Recorded January 2 and 9, 2005
Listen to #493:
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Listen to #494
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Due to the overlapping nature of FTRs #493 and #494, the descriptions for the two programs are merged into a single, longer document. The programs set forth the crooked nature of companies that make the electronic voting machines for US elections, as well as that corruption’s effects on the American political process. One of the most disturbing points of information presented here concerns the apparent use of phony terror alerts to manipulate vote-tabulating computers in two borderline states. In Warren County, Ohio and Tallahassee, Florida, dubious “terror alerts” caused the evacuation of key election facilities and the securing of both by security personnel. Much of the discussion focuses on Sequoia Pacific and its long-standing relationship with both organized crime and the GOP. A supposed competitor of Sequoia Pacific—ES&S—actually works closely with its “opponent.” Daniel Hopsicker investigates various gambling initiatives, and how the organized crime and political elements involved in election tampering skewered the vote tallies on those proposals. Charles Kane is a “former” CIA officer who advised the Ukraine on election matters in 1996, and was involved in the highly suspicious handling of absentee ballots in Martin County, Florida in 2000. The articles by Daniel Hopsicker have been reproduced here, for the convenience of the listener.
Program Highlights Include: The criminal conviction of Lloyd Dixon, head of Sequoia’s predecessor company; Dixon’s successor—Louis Wolfson—tried to bribe Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas; Sequoia’s involvement with a New Orleans gambling initiative; the conviction of SP’s Southeast representative Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci for bribing Jerry Fowler, Louisiana’s elections overseer; the suspicious “suicide” of the New Orleans official in charge of security for the building housing the election machines; Deborah and Richard Clark’s highly questionable involvement with both Sequoia Pacific and SP’s supposed competitor ES&S; the manner in which SP and ES&S swap machines back and forth; the extraordinary maneuvering Kathryn Ferguson used to purchase SP machines for Las Vegas; numerous examples of the strange and anomalous results achieved by some of these electronic voting machines.
1. Before presenting text that illuminates the discussion in FTRs 493 and 494, we present (in line-items 1–4) Daniel Hopsicker’s articles upon which the programs are based:
The Big Fix 2004
How to Fix a Presidential Election Pt. 1: Convicted, Felons, ‘Shadowy Financiers’ Own Companies Counting Votes
An investigation into the surprisingly-sordid history of America’s “election services industry” has revealed that executives and owners of the two largest companies, E S & S and Sequoia Pacific, have been convicted of bribery and suborning public officials in more than a dozen states.
And while a felony conviction may be enough »Continue original article»
2.
Election Company Has Long Criminal History
Thugs, Racketeers Counting American Votes
While Ukrainians poured into the streets of their capital Kiev to protest a presidential election they say was stolen by that country’s current regime, here in the U.S. a little-known election company called Sequoia Pacific, responsible for putting our own ‘current regime’ in powerfour years ago, was at the center of controversy last week... for the second Presidential election in a row.
While U.S. newspapers have been filled with quotes from American officials pontificating »Continue original article»
3.
Back In The USSR
CIA “Helpful” in Ukraine ElectionsA retired CIA agent, whose illegal and unfettered access to election rolls in Martin County Florida was a major source of legal contention after the 2000 Election, traveled to the Ukraine four years earlier to teach “grass-roots politics” to people there, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The news came even as citizens in the Ukraine celebrate »Continue original article»
4.
Fraud by Computer in Florida
Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote TotalsA “mistake” made in the office of a seriously-compromised Supervisor of Election in Pinellas County whose husband is a top executive of the country’s largest election services company has almost unnoticed spiked the best hope for a election recount in Florida that might have thrown a spotlight on the dark corners of the Florida election process concealing widespread systemic and system-wide vote fraud.
The office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County, Deborah Clark, provided inflated totals on the YES side of the gambling »Continue original article»
5.
Rogue State: The Covert Op that Ate the World
While both of the terrorist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center were students at Venice Florida’s Huffman Aviation, the flight school’s owner Wallace J. Hilliard, 72, of Naples, FL., was simultaneously pursuing his own diplomatic opening to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. A photograph (left) recently made available »Continue original article»
One of the central themes in Daniel Hopsicker’s articles on electronic vote fraud concerns the pervasiveness of organized crime in the milieu of the crooked voting machines. In addition, gambling—one of the principal sources of income for organized crime syndicates—also figures in this concatenation. It is important to note, however, that organized crime is but one of the elements in the crooked voting machine phalanx. One of the companies that has both Republican right-wing AND organized crime influences is Sequoia Pacific. A Gambino crime family operative was involved with the company’s operations in New York. ” . . . In fact, the Gambino family and Sequoia Pacific have had more than a nodding acquaintance, according to newspapers in New York reporting on the intrigue surrounding the awarding of a multi-million dollar contract for election machines in New York City during the mid-90’s, where Sequoia’s representative in the bidding gained notoriety for attempting to grease the skids a little at a marathon luncheon hosted by Salvatore Reale, a Gambino underboss who later pled guilty to racketeering. . . .”
(“Election Company Has Long Criminal History” by Daniel Hopsicker; Mad Cow Morning News; 11/24/2004; p. 3.)
6. From its inception, Sequoia has been inextricably linked with criminal activities. Begun as American Voting Machine, the company was under the control of stockholders in [North American] Rockwell, a major defense contractor. President and CEO Lloyd Dixon was convicted of bribing an official and sentenced to prison. ” . . . It [Sequoia Pacific] began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of Defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960’s. The company’s founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr. resigned as president and CEO on Jan. 10, 1973, and later went to prison, after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials. The company was fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials. . .” (Idem.)
7. Things didn’t get any better after Dixon’s departure and imprisonment: ” Last week, we briefly related the sordid tale of the next owner of Sequoia Pacific, financier and corporate raider Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace, ‘Dishonest Abe’ Fortas. Fortas got caught palming a lifetime yearly ‘retainer’ from the wily Wolfson’s family foundation. Alas for ‘Dishonest Abe,’ as he came to be called, the law draws no distinction between ‘accepting a retainer’ and ‘taking a bribe.’ Fortas cut himself a deal. He taped phone calls, at the FBI’s behest, with Wolfson, who was pleading with the Supreme Court Justice to dummy up. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word ‘cover-up’ enters the American lexicon for the first time. Apparently, Fortas coined it at the instant of need, when he said (probably for the tape recorder), ‘No I can’t do that! That be a cover-up!’ ” (Ibid.; pp. 3–4.)
8. Gambling was at the epicenter of a scandal concerning the apparent bribery of Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler. ” . . . Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City in the mid-’90’s, which helped explained his taking bribes. It was at this same time when allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace in Louisiana. Curiously, gambling was the burning issue on the ballot in state elections at the same exact time. One proposition concerned Harrah’s proposal to build a casino in downtown New Orleans. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 5.)
9. Fowler was convicted of taking bribes from Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, the Southeastern representative of Sequoia Pacific. ” . . . We first learned of Sequoia Pacific’s penchant for greasing the palms of corrupt public officials from the well-publicized news accounts in the year 2000 about Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler, convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale ‘Rocco’ Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey. Even after pleading guilty to suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for more than a decade, Ricci remained something of a mystery figure, we learned to our surprise. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 4.)
10. The Ricci/Fowler liaison was brought to light when Susan Bernacker, a losing candidate tested the voting machines. When she voted for herself, the Sequoia Pacific machines registered a vote for her opponent—Nick Giambelluca. ” . . .Voting machine tests performed and videotaped by a suspicious local candidate immediately after this election demonstrated that votes Susan Bernacker cast for herself during the test were electronically recorded for her opponent. (The test was repeated several times with the same result. The astonishing video footage is in our documentary The Big Fix 2000.) . . .” (Ibid.; p. 4.)
11. It is interesting to note that the Supervisor of Elections in New Orleans—Tony Giambelluca—allegedly committed suicide behind a dumpster two weeks before the election. It is unclear whether Tony was related to Nick Giambelluca. ” . . . Tony Giambelluca, who held the keys to the warehouse where the election machines were kept, turned up an apparent suicide. He had chosen to take his life behind a garbage dumpster, which seems an odd decision. Given the choice, we figure most people would choose to end their existence in a slightly more scenic locale. . .” (Idem.)
12. Sequoia Pacific and another electronic voting company—E S & S—operated in conjunction with one another, rather than in competition. The collusion between E S & S and Sequoia will be highlighted again later on in this description. (For more about E S & S, see FTRs 470, 487.) ” . . . Study of this case revealed some interesting details about the way the ‘election services’ industry works. . . First, the scheme showed that there was collusion, rather than competition between the two major election services firms, Sequoia Pacific and E S & S. Court documents revealed the two sold voting machines back and forth to each other until they had arrived at the figure they wanted the client, the state of Louisiana, to pay. Nor was this an isolated case. The bribery conviction of Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, for example, revealed that E S & S’s predecessor company. Business Records Corp. of Dallas, arranged for contracts which led to Smurfit Packaging Corp. and its subsidiary, Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment Inc. More collusion. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 6.)
13. Sequoia operates through dummy front companies: ” . . . Another discovery was that, like the CIA, Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. For example, two Florida election execs, Glenn Boord and Ralph Escudero, pled guilty to conspiracy to compound a felony (public bribery), who had owned a paper voting-machine company called Uni-lect, which was just a front for Sequoia Pacific. Pasquale ‘Rocco’ Ricci’s company, International Voting Machines, was also really Sequoia Pacific. So, too, was Harold Webb’s Garden State Elections. (And also Herb Webb’s Elec-tec.) Webb, a New Jersey elections equipment executive who participated in the bribery and kickback scheme that resulted in the conviction of Fowler also played a key role in the infamous Martin County, Florida drama over Republican absentee ballots in the 2000 election.” (Idem.)
14. “New Jersey election services companies controlled by Webb were key suppliers to Martin County, Florida, which calls into question the version of events surrounding the tampering with absentee ballot applications testified to by Republican Party operatives in court in 2000. In counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems, and used tabulating machines from Sequoia Pacific disguised as being from other vendors, and used the same (doctored) machines as Louisiana, supplied by the same ‘shadowy’ sources. When a reporter for the Fresno Bee interviewed Sequoia’s chief executive, the reporter told us later he had been ‘taken aback by his secretive nature.’ In truth, Sequoia’s chief executive has a lot to be secretive about. . . .” (Idem.)
15. Next, the discussion turns to the issue of the vote tampering in Martin County, Florida. (Subsequent discussion of the Florida election scams will return to the apparent role of gambling in these machinations.) A profound irony concerning electoral fraud in the U.S. concerns the difference between the reaction of the U.S. media and electorate to the American and Ukrainian elections. The exit polls in both the U.S. and Ukraine were fundamentally different from the election results. However, the U
krainian people were vocal and visible in their reaction to the apparent fraud. The American people, on the other hand, were altogether passive. It is particularly noteworthy that The Washington Post and The New York Times were vehement in their condemnation of the election results in the Ukraine, while dismissing U.S. critics of the elections as “conspiracy theorists.” (For more about this, see FTR#485.) DANIEL HOPSICKER NOTES THAT THERE IS A LINK BETWEEN UKRAINIAN ELECTIONS AND THE FRAUDULENT BALLOT TALLIES IN FLORIDA—“FORMER” CIA OFFICER CHARLES KANE. “A retired CIA agent, whose illegal and unfettered access to election rolls in Martin County Florida was a major source of legal contention after the 2000 Election, traveled to the Ukraine four years earlier to teach ‘grass-roots politics’ to people there, the MadCowMorningNews has learned. The news came even as citizens in the Ukraine celebrate their new-found freedom, while in the U.S. suspicion continued to fester that vote fraud may have cost Americans their own right to free and honest elections.”
(“Back in the U.S.S.R.: CIA ‘Helpful’ in Florida, Ukraine Elections” by Daniel Hopsicker; MadCowMorningNews; 12/8/2004; p. 1.)
16. “In a bitterly ironic twist, Charles Kane, former Director of Security at the Central Intelligence Agency, and member of the Florida Republican Executive Committee, spent four days in Kiev, the capital of the former Soviet republic, hosting training sessions for Ukrainian political parties in 1996. Institute officials chose Kane to go to the Ukraine, according to the February 20, 1996, Stuart/Port St. Lucie News, apparently straight-faced, ‘because of his experience in grass-roots campaigns.’ ” (Idem.)
17. Kane later participated in the Martin County (Florida) electoral shenanigans: “Four years later, Kane’s credentials as a proponent of democracy were receiving much closer scrutiny. . . . ‘Kane’s efforts were part of a sinister underground conspiracy to help Bush,’ Edward Stafman, attorney for the Martin County challengers told the Associated Press on December 7, 2000. . .” (Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)
18. ” . . . The career of the much-traveled Kane, it must be stated, resembles nothing so much as a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. . . He was also involved, years earlier, in the investigation into the JFK assassination, dispatching a memo to the FBI regarding the whereabouts on the day of the assassination of notorious pipe-smoking Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)
19. As Daniel notes, Kane’s presence in the Ukraine and Florida (as well as his intelligence background), raises questions about his activities in Martin County. (For more about Kane, see FTR#268. An excellent web site featuring information about the apparent fixing of the 2004 election is www.campaignwatch.org. Information about Charles Kane can be found here.) Daniel relates Kane’s role in the Martin County vote snafu: “Charlie Kane’s presence in both the Ukraine and the 2000 election debacle prompted us to take a quick backward glance at the controversy which became familiar during the weeks following the infamous Florida Vote Snafu of 2000. Two heavily Republican counties in Florida had allowed party officials access which they said was to fix hundreds of flawed absentee ballot applications that had been submitted by voters but rejected by the elections office. The Martin County supervisor of elections, a Republican, let Republican Party workers take away the ballot requests on a daily basis, add missing voter identification numbers and resubmit them, a deputy elections supervisor said.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)
20. “Just days before the Nov. 7 election, Charles Kane and his buddy Thomas Hauck were laboring in front of a computer at the local Republican headquarters in Stuart, supposedly as part of their party’s sophisticated but botched statewide effort to get out the absentee vote. A printing company had failed to put the required voter identification numbers on thousands of absentee ballot request forms that were mailed to voters. So Hauck and Kane got busy in Martin County, aided by a Republican supervisor of elections who let them remove forms from her office.” (Idem.)
21. Daniel notes that Kane’s access to the printing company forms may have led to fraud in other parts of Florida, since the same forms were used all over the state. “Kane, who chaired the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign in Martin County, supposedly read the numbers from the party’s database. Hauck, the local GOP treasurer and a 20-year veteran of local campaigns, supposedly filled in the blanks on the request forms. But the printing company’s forms were used state-wide. Had this perhaps ‘convenient’ fact been used as an excuse to allow illegal access in other places in Florida as well? The question was never answered.” (Idem.)
22. Still more about the absentee ballots and the role they may have played in both the Martin County voting results and in the results of Florida as a whole: “Moreover, while Gov. George W. Bush edged Vice President Al Gore by 56 percent to 44 percent in Martin County, the absentee votes—control of which violated the rules of chain of custody—broke nearly 2 to 1 for Bush. . . . Other tantalizing clues have emerged, like the recent statements made by Jeff Fisher, Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida’s 16th District, which, curiously, encompasses both Martin as well as Palm Beach County, where the vote count has been disputed in an analysis by UC Berkeley researchers. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. Perhaps the proof of vote tampering, if proof is ever found, will be found by piercing through the implausible explanation offered for Charlie Kane’s illegal access to election records . . .” (Idem.)
23. In another of Daniel’s articles on voter fraud, he returns to the subject of Sequoia Pacific, its relationship to ES&S and evidence of electoral fraud in Florida. Exemplifying the shady oversight of the electoral process in Florida is Deborah Clark, appointed by Jeb Bush to the office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County. And once again, we see gambling initiatives figuring in the scenario. “I’m shocked—shocked—to learn that there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” ” . . . The office of Supervisor of Elections in Pinellas County, Deborah Clark, provided inflated totals on the YES side of the gambling initiative which were then used by state officials in the official state tally of the hotly-contested gambling initiative known as Amendment 4. The initiative would allow casino slot machine gambling in South Florida, an outcome devoutly to be wished by owners of the spanking new $700 million Hard Rock Café Casino in Hollywood, Florida, a facility all dressed up but with currently nowhere to go.”
(“ ‘Fraud by Computer’ in Florida: Election Official Thwarts Recount Using Phony Vote Totals” by Daniel Hopsicker; MadCowMorningNews; 12/14/2004; p. 1.)
24. Daniel relates Deborah Clark’s curious behavior with regard to the gambling initiative: “Pinellas County voters defeated the gambling initiative by more than 17,000 votes. But t
he official state record says the exact opposite, the result of a ‘mistake’ by the office of Pinellas Elections Supervisor which would have gone unnoticed, said local reports, had it not been caught by outside observers. A recount of Florida’s votes on the state gambling initiative offered an opportunity to correlate what was found with what are so far just ‘theories’ of how the Presidential election in Florida might have been stolen. Deborah Clark provided an extra 34,000 votes on the YES side of the initiative, sufficient to legally preclude what would have otherwise been a mandated recount.” (Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)
25. Returning to the incestuous relationship between Sequoia Pacific and ES&S, the discussion highlights Deborah Clark’s husband Richard, after noting that a recount of votes on the gambling initiative might very well have shed light on how the vote was manipulated for the presidential race. “As a longtime top executive with ES&S, the company which counts more than half the U.S. vote, Richard Clark probably had more to lose from a recount than almost anyone alive. . . . Should rumored anomalies surface in the recount, the fortunes of any elections firms involved would no doubt suffer. A recount of the gambling initiative, known as Amendment 4, election experts said, would have offered clues as to how and why 90,000 extra YES votes for gambling were recorded in Broward County, for example. This number is almost equal to the ‘extra’ votes for President Bush cast in Broward County, which researchers say were inexplicable except through manipulated electronic vote tabulation—which were counted in the same county’s tally.” (Ibid.; pp. 2–3.)
26. More about Deborah Clark’s husband Richard and his professional involvement with ES&S and Sequoia: ” . . . More seriously, while Deborah Clark had worked as a top official in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Office, her husband Richard Clark’s employer Elections Systems & Software, was awarded more than $400,000 in business with the office, and was up for a lucrative contract worth as much as $15-million to sell new voting machines to Pinellas County. . .” (Ibid.; p. 3.)
27. When reading the text that follows, recall the incestuous nature of the relationship between ES&S and Sequoia discussed above. The two supposedly competing companies swap machines back and forth. ” . . . He [Clark] said he quit ES&S for about five years, having joined the firm when it acquired the company that previously employed him, Business Records Corp. [For more about Business Records Corp. and its connections to the ultra right-wing Hunt family of Texas, see FTR#470.] But Clark said he quit ES&S just before his wife was named elections supervisor because he was worried that his employment with the firm could appear as a conflict. But so far, Clark’s new company, Richard A. Clark Enterprises, works for just one company, ES&S. The selection process in Pinellas County became mired in ethical conflicts after county commissioners learned in July 2001 that ES&S had ‘very’ close ties to Deborah Clark.” (Ibid.; p. 5.)
28. ” . . . Even Clark’s deputy administrator, Karen Butler, is a sister of Sandra Mortham, Florida’s former secretary of state and a lobbyist for ES&S before the state legislature. . . .” (Idem.)
29. More about Richard Clark and his relationship with the incestuously-related ES&S and Sequoia Pacific and the latter’s relationship with organized crime, including the Louisiana scandal: ” . . . Clark had been working in Birmingham, Ala. as an independent contractor, after resigning from the company. . . Apparently, no one noticed that when Richard Clark went to Birmingham, another Birmingham election exec, Phil Foster, was being indicted on felony bribery charges. Foster, a regional sales vice president was allegedly involved in a conspiracy and money-laundering scheme that involved the sale of machine parts at inflated prices and kickbacks of nearly $600,000. Pinellas commissioners were surprised when the St. Petersberg Times reported that Foster, a key employee for front-runner Sequoia Voting Systems, had been indicted for the elections kickback scheme in Louisiana. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 5–6.)
30. ” . . . Testimony in Federal Court in Baton Rouge revealed that, in fact, Sequoia had engineered the complex scheme, an action which provides yet another election irony. Pinellas Commission Chairman Calvin Harris told the Times he assumed the state had checked out the competing companies while their machines were being certified. Not so, said Clay Roberts, director of the state’s Division of Elections, who maintained that background checks were a job for counties. So while the state of Florida was death on voting by convicted felons, there were no safeguards in place to prevent the votes from being counted by felons. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 6.)
31. It is interesting to note Deborah Clark’s capricious views on spending for voting technology. She was against spending $2 million to retrofit Pinellas County’s machines. But she was in favor of spending $14 million on Sequoia machines in the first place. ” . . . Although she hadn’t shown much concern over spending $14 million on the machines, she said that the $2 million expense of retrofitting Pinellas County’s new touch screen voting machines to generate a receipt for voters which would verify how their ballots were cast was unnecessary. The county’s touch screen voting system, built by Sequoia Voting Systems, was safe from tampering.” (Ibid.; p. 5.)
32. Before returning to the Florida vote subterfuge, let’s once again note the presence of gambling (“ . . . shocked, shocked!”) in the environment of the crooked voting machine companies. ” . . . For why this happens, there’s no better example than. . . . where else? Las Vegas. . . Back in 1993–94, many observers wondered why new Clark County elections chief Kathryn Ferguson would commit to what turned out to be tens of millions of dollars in expenditures to adopt Sequoia Pacific’s electronic voting machines. So determined was Ms. Ferguson to buy the Sequoia machines for Las Vegas that a former member of her elections department team stated Ferguson resorted to the simple exigency of having Sequoia Pacific’s representative send a list of bid specifications designed so that Sequoia’s machines were the only ones that could meet them. [Emphasis added.].” (Ibid.; p. 7.)
33. Note again the incestuous relationship between ES&S and Sequoia: “This hardly seems sporting. And it’s definitely illegal. Asked at the time, Ferguson said she had no concern that her acceptance of a job at Sequoia Pacific might appear to be a payoff for favors rendered. Today, Kathryn Ferguson is ES&S’s chief spokesman. She’s good to go.” (Idem.)
34. At times, the vote snafus in Florida were of truly comical proportions. In a 2002 primary election, Hillsborough County recorded a total of 118,699 votes for state attorney. Consider the following: ” . . . A total of 118,699 people turned out to vote countywide. But somehow, 125,891 voted in the race for state attorney.” (Idem.)
35. One town in Hillsborough county was remarkable for its performance in that same primary election: ” . . . For example, in the Aug. 31, 2002 primary, the population of an entire small town—12,498 voters—appeared at the polls in Hillsborough County and apparently decided not to vote in the race for state attorney. The town cast votes in all the other contests, but not in the race for state attorney. Had there been a town-wide secret pact?” (Ibid.; p. 3.)
36. In the 2004 election, there were two suspicious terror alerts—one in Warren County (Ohio) and one in Tallahassee (Florida). It appears altogether possible that the evacuations resulting from the alerts permitted vote tampering. ” . . . In Ohio, there was the famous ‘Warren County Lockdown’ because of ‘terror’ threats, and in Florida, a ‘bomb threat’ at the State Elections Office in Tallahassee. The State Elections Office in Tallahassee holds, of course, that state’s main tabulating computers. . .”
(“Back in the USSR”, p.4.)
37. ” . . . ‘The Republican-dominated (Warren Ohio) County threw out all the media and independent vote watchers when votes were being counted at the end of Election Day, claiming ‘homeland security’ issues.’ ” (Idem.)
38. The circumstances in Tallahassee are suspicious as well. Note the nature of the “threat” that necessitated the evacuation of the building housing the central tabulating computer. What happened during that evacuation? ” ‘State elections workers got off to a slow start this morning after Tallahassee police evacuated their building. Investigators called in the bomb squad after finding a suspicious package.’ The events seem strangely similar. Moreover, the explanation given in Florida lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, we discovered in an area that stores quilts and other artwork that is part of the department’s historic archive.’ The package turned out to be a bundle of documents, supposedly being blown by an air vent. . . . ‘Calling out the troops’ to protect Florida’s collection of quilts seems a dubious excuse. . . made far more suspicious by the unfortunate box’s proximity to the state’s central tabulating computer on the eve of the election. They must be some really important quilts.” (Ibid.; pp. 4–5.)
39. The last article (as of the time FTR#494 was recorded) that Daniel published on electoral fraud draws connections between Wally Hilliard (of Huffman Aviation) and Adnan Khashoggi, the Egyptian-born Saudi weapons dealer who was a principal figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. Daniel uncovered trips that Hilliard had made to Castro’s Cuba. “While both of the terrorist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center were students at Venice Florida’s Huffman Aviation, the flight school’s owner Wallace J. Hilliard, 72, of Naples, Fl., was simultaneously pursuing his own diplomatic opening to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. A photograph recently made available to the MadCowMorningNews shows a smiling Hilliard strapping a Rolex with the must-have diamond beveled-face onto the presumably grateful wrist of one of Fidel Castro’s top aides, Guillermo Garcia Frias, known in Cuba as ‘the Commandante of the Revolution.’ ”
(“Rogue State: the Covert Op that Ate the World” by Daniel Hopsicker; MadCowMorningNews; 1/4/2005; p. 1.)
40. What was Hilliard doing in Havana? ” . . . Hilliard was looking to cut a deal with Castro, said Rob Tiller, who provided the photograph, to buy a 10,000 acre cattle ranch on the island for the Mormon Church in Utah, reportedly in anticipation of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)
41. Next, Daniel ties Hilliard in with Adnan Khashoggi. They appear to be involved in an effort to secure landing rights on Rum Cay in the Caribbean, apparently in connection with drug smuggling activities. ” . . . But it’s Hilliard’s involvement with Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi billionaire and international fugitive, which is most intriguing. We learned of it from a business rival of the two men, both vying for rights to build a casino on a remote island in the Bahamas. Like a ‘bandit cab’ in the air, Hilliard’s Lear jet was flying without any apparent official sanction. Though the FAA license under which it operated has been suspended, (that of Air Florida, belonging to Pakistani Pervez Khan) the plane was making regular runs to the Bahamas. We received a photo taken in Rum Cay attesting to its presence bolstering one side in a struggle for control of the isolated island and its coveted runway, which had recently been upgraded for jets.” (Ibid.; p. 4.)
42. “Located 375 miles to the southeast of Ft. Lauderdale in the remote southeastern Bahamas, Rum Cay, we soon learned, is the very definition of ‘secluded.’ In fact, that’s its charm. The island once served as a refuge for pirates, and had been a center of gun-running during the American Civil War before growing to true prominence during Prohibition as a port used for boot-legging. What was going on at Rum Cay was that there was a new runway, which now allowed private jets like Hilliard’s Lear to land on the island. Local newspapers were running regular items with headlines like ‘Cops Seize $50 Million in Drugs.’ ” (Idem.)
43. “The reputed head of one group vying for control was a South African named Lesley Greyling, reportedly fronting for Khashoggi. News accounts about Mr. Greyling relied rather heavily on the ‘M’ word. . . . Mobster. But not a mobster of the ‘dese dem & dose’ variety. . . Greyling helmed a Palm Beach company, Members Service Corp., whose chairman was former Republican Governor of Florida Claude Kirk, and included noted attorney F. Lee Bailey, and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Greyling was said to be also considering helping the Saudi arms merchant and Iran-Contra middleman build a casino on the Gaza Strip. Saudis and the Mob and terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard all bumping chests together in the world’s Bermuda Triangle of narcotics trafficking. It’s a Strange Brew. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 4–5.)
44. Evidence suggests that Khashoggi may be involved with companies implicated in some of the funky vote technology. (Note that this link has not been completely “closed” as yet.) ” . . . Hilliard is in business, to cite one example, with Saudi billionaire arms dealer and international fugitive Adnan Khashoggi, whose name has now surfaced in connection with at least one, and possibly two, American election companies mired in controversy. The story which follows is of vital current interest only for what it reveals about the milieu in which the 2004 election was fixed. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 5.)
45. ” . . . Was Adnan Khashoggi a principal in a company which has been counting the votes of American servicemen overseas? Answer: highly likely. Both Election.com and Triad, the election company cited for causing most of the problems in Ohio, should receive close scrutiny for evidence of Khashoggi involvement.” (Ibid.; p. 7.)
46. Next, Daniel notes that Khashoggi has been involved with a number of enterprises named “Triad.” Whether he was in any way involved with the election machine company of the same name remains to be seen. “While there has been no suggestion of it anywhere in the media, the name ‘Triad’ was used extensively by Khashoggi at exactly the same time (the early 80’s) and in exactly the same place (Palm Beach, Florida) as the ‘Triad Governmental Systems’ involved in Ohio’s current election ‘difficulties.’ Khashoggi owned a number of companies named ‘Triad.’ Khashoggi owned ‘Triad International Marketing.’ ‘Northrop the Los Angeles-based aircraft and electronics manufacturer owes Triad International Marketing, S.A., a Liechtenstein corporation controlled by Khashoggi. $31 million in commissions on sales to the Saudi air force,’ reported the L.A. Times on August 29, 1987. Kashoggi owned ‘Triad America.’ ‘Creditors claim they are owed more than $100 million by Triad America and its subsidiaries. . . in Salt Lake City. Leonard Gumport, the court-appointed examiner, also is recommending that Triad America seek repayment of the $189.2 million loaned to companies controlled by the Khashoggis,’ reported the Salt Lake Tribune.” (Idem.)
47. “In 1982, Khashoggi owned Triad Farms in Kentucky. In The Bluegrass Conspiracy by Sally Denton, she revealed that the large drug smuggling operation called ‘The Company,’ [had] headquarters near Lexington, Kentucky, at Triad Farms, owned by Khashoggi. That’s just about the same time (1982) that TRIAD Governmental Systems was founded. From the company’s literature: ‘TRIAD Governmental Systems, Inc., is a nationally recognized corporation that is committed to providing quality, computer based systems for governmental voting units. Incorporated in 1982, TRIAD GSI was founded to provide quality support and services for Rapp Systems’ Election products, with election experience that spans a quarter of a century.” (Idem.)
48. Triad had problems as far back as 1988. “We also discovered that a strikingly similar allegation of Triad employee tampering was lodged against the company all the way back in 1988. . . According to Jackie Beville, a former employee of the Supervisor of Elections in Hillsborough County, Triad workers adjusted the software to clear up a ballot-counting problem shortly before the election, and the machinery should then have been re-certified following the work. When questioned she was told that Triad workers were just fixing problems caused by a lightning strike. Beville disputes that the weather had anything to do with the repair work. But even if it did, ‘My question is, why was it a secret? The party chairmen were not called in. The canvassing board was not notified. The Division of Elections was not notified.” (Idem.)
49. “ ‘Why was I forbidden to mention it? If the party chairmen and division had been notified, it may not have been a big deal. But it should have been made public. Everyone has a right to know.’ Triad manufactures punch-card voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November. The company is owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has donated money to the Republican Party as well as the election campaign of George W. Bush. Given the broad distribution of Triad voting systems in Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled against this company strike to the heart of the assumed result of the 2004 election. And not just Triad. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 7–8.)
Don’t worry ES&S: Hart-Intercivic may be getting most of the vote-theft attention this year, but you’re still a very component of the GOP’s vote-rigging scheme:
Sung to the tune of It’s Only A Paper Moon
I never feel a vote is real
When I’m away from paper
Out of the embrace of pen
The fix is in and we all pretend
Mmm, mm, mm, mm
To buy the fantasy for another term
Mmm, mm, mm, mm
The suits smile, the totals have a smell about them
Say..........
Its only a paper ballot
Sailing into a cardboard box
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If we burned down Hart InterCivic
Yeah, the rhymes get a little rough in places. My bad.
Woah. Did Anonymous counter-hack and firewall the vote-machines to stop a planned Rove hack? That might explain some stuff.
Great, Antonin Scalia seems to think the landmark Voting Rights Act is “a perpetuation of racial entitlement”:
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And if that doesn’t work, call in the Supremes:
Virginia just banned a type of voting machine used in ~20% of the state’s precincts that turn out to be appallingly easy to hack and had easily guessable passwords. And if they are hacked there’s no way to know. Investigators first discovered the security flaw on election day last November when machines in one county started shutting down randomly. Fortunately, experts are unable to point to any evidence of tampering on the machines. Unfortunately, we just have to hope that’s the case since there’s no way to know:
That’s some great spin:
Good news! The machines that allowed for untraceable tampering have been in use so long they’re going to have to be replaced soon!
Of course, that point at the end really was some pretty good news:
Yes, election officials are actually considering counting by hand again. Has America finally healed from the psychological trauma of the chad-pocalypse? What’s next?
So apparently a large number of Kentucky voters were voting for Democrats for offices like Attorney General and state Auditor, but for some reason decided to vote for the Tea Party guy that was lagging in the polls and pledge to dismantle the state’s highly popular healthcare program. Either that or something else was going on with the vote...:
“We’ve seen this before, of course. Too many times.”
Yep. And if America’s aging electronic voting machines, many of which were never vetted or vetted using standards that are now known to be flawed, don’t get replaced soon, we’re going to see this a lot more:
“Officials in nearly three dozen states told the Brennan Center they’re interested in replacing their antiquated voting machines but don’t have money to do so. Most states have used up the Help America Vote Act funds allocated to them in 2002 to purchase the flawed machines they now have. The issue with aging voting machines cuts across class lines: wealthier election districts in some states have already found the money to buy new machines, while the poorer districts around them remain stuck with failing machines.”
Classy.
With the GOP once again in the midst of some sort of meltdown and establishment Republicans panicking over the possibility that either Donald Trump or Ben Carson could become the GOP nominee while others point out that Ted Cruz has a very real chance of taking that prize, it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s still a very good chance that the next president could be a Republican no matter who the GOP nominates. All they have to do is stay relatively close enough in the polls in key swing states like Ohio to make a surprise surge seem plausible, and let the machines do the rest:
Are you ready for President Cruz? You should be.
Will this FINALLY force Georgia to update its highly hackable electronic voting machines? Let’s hope so because if this case doesn’t provoke widespread voter outrage than it’s pretty clear that Georgia has a problem with hackable voter minds too:
It turns out the computer running the Georgia state election systems was completely wiped just days after a lawsuit was filed by a group of voters suing to demonstrate the unreliability of the state election systems. On July 3 a group of elections reform advocates filed the suit and in July 7 the data was destroyed. Interesting timing.
Fortunately there were two backup servers. Unfortunately both of those were destroyed too. It’s possible the FBI has a copy of the destroyed data but that has yet to be confirmed yet.
It also turns out that this particular server in question was found to have a serious security hole that a security expert discovered in August of 2016. This researcher informed the state government of this hole but it remained open until the July 7th mystery wipe. According to the researcher this kind of security hole could have allowed a malicious actor to change election outcomes.
In addition, the state official in charge of the election system and the main defendant in the suit is Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a Republican who is running for governor in 2018. It’s all quite a ‘mystery’:
“The lawsuit, filed on July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.”
So a gaping security hole wasn’t fixed for six months, a period that included the November 2016 election and this year’s Georgia special election which certainly lends credence to the plaintiffs’ charge that the results of both of those elections can’t be trusted:
And don’t forget that George is one of those states that uses 15 year old machines that don’t keep a paper trail so there’s basically no reliable way to audit the results. The only hope for an audit was the wiped server:
So that happened. And while all suspicions will undoubtedly be directed towards ‘Russian hackers’ potentially messing around with the election results, let’s not forget that these 15 year old voting machines Georgia has been running some of the most blatantly hackable elections for yeas starting with the 2002 when when these joke electronic voting machines were first put into use with highly suspicious results. And those same blatantly hackable machines that are still in use today! That’s what this lawsuit is all about.
Well, at least no one mysterious died as part of this particular vote hack coverup. Could be worse!
With Georgia’s municipal elections fast approaching, it’s probably worth noting something important regarding the unverifiable and highly hackable electronic voting machines that prompted a lawsuit that, in turn, appears to have prompted the erasure of Georgia’s voting system servers and backups the day after the lawsuit moved from state to federal courts (with no explanation given thus far) and after it become public that the server was left completely accessible to the public with no password needed for months: Those same hackable voting machines are the exact same machines set to be used in the upcoming municipal elections, just FYI:
“We’ve been covering this entire mess for months now (years, really), but particularly since the lawsuit [PDF] was filed in July, after the somewhat surprising results from June’s U.S. House Special Election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, where GA’s former Republican Sec. of State Karen Handel reportedly defeated Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, but only on the state’s 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems. (He defeated her nearly 2 to 1 on the only verifiable ballots in the race, the mail-in paper votes. Everything else regarding the results is unverifiable speculation.)”
Mysterious unverifiable Diebold voting machines that Republicans just happen to exclusively win on. Those were at the center of the lawsuit file after the surprising results of the June special election:
And then we learn that the server which stored personal data for all of Georgia’s voters and administrative passwords for the state’s voting and tabulation systems was wiped clean:
And then we learn that this same server had been left open to the internet for 6 months, making all of that server content potentially available to anyone. And this vulnerability was left in place even after a security researcher notified the server administrator until after this year’s special election:
Next we learn that Georgia’s Republican state Attorney General’s office is no longer defending the Secretary of State, Kennesaw, or the state Elections Board on the matter. But we don’t know why the Attorney General’s office withdrew their support:
And while we have answers to none of the major questions surrounding this case, we do have an answer for one of the most urgent questions raised by this case: Do these same vulnerabilities exists today? And the answer is, of course, a resounding “Yes”:
So that’s the disturbing backdrop for Georgia’s voters heading into election day, which is why it’s important to keep in mind that the most effective way to thwart a riggable voting system is to have large victory margins. It’s a lot hard to get away with hacking a race that isn’t even close. It might seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to defeat a system apparently set up to manipulate your for vote is to vote. In large numbers. And ideally for a party that doesn’t support rampant vote manipulation.
What a coincidence: a number of other jurisdictions in the US continue to use insecure electronic voting machines with no paper trail. But that’s changing. At least in Georgia, Delaware, Philadelphia where officials are planning on replacing their insecure voting machines with new machines for 2020. But the new voting machines just happen to still be very vulnerable to hacking and mass fraud. Surprise!
The new machines these jurisdictions are planning on purchasing are from ES&S. They do at least have a paper trail in the form of paper slips of the selections for each voter that can be used for audits and recounts. But here’s the problem: the information on the paper slips isn’t simply printed out. It’s stored both as printed text and a barcode. And if there’s a recount, it’s the barcode that’s actually read in by machines, not the printed text. And that means it’s entirely possible for hackers to execute a hack where the printed text accurately reflects the selection of the voter but the barcode reflects hacked vote selections. Security experts, including those at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, are already warning that this barcode technology is vulnerable, but officials in these jurisdictions have decided that this is secure enough and they’re going to go ahead with putting these machines in place by 2020:
“Many states have adopted what experts call a much more secure option — paper ballots that voters mark with a pen or pencil and that are then scanned and tallied. But election officials in Georgia, Delaware and Philadelphia have rejected that option in favor of the barcode devices, saying they are secure enough and better suited for many voters with disabilities.”
The barcode paper trail is ‘secure enough’. That’s the conclusion of election officials in Georgia, Delaware, and Philadelphia despite that the fact that security experts are warning that this system still has the exactly same fundamental vulnerability that paperless voting systems have: they can be hacked without voters noticing because its the barcode, not the printed text, that’s actually used to read the paper slips:
“It basically turns the system into one that has all of the well-known problems that paperless … voting machines have...You have to trust the software that’s being used to cast the vote.”
Given the obvious problems with this system, it should probably come as no surprise that when Georgia lawmakers advanced a bill to approve of these barcode machines the votes split long party lines. Republican lawmakers hailed the vulnerable technology as ‘bringing Georgia into the 21st century’, of course:
Keep in mind that Georgia has long been the state with the most voting machine anomalies in the 21st century so far, starting in 2002 when electronic voting machines were first pushed on the states by the federal government. For instances, the computer running the Georgia state election systems was completely wiped just days after a lawsuit was filed by a group of voters suing to demonstrate the unreliability of the state election systems in 2017. All the backups were wiped too. And as the article notes, Georgia was actually sued over its insecure voting machines last year in an effort to prevent the machines from being used in the 2018 elections and a judge agreed that the existing paperless machines posed an unacceptable risk. But the judge also determined that there wasn’t enough time to replace them before election day. So it’s particularly ominous to see Georgia on the list of states where these barcode systems are being embraced. Especially when only the Republicans are doing the embracing:
So a judge ruled just last year that, yes, Georgia’s voting machines posed an unacceptable risk. Then a commission set up by Brian Kemp, who was defending the existing voting machines in that law suit, recommends replacing Georgia’s machines with new machines that just happen to basically pose the same hacking risk. That’s not super suspicious or anything.
With the 2020 election season now now in full swing, the ever-urgent questions surrounding the security of US election systems are once again even more urgent than normal. So here’s an update on that ongoing mystery surrounding Georgia’s election systems used for the 2016–2018 elections. First, recall how, back in October of 2017, it was reported that Atlanta-based security researcher, Logan Lamb, discovered in August of 2016 that millions of voter records on a server at the Center of Election Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs Georgia’s state election system, had been openly accessible over the internet for at least six months. The server was described as a statewide staging location for key election-related data and the security vulnerability wasn’t fixed for six months after Lamb reported it, meaning this vulnerability was still in place when the November 2016 elections took place. A lawsuit was filed on July 3, 2017, and days later the server was wiped.
Also recall how that lawsuit happened to be filed after the special election in Georgia for a US House seat in April of 2017, where Republican Karen Handel consistently beat the Democrat John Ossoff only on the 100% unverifiable Diebold electronic voting machines. Ossoff won overwhelmingly in districts that used mail-in paper ballots. We also learned that the server in question contained the personal data for all Georgia voters and administrative passwords for the state’s voting and tabulation systems. Two backup servers were wiped and “degaussed three times” in August of 2017, the day after the lawsuit was move from state to federal court.
Ok, so here’s the update: Logan Lamb, the security researcher who first discovered this vulnerability, finally got a copy of the server to analyze it in December of 2019. The copy was created by the FBI in March of 2017. As the article notes, Georgia state officials have long asserted that they found no evidence that election-related data
was compromised, but they also long refused to allow the server to be subject to independent analysis.
So Lamb eventually gets a copy of the server from the FBI. What did he find? He found signs that the server was indeed hacked. The evidence suggested the server was compromised as far back as December of 2014 and that the hacker exploited a bug that provided full control of the server. 20 minutes after that hack, the hacker patched the server, which Lamb described as the sign of a seasoned hacker who was trying to avoid allowing anyone else to exploit the vulnerability they found. In other words, the hack probably wasn’t just some random hacker but instead someone who was looking for the exclusive ability to hack the server. Surprise!
Lamb also found that the server logs — which is needed to know what may have been altered or stolen — only went back to November 10, 2016, two days after the 2016 election. The way Lamb describes it, there’s no valid excuse for wipe these logs which points towards foul play. He also found evidence that election-related files were deleted from the on March 2, 2017, which is soon after a colleague alerted Kennesaw State University officials that the election server remained vulnerable to hackers six months after Lamb first alerted them.
Oh, and there is no evidence the FBI ever actually examined the copy of the server, which is bad in and of itself but amazingly bad in the context of a national freak out over ‘Russian hackers’.
So, more than three years after Lamb notified Georgia that millions of voter records are available on the open internet, and more than two years after we learn that the server and its backups were wiped in response to lawsuits, he finally gets access to a copy of the server the FBI made in March of 2017 and apparently never examined. Upon examination, Lamb finds the server was hacked in December of 2014 and yet the server logs were partially wiped and only go back to November 10 of 2016, two days after the 2016 election. And elections-related files were deleted in early March of 2017, soon after Kennesaw State University officials were warned that the server was still vulnerable six months after Lamb first alerted them. Gee, might there be some foul play here? Hmmm...:
“In late December 2019, the plaintiffs were finally able to obtain a copy of the server’s contents that the FBI made in March 2017 and retained — after the state allegedly dragged its feet in securing the image.”
Better late than never but wow that is late for an issue this urgent. So Lamb finally gets a copy of the server from March of 2017 from the FBI, which means it doesn’t cover the April 2017 special election. And, of course, he finds evidence it was hacked in December of 2014 by a hacker who appears to have known what they were doing:
And he also discovered that the server logs had been entirely wiped up to November 10, 2016, two days after the 2016 election. So while there’s evidence the server was hacked, much of the evidence that would tell us about the nature of how that hack was exploited wiped:
In addition, there’s evidence that election-related files were deleted on March 2, 2017, just after Kennesaw State University officials were notified that the server still hadn’t been fixed six months after Lamb’s initial warning:
But perhaps the most disturbing twist in all of this is that it’s not even clear the FBI ever examined the server copy they made, despite the US being in the middle of a massive freak out over alleged Russian hackers engaging in election meddling. It’s as if evidence of Republican Party hacking was deemed to be something the FBI explicitly didn’t want to find:
And now Georgia state officials are arguing that the new election system that’s going to used in the 2020 elections has made these questions about what happened in the past irrelevant, indicating that the state is going to continue aggressively blocking this investigation despite these bombshell findings:
It’s worth recalling that Georgia’s new election system for 2020 that was found to be vulnerable in the National Academies of Sciences report was approved by the state legislature along party lines, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats opposing it. Because of course.
So there’s now evidence strongly pointing in the direction of Georgia’s elections appear to have been rigged by Republicans since 2016, evidence of an ongoing coverup, evidence that the FBI doesn’t care, and evidence that these problems are going to continue even under the new voting system that was supposed to fix this. Which is evidence of something much, much worse than just vote rigging and a anti-Democrat strategy that is fundamentally anti-democracy. In other words, a vote for the Republican Party at this point effectively doubles as a vote against the power of your own vote.
Here’s a pair of articles that would sadly be expected during a normal election year but take on a whole new significance during the 2020 pandemic election where discrediting the integrity of the vote and alleging massive voter fraud has become central to President Trump’s re-election strategy. They’re sadly expected articles because they’re articles about problems with Georgia’s election systems. And as we’ve routinely seen since 2002, when electronic voting machines where thrust onto the states, Georgia has consistently faced charges of operating extremely insecure voting systems. That includes the 2017 lawsuit over highly anomalous 2016 voting patterns that consistently favored Republicans that involved an election server getting wiped by state officials that forced Georgia to update their voting machines for 2020. And yet, as we also saw, the new “ballot marking” devices that Georgia opted for are still highly vulnerable to hacking and the approval of their use was passed a strict party-line vote, with all Republicans voting in favor of the new machines and all Democrats against it. So we’re entering into 2020 with Georgia once again facing highly credible allegations of riggable voting systems.
But, of course, 2020 is also the year of a pandemic election, when mail-in voting is set to play an unprecedented role at the same time Republicans have doubled down on a strategy of preemptively invalidating the upcoming results by declaring mail-in voting to be inherently fraudulent and ripe for double-voting. We even had Trump tell his supporters in North Carolina to vote twice to ‘test the system’. So, of course, Georgia has found a way to combine both insecure election systems with a giant double-voting fiasco. And it’s the kind of fiasco that points to how the Republicans attempt to invalidate the upcoming vote simply by confusing enough voters.
First, here’s an article about how Georgia’s election system managed to allow around 1,000 voters to vote twice during the primaries earlier this year. Given that double-voting is actually a very rare phenomena the fact that 1,000 did this is highly anomalous.
So what prompted mass double-voting during the primaries? It appears be general confusion related to the fact that early-voting had started in the primaries in March before they were delayed until May due to the pandemic. Some individuals who voted during that initial early voting period were concerned that their votes hadn’t been recorded after the primary was delayed so they voted in-person during the May primaries. The problem was that election officials — described as over-worked and under-trained — weren’t familiar with the procedures for accounting for people who had previously voted. In addition, the state databases that contained the information on who had previously voted hadn’t been reliably updated. Voters who requested a mail-in ballot but decided to vote in-person were supposed to bring the mail-in ballot to the polling place. If they didn’t, poll workers had to check a database of who already voted but the database didn’t contain information on whether or not they already voted. Only if they had requested a mail-in ballot. It sounds like the partisan make up of the people who voted twice was around 60% Democratic voters and 40% Republican, adding fuel to GOP’s mass voter fraud narrative.
Another disturbing finding in all this is that the new election systems can apparently generate an unlimited number of voting cards for a single voter, which is considered a major electoral security flaw.
So after a court ordered Georgia to replace its election systems, the state managed to replace it with a new system that ripe with new vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities that have become apparent in the middle of the very first election with this new system and include allowing people to vote twice. And now Georgia’s officials are deciding whether or not prosecute those voters:
“Election controversies are nothing new in Georgia. The state has aggressively culled voter rolls and, until this year, it used what critics called the most insecure voting machinery in the U.S. Last year, it replaced its voting technology. The June 9 primary was the statewide debut of new, computerized ballot-marker voting machines supplied by Dominion Voting Systems. On primary day, however, in-person voters had to wait hours in line after delays involving some of these machines, which are now the subject of a lawsuit.”
From the most insecure voting machinery in the US to brand new hardware this year. Brand new hardware that was still vulnerable to basic problems like an inability reliably check whether or not someone had already voted. It’s ongoing vulnerabilities like this that have plaintiffs from the Coalition for Good Governance suing to get Georgia’s election systems once again gutted and replaced before the November election:
And then there’s the recent discovery that the election systems were allowing an unlimited number of voter access cards issued to the same voter with no override pass-code. So any random poll worker potentially has the ability to issue multiple voter cards per voter, the kind of incident that the Trump campaign has made clear it will pounce on to spread allegations of Democratic voter fraud:
And now here’s an article with more on the ongoing lawsuit to force Georgia to re-replace its election systems. The heart of the lawsuit is based on the idea that ballot-marking machines — machines were voters select who they want to vote for on the machine, which then prints out a marked ballot that the voter is supposed to manually review before finally submitting — don’t represent an adequate security measure against manipulated votes because studies have shown voters don’t actually check the printed out ballots. It sounds like the judge in the case is open-minded to the plaintiffs’ case.
Interestingly, one of the core arguments for the state in defending its election systems is all the great strides Georgia has made in recent years to improve and secure its election infrastructure. It’s the kind of argument that implicitly acknowledges that the system hadn’t actually been secure before that. After all, you can’t make great strides on security if there weren’t major security holes. It points to one of the major complications in addressing election security in America at this point: the US has failed so miserably for so long at addressing the glaring security holes in its election systems created by the national shift to electronic voting machines in 2002 that if the US ever tried to meaningfully reckon with election system insecurities at this point it would be forced to come to terms with the reality that the Republicans have probably been stealing elections for decades now and that a whole lot of existing laws were created by people who never should have been elected in the first place:
“The lawsuit originally filed in June 2017 targeted the outdated, paperless, touchscreen voting machines Georgia had used since 2002. The state last year bought a new election system that includes touchscreen machines that print a paper ballot that’s read by a scanner. It was purchased from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million.”
Yes, this lawsuit in 2020 was originally filed regarding the machines Georgia used in 2017. Machines that had been in use since 2002. And yet the lawyers for the state are defending the current system based on all of the improvements they made in recent years. So the state’s defense is basically an acknowledgment that Georgia’s election systems were garbage from 2002 until this year. Garbage that consistently ‘red-shifted’ and led to a complain GOP domination of the state:
And then the state lawyers also point to new state laws written last year that required a rigorous post-election audit. This defense, of course, ignores how the whole point of the suit against the ballot-marking machines is that the paper trail they produced doesn’t actually allow for meaningful audits because voters don’t actually check the generated ballots. In other words, an audit of hacked ballot-marking machines won’t reveal a problem. This is why hand-marked ballots are inherently more secure:
But that issue involving ballot-marking machines still only impacts in-person voting . Then there’s the issue with the rules for scanner machines that read in the mail-in ballots sent in by voters. As the plaintiffs point out, Georgia’s doesn’t require that scanner machines count or flag every mark on the ballot. So, for example, if a voter fills in an oval, but only partially, the scanner can skip counting that vote without flagging it for manual review. It’s the kind of shortcoming that is ripe for systematic partisan rigging of the count. For example, if optical scanners in urban districts are more likely than their suburban and rural counterparts to be calibrated in a manner that makes the urban scanner more likely to skip an edge-case oval on a ballot that could make it more likely that votes go net-uncounted for individual candidates in Democratic-leaning districts vs Republican districts:
Having machines that auto-flag these edge cases could have avoided this but as this ongoing lawsuit makes clear Georgia never misses an opportunity to give the GOP an opportunity to cheat. Even the brand new system that was mandated by a court is filled with vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities of basic features like looking up to see if someone has already voted or the ability to ensure voters are only issued a single voter card. Vulnerabilities that are perfectly situated to fuel the GOP’s claims of massive double-voting. And that’s part of what’s going to make the inevitable upcoming stories of electoral chaos in Georgia so tricky to respond to this year. Because there’s definitely going to be voting shenanigans in Georgia like there is every election from the Republicans. It raises the question of what would happen if the Democrats responded to the GOP fraudulent hysterics about massive Democratic voter fraud by pointing out that we haven’t really ever had a serious independent retrospective forensic examination of past elections and allegations of electronic voting machine manipulation and that maybe 2021 would be a good year to have that retrospective forensic examination in light of the GOP’s sudden interest in voter fraud.