About the voting machines

I’ve had many posts related to the democrats cheating using illegal ballots, but not so much on the voting/election machines. Partially in response to news on Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News, and also partially inspired by left wing comments on Twitter, it’s time for another post on the machines. I did point out before how democrats were constantly saying that the machines were not secure and also were switching votes:

Remember when left wingers claimed voting machines were switching votes or were insecure?

While most of the other links in that prior post are newer, the most thorough supplemental material linked is from a hard core left winger and was posted at far left wing HuffPo:

The article is VERY informative, and covers ground I’m not going to simply duplicate here. One thing I will point out is how the “regulatory capture” of the FDA that Jordon Walker of Pfizer laughed about in the undercover sting videos shown by James O’Keefe is repeated with oversight of election machine companies by the EAC, with my bold:

The Revolving 'Election Industry' Door

One last point worth noting, for now, on all of this. The appalling revolving door of U.S. electoral control and administration continues to spin, along with the compromise of federal and localized oversight.

Think the oil industry's corruption of federal regulatory commissions was bad in light of the BP disaster? "Big Oil" has nothing on "Big Elections" -- but because the U.S. media hasn't bothered to cover the gusher of corruption spewing into the American election system, neither has the U.S. public.

Surprisingly, Cox does not now work for a voting machine company now (she is President of Young Harris College in Georgia), as so many other election officials do so immediately upon leaving office -- the most recent being PA's Sec. of State Pedro Cortes who suddenly resigned a few weeks ago to become Executive Vice President at the ironically-named Internet voting company Everyone Counts. That company already boasts the name of Chief Operating Officer Paul DeGregorio, who took the job upon leaving his post as George W. Bush's Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). As The BRAD BLOG reported in 2009, DeGregorio immediately used his former position as "America's Chief election official" in a cheesy video sales pitch for the firm, to help push their insecure and un-overseeable Internet Voting scheme to a still-unsuspecting, and still dreadfully under-informed American public.

Meanwhile, last year Dominion had already hired away Sequoia's VP Edwin Smith. Readers of The BRAD BLOG may remember the woeful Smith as the one who'd first sent threat letters to Princeton computer scientists, promising legal action if they independently reviewed Sequoia's voting machines after the systems had been found to have miscounted in a New Jersey election. He then upped the public blunder by hiring his own buddy and long-time Sequoia contractor/bag-man to carry out an "independent, third party" review instead.

Smith's "independent" hire, in addition to being anything but independent, was subsequently revealed by The BRAD BLOG to have had a, um, somewhat unsavory (if very amusing) background. After we revealed all of the chicanery, the hire was fired and Smith was disciplined by the company. But apparently he's still welcome at Dominion, now one of the largest e-voting firms in the U.S. (and maybe even in Venezuela!)

And even more shamefully, last December Smith was even be welcomed onto the U.S. Election Assistance Commission! As we reported late last year, Smith, now "VP of Compliance and Certification" for Dominion, was disgracefully appointed to the EAC's "Technical Guidelines Development Committee" as one of their new "Technical and Scientific Experts". As we wrote at the time: "This would be the equivalent of appointing the sitting Vice President of Exxon Mobil to an EPA advisory committee."

That’s a good bit already, but there is more at that link. And note that there are nine links just in what I’ve copied here. Just as it is ridiculous to claim that the FDA is independent from big pharma, it is false to claim that the EAC is independent from the election machine companies that it is supposed to oversee.

Especially note how the Sequoia VP threatened people commissioned by the state of NJ to analyze their machines after serious vote miscounting problems were found. His company did not want their equipment to be reviewed in spite of that miscounting, and that alone should give you an idea of how ridiculous it is to suggest that voting machines are “thoroughly confirmed”. If you follow the link and then check out the right hand side where “Brad’s” newer stuff is, you’ll see he’s very left wing.

Though Brad’s article is from 2010, there is no reason to believe that much has changed with respect to the regulatory capture and thus the lack of independence of the EAC.

Whatever reviews/tests/audits of the machines are done, to my knowledge no independent 3rd party ever reviews the code on the machines. The voting machine companies fight against this with claims of “intellectual property”, even though their should be transparency for anything related to elections. Choosing who leads this country and thus makes decisions that effect the lives of everyone here FAR outweighs any IP considerations.

It shouldn’t even be an option for the machine companies to hide anything from independent third party experts, including people with no ties to government but otherwise qualified. The case for making the code open source is actually far stronger than what we have now with everything hidden.

It’s worth noting at this point that hackers have confirmed that voting machines are easily hacked, and once hacked code can be changed, as can election results:

Note the point of “under election conditions surreptitiously”, and how “an attack could compromise the entire jurisdiction”. The link is to a pdf, and there is much more information there, including how paper ballots are required to do any sort of after the fact checking.

There is also mention of “risk limiting audits” (RLAs) being used with paper ballots that can determine a hacked system. Here the authors will be wrong based on what elections officials have admitted about the scope of their RLAs. RLAs are done with only a small percentage of all ballots cast, and they are not done on election day. They also don’t take into account bogus voter registrations and issues with poll books. They will be done before and/or after election day, and they will compare a hand count of that small sample of ballots with the machine count only.

So that means any code designed to change election results, whether by corrupt employees of election machine companies or by hackers, can be programmed to only work on election day and the later RLA will not see the effects of that code. With a hack the code could even include instruction to delete itself and restore the original file. In plain language pseudo code it is literally as simple as:

If Date = ElectionDay Then

Run some code

End If

The code could also do the same thing the following day, and then have an instruction to delete the hacked code and restore the original. Of course if you’re sure no one gets to look at the code at all, you can just leave it in there until you release your next update. That “Run some code” part can be pretty much anything too. It can include a check for code in an external file that gets run if that file exists and doesn’t run if that file has been deleted, and of course it can change vote tallies in any number of ways just as the hacker conference report states.

Another vulnerability is the USB “thumb” drives used to transfer results. Those seem to go missing or take detours on their way to central election centers on a frequent basis, or there are problems with the data one them. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I recall a report on thumb drives that took a few extra hours to deliver even though the drive was supposed to be less than 15 minutes but I cannot locate it now.

In any event, a thumb drive is easy conceal in your hand for a swap even if there is an observer from the opposing party with you and they are paying attention. Anyone claiming that manual transfers via thumb drives is “safe and secure” is lying to you. For security, data transfers should be done on much larger proprietary drives that would be much more difficult to conceal, to connect to, or to duplicate.

What about the hardware? Well just look back to the misprinted ballots in Maricopa County in the last election. Whether it was “shrink to fit” or whether it was a smaller image deliberately created to cause problems on election day, it did create huge problems and caused many republicans to not vote due to very long delays. Those printers are part of the election hardware, and the issue just happened to be discovered due to Kari Lake’s lawsuit. Though the trail was very limited, it did show multiple witnesses for the county perjure themselves.

Also keep in mind that per Lake’s expert witness who got to examine the ballots, the proper sized “duplicates” that were supposed to be attached to the smaller and thus “adjudicated” ballots were not there. And that expert witness got very little time to examine ballots. Once the smaller ballots were found and the duplicates that the county claimed were created (and filled in by “adjudicators” who decided how the voters voted) were not found, any competent and unbiased judge should have immediately ordered a full examination of all ballots without delay. Alternatively, he could have simply ruled for a new Maricopa County election right then and there.

Think about the smaller ballots and how that should have been impossible, think about how Scott Jarrett perjured himself on day one claiming that he did not know of any way smaller ballots could happen, and then think of how democrats and RINOs all across the country went to court to stop ballots from being inspected after the 2020 election, just like Maricopa County tried to dismiss Kari Lake’s lawsuit a few months ago, and then ask yourself why all of those “election officials” worked so hard to hide ballots, electronic election records, and everything else.

P.S. In a future post I’ll cover the thousands upon thousands of signature mismatches found in the Maricopa County voter rolls versus those found on the ballot envelopes. This was covered in AZ Senate committee hearings recently, and it was far more than the supposed margin of victory for Hobbs or Mayes.

P.S.S. If you though the Maricopa County audit of the 2020 election proved anything, remember just for starters that there was NO chain of custody for any of the boxes of ballots for after the election right up until the handoff to the audit team, and there was a months long delay where any number of bogus ballots could have been swapped in during those months. Then there was the deletion of the election database files and the lying about it.