the internet, the machines are vulnerable to being “hacked” remotely, allowing the counting to be altered surreptitiously, or malware to be installed to affect an election result. Motherboard, the site that originally published the story, called the remote access software installation “the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”

According to the April letter, ES&S claims to have stopped installing the remote-access software in December 2007, in response to standards adopted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission

On election day November 6, 2018, thousands of voters in Johnson County, Indiana had to wait in line for hours as technical glitches and computer crashes caused issues throughout the county. A preliminary report prepared for the Indiana Secretary of State by Ball State’s Voting System Technical Oversight Program, or VSTOP, examined all of the things that went wrong on election day. In this preliminary report the investigators concluded that ES&S failed to report several “anomalies” that occurred prior to election day, which violates Indiana election law.

for full article, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Systems_%26_Software

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Democracy Diverted: Polling Place Closures and the Right to Vote
December 10, 2019

Southern U.S. states have closed 1,200 polling places in recent years since the Supreme Court weakened a landmark voting-discrimination law in 2013

States with a history of racial discrimination have shuttered hundreds of voting locations since the court ruled that they did not need federal approval to change their laws.

Seven counties in Georgia now have only one polling place.

Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, areas with a history of voting discrimination – such as requiring African American or Hispanic voters to pay a poll tax or pass a literacy test – had first to convince the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court that any election changes they wished to make would not have a discriminatory effect. The Supreme Court struck down that portion of the law in 2013.

Overall, those states formerly covered by the law have closed at least 1,688 polling places between 2012 and 2018, the Leadership Conference found. A total 1,173 of those polling places were closed after the 2014 election – and after the Supreme Court issued its decision.

Georgia stands out because its counties have closed higher percentages of voting locations than any other state in our study. The top five closers of polling places by percentage were Georgia counties: The top three counties in the state were Lumpkin (89 percent closed); Stephens (88 percent closed); and Warren, which is 61 percent African American (83 percent closed). Bacon County, which is 15 percent African American, and Butts County, which is 28 percent African American, tied with 80 percent closed. Seven counties with major polling place reductions now have ONLY ONE polling site to serve hundreds of square miles. In a February 2015 memo, the office of Brian Kemp, who was then serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, encouraged counties to consolidate voting locations. He specifically spelled out twice – in bold font – that “as a result of the Shelby vs. Holder [sic] Supreme Court decision, [counties are] no longer required to submit polling place changes to the Department of Justice for preclearance.”

Courts have found intentional discrimination in at least 10 voting rights decisions since the Shelby court decision.

for full article, see
www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/southern-u-s-states-have-closed-1200-polling-places-in-recent-years-rights-group-idUSKCN1VV09J

It’s laughable to hear Republicans complain about being disenfranchised. They’ve been disenfranchising Black voters for decades, either by directly setting up barriers or refusing to address voting issues that have long been known.

The push to throw out mail-in ballots they deem as “illegal” is the GOP’s latest attempt at voter suppression. If Trump were to prevail, millions of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit would be disenfranchised.

During three days of hearings across Florida, the commission collected more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses under oath and reviewed more than 118,000 pages of documents.

Black people were turned away at the polls for various reasons in 2000. One poll worker said his precinct workers turned away 30 to 50 potential voters because they could not get through to the supervisor of elections on the phone to confirm their eligibility.

When Lavonna Lewis, a first-time voter, arrived at her polling place, a white poll worker standing outside told her that the poll was closed. As she turned to leave, the poll worker allowed a white man to walk in and get in line to vote.

The commission concluded that there were problems in nine of the 10 counties with the highest percentages of African Americans. These problems, the commission said, were “serious and not isolated.”

Across the country, the GOP’s goal was to figure out what worked best and implement those suppression tools all over the country.

for full article, see www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-glanton-trump-voter-fraud-voter-suppression-20201116-tgkjzi25s5ajbc6pcjdghb4vv4-story.html

The election security hole everyone ignores

08/31/2020
KnowInk — the nation’s leading provider of pollbooks

Electronic pollbooks offer advantages over paper pollbooks, such as faster voter check-in and the ability to determine the correct polling place for voters who show up at the wrong one. They can process Election Day voter registrations in states that allow those, and provide near-real-time syncing with other pollbooks and databases to prevent people from voting in multiple places.

The devices also let counties replace traditional precincts with large vote centers, so that people can cast ballots at any convenient location rather than be tethered to their neighborhood. Vote centers need a county’s entire voter list, not just a neighborhood subset, which makes printed pollbooks impractical for them.

But these advantages fade when the machines fail and poll workers can’t verify a voter’s registration. The fallback when that happens is to make voters cast provisional ballots, but polling places often fail to stock enough of those. Provisional ballots also require more processing and can’t be counted until the voter’s eligibility is verified, therefore increasing the risk that they might not be counted before election results have to be certified.

The Brennan Center found that 17 states using e-pollbooks don’t require a paper backup of the voter roll at polling places, and 32 states using e-pollbooks don’t have contingency plans requiring a minimum number of provisional ballots be available.

In 2010 in Shelby County, Tenn., for example, pollbooks incorrectly indicated that 5,400 voters had already voted. The issue disproportionately affected communities of color.

One of the most high-profile failures of this sort occurred during the 2016 presidential election, when pollbooks in Durham, N.C., indicated falsely that some voters weren’t registered or had already voted. The incident later raised alarms following revelations that Russian hackers had targeted the pollbooks’ vendor, Florida-based VR Systems, and that two days before the election Durham had experienced problems with its VR Systems software and voter database. (VR Systems has denied that its systems were compromised.)

A partial investigation by a contractor hired by the county found that old voter data had been left on some of the pollbooks — attributed to an election staff error — but a definitive investigation never occurred.

To address the absence of independent testing, the nonprofit Center for Internet Security launched a pilot project this year with the federal Election Assistance Commission to develop methods for assessing electronic pollbooks and other election systems that don’t fall under the EAC’s existing testing and certification program.

KnowInk and VR Systems have submitted systems for the pilot project. ES&S has not submitted its e-pollbook to the project but plans to submit it to a private security firm, Synack, for examination.

Wilson said CIS will assess each vendors’ internal development processes to verify that they’ve followed security best practices, perform tests to see if their devices can be hacked and assign the pollbook and vendor a series of scores.

Ben Hovland, an EAC commissioner since last year, told POLITICO that creating such a centralized program is a no-brainer.

“Why should 50 states have to build 50 different certification programs? That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

for full article, see www.politico.com/news/2020/08/31/election-security-hole-406471