talkpolitics | Documenting the Difficulties with Electronic Voting

peristaltor.livejournal.com posting in

In the last post I made on this forum, I pointed out a recent hardware hack to electronic voting machines here in the United States. As usual, people pointed out that this was an anomaly, that this could not happen in the Real World™, that it is just as important as Acorn (that one stumped me), et cetera ad infinitum ad naseum.

I say "as usual" above because a common tactic to dismissing one's rhetorical opponents is to simply demand documentation and then attempt to find a chink in the specific document that one can later use to dismiss the entire contents of the supporting evidence. It's done with global warming, it's done with evolution, blah blah blah. Let me be clear: Asking for supporting documentation is not the problem here; that's perfectly acceptable to defining the stipulations in later discussions. To dismiss the veracity of, again, the entire claim by pointing out small problems with some of the supporting evidence ignores what William Whewell called the Consiliance of Induction, "the unification of knowledge between the different branches of learning." Individual pieces of evidence from different sources compile a sound inference of a theory's veracity.

With that said, I've gone back in my personal LJ and dredged up some supporting evidence for the accusation that the US's current electronic voting machines might very well not be the best and brightest means for actually counting the votes people cast.

From Chinks in Democracy's Armor, 2008.

Essentially, I strongly feel very powerful people are in power simply because those that back them manipulated the results of several elections. I'm writing this post as a primer to those who haven't been following this information.

I don't blame those of you out there who have trouble swallowing this claim whole. The mainstream press hasn't been doing much of a job following it for you. They have instead dedicated their diminishing reporting resources to stories cheaper and easier to investigate, like Lohan and Spears, leaving labor-intensive follow-ups to voting irregularity charges largely unchecked. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there following these leads; it just means these people don't show up on the 6 O'Clock news.

Let's start with Bev Harris at Black Box Voting here in Puget Sound. As featured in the movie Hacking Democracy, she stumbled upon the source code for the Diebold voting machines online, and realized the security holes the code revealed threatened any vote handled by them. Combine that with Diebold President Waldon O'Dell's written claim that his company would work toward "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President," one can easily see Harris's reason for concern.

Okay, one can dismiss that above claim as specious. I've noted no hard evidence for election results compromise, after all. Hacking Democracy does demonstrate quite convincingly that the Diebold machines are unsecure in a scene near the end of the movie; that demonstration, however, does not prove anything but the possibility.

How about a sworn affidavit? Clint Curtis was a life-long Republican and programmer working in Florida. His employers asked him to do something he felt wrong, to write code that would help them control the vote. Read his sworn affidavit to find out the whole story. Really, it should be turned into a Grisham novel. It's that good.

Curtis later ran for office in a district that used the machines his old employers provided. He lost, but sued, stating the election was rigged and that -- since he himself had done it -- no one would be able to see any evidence of tampering. . . .

On the off-chance that Curtis, with his mountain of verifiable evidence and the current investigation into the death that prompted his affidavit doesn't convince (see the BradBlog archives for the story; I apologize, but I lost it), how about the 2004 election? Here in Washington State, the governorship was won by (supposedly) less than 200 votes. The commercial media bit the GOP bait and blamed King County's registration of felons and the dead for the close race. Ah, but what almost no one hears about today happened just a few miles north of King County. In Snohomish County:

Absentee ballots composing 2/3 of the total ballots showed a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the votes, on touch screens, showed a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic).

Vote-switching and machines freezing up occurred in 58 polling locations out of approximately 148 total. There is a high correlation between the problem machines — as reported by KING5 news — and the Republican percentages the machines reported.

Statistical analysis of machines that recently had their CPUs repaired shows a propensity for Republican voting that is present but weak on the individual level but strong at the polling location where the machines were placed.

The average of the 58 polling places reporting vote switching, freeze-ups, or repairs within two weeks of the election was 11.58% more favorable to Republican Dino Rossi than absentee voters did, and averaged 10.8% more votes than Gregoire on election day, while Rossi’s overall spread among all electronic voters at all polling locations was under 5%.

These discrepancies pointed to statistical improbabilities that truly stagger the imagination: the chances that the election results from these machines were accurate are 1 in 1,000 trillion. . . .

From How Bush Got To Be President, 2008.

From this:

Newly obtained computer schematics provide further detail of how electronic voting data was routed during the 2004 election from Ohio’s Secretary of State’s office through a partisan Tennessee web hosting company. . . .

The flow chart shows how voting information was transferred from Ohio to SmarTech Inc., a Chattanooga Tennessee IT company known for its close association with the Republican Party, before the 2004 election results were displayed online. (Emphasis mine)

Techie Candy

Though the article also interviews another expert who finds the schematic "inconclusive," Spoonamore continues by noting something very, very odd:

Spoonamore notes that on election night in 2004, he observed what he calls the "Connally anomaly," in which eight Ohio counties that had been reporting a consistent ratio of Kerry votes to Bush votes suddenly changed at about 11 pm and began reporting results much more favorable to Bush. Election tallies in these counties, plus a few others, also showed the unlikely result of tens of thousands of voters choosing an extremely liberal judicial candidate but not voting for Kerry.

Spoonamore immediately suspected that a Man in the Middle attack had occurred but had no idea how it could have been carried out. It was not until November 2006 that the alternative media group ePluribus Media discovered that the real-time election results streamed by the office of Ohio's Secretary of State at election.sos.state.oh.us had been hosted on SmarTech's servers in Tennessee. . . .

By then, SmarTech had become embroiled in the White House email scandal, during which it was discovered that accounts at rnc.com, gwb43.com, and other Republican Party domains which were hosted by SmarTech had been used by White House staff, instead of their official government email accounts, to avoid leaving a public record of their communications. When subpoenaed by Congress, the White House said the emails had been accidentally deleted. (Emphasis mine.)

. . . .

From Further Evidence Explaining Our National Shame, 2009.

By now, most must concede that, when it comes to voting machines, problems exist. Yes, most will grant that. What they will not grant is evidence that something conspiratorial actually happened.

Until now:

Five Clay County officials, including the circuit court judge, the county clerk, and election officers were arrested Thursday after they were indicted on federal charges accusing them of using corrupt tactics to obtain political power and personal gain. . . .

According to the indictment, these alleged criminal actions affected the outcome of federal, local, and state primary and general elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006.

(Emphasis mine.)

Election tampering? Not historically unknown. Election tampering that can be neither traced nor (thanks pressure from the folks that make the tampering possible) corrected? That, folks, might be uniquely American.

There are plenty of external links to peruse at your leisure. Enjoy the evidence.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com

I say "as usual" above because a common tactic to dismissing one's rhetorical opponents is to simply demand documentation and then attempt to find a chink in the specific document that one can later use to dismiss the entire contents of the supporting evidence.

Yup. That's all it took. Next. A lot of coulda, shoulda, woulda. But not the actual occurence and evidence for your claims. all conjecture and conspiracy theory and no real evidence.

From:

badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com

This.

From:

stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com

This.

Uh oh. We agreed on something. I feel Armageddon coming.

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Documenting the Difficulties with Electronic Voting

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