Usually the best thing to do is scream loudly into the spy microphones if you think an election is about to be stolen. Especially if it's your close relatives doing it. Could disrupt the possibility of nuclear holocaust, for the time being. Metaphysical pressure builds up in closed-loop social and human systems as well as technological ones. The earth weeps black tears for the black deeds she has seen.

Well maybe now, since an unqualified poor person won on the hackable machines, we can finally get some action.

Of course, it seems they want to portray this as a voting booth problem, but since ACORN is gone now, what do they have?

If this "voter fraud" story has legs, I am a Greek God!

Brad, I'm sure you know about this. Just at the mainstream media is finally getting a whiff of the facts they've been suppressing regarding the unreliability of voting machines, now the lies that the mainstream media published on ACORN are all being nakedly exposed. How truly despicable the US media is. Accepting the media's reporting of lies as fact, Congress destructively and maliciously cut funding to ACORN based on the extremist right pimp. Congress has now cleared ACORN of wrongdoing. Whoops.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2...ary-report-clears-acorn/

Larry @ #2 ~ "...now, since an unqualified poor person won on the hackable machines, we can finally get some action."

HAhHhehahIIIIihaeeeee!

Brad,

You may remember an election in IA I believe, Potowatamie Country comes to mind, a small election but some sort of Republican primary, in which a college student on a lark decided to run in the election agains an incumbent Repub who was well-liked and had evidently done a pretty good job. The college student with no campaigning ala Greene ended up getting the most votes. Naturally, the elections officials were suspicious. In this case, they had paper and were able to recount. Turned out that the "ballot definition" for the optiscans was not done properly. Without paper, of course, this case would have been just like the SC debacle. I tried to find a link to this happening on google and couldn't find what I was looking for, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the election snafus involving e-voting that was reported on by BradBlog. Maybe you remember this case. It would be a good one to use to remind people that this e-voting problem is nono-partisan, inherent when you use this technology to count votes.

Expert / M.I.T. computer expert weighs in on ES&S 14.5% UNDERVOTE RATE from FL-13 on the same paperless DRE-junk machines used in the SC election...

"Charles Stewart's Bubble Chart: Voting Machine Implementation's relation to Sarasota's Massive Undervote Rate"

http://www.youtube.com/u...edean#p/u/32/4acC583ZfWc

(The above is cobbled together stills and video. Did the best I could as we were not allowed to film in the Tallahassee court room. Despite having filled out all the required paperwork, we were denied video rights at the last minute by Judge William L. Gary. The scratchy audio is culled from a camera I kept running under my jacket.

**Features insight/ analysis from computer programmer, engineer, and activist Leonard Schmiege; also Ion Sancho, Hero Supervisor of Elections ("Hacking Democracy") comments on video logs mysteriously disappearing from the Sarasota Warehouse**)

Great job on Nicole Sandler, today, Brad!

The question is who is backing Greene, that he gets his own hacker to pitch for him?

To Steve:

Here is the BradBlog link you ar looking for.

Here is a link from my blog about the incident.

In 2004, I was the Asst. Director of Special Programs for a huge political organization in one of the most highly contested states in the nation. I was invited to a panel convened to discuss, mainly, the adoption of DRE/paper receipt systems. After spending an inordinate amount of time researching the ins-and-outs, I was absolutely awed with the unreliability and the ease with which manipulation of these machines can occur, as well as the incestuous relationships between-and the highly partisan nature of-the manufacturers.

What shocked me most was that after half an hour of speaking (and watching me out of the corner of his eye feverishly pulling pages from my three inch thick file of research) and another twenty minutes of ignoring my attempts to ask a question, when I was finally able to speak he hadn't a single answer to the most basic queries. Two dozen questions later, he finally said, quite tersely, "Look, I don't know, I just sell the things." Then the meeting adjourned and he literally fled the building.

This was one of the greatest moments in my young career, and I was greeted with congratulations from the audience.

The machines, which were a mystery to the man selling them, sit in my polling station today.

Check out Black Box Voting, the supreme site for information on this issue: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

In the reporting I've seen, it would appear as though Mr. Green first tried to pay the $10,400 filing fee at Democratic HQ with a personal check.

When that didn't work he apparently "walked down te street" and opened a "checking account under the name of his campaign" and then came back and paid the fee with that check.

http://www.theatlantic.c...th-personal-check/58146/

This sounds very odd. What bank will open a 'business account' without proof of business? What bank will allow a customer to immediately draw a significant amount of money from a just-opened account without a holding period?

Maybe Mr. Green already had an account at NBSC and they cut him some slack. But if this account is true it sounds like the bank cut corners.

Bill Hemmer's remark, "Now I can understand in 2000, a difference of 537 votes and we hold the Presidency up for 36, 37 days, but this guy got almost 60 thousands...or, sorry, 60 percent of the vote," reveals an incredible lack of understanding of the issue of election fraud by way of a hack.

The numbers reported by these unverifiable DREs can be whatever the hacker decides them to be. Even if Green received no more than a handful of votes statewide, the ES&S central tabulators could report that Green received 60% of the vote.

When Brad uses the word "unverifiable," he means just that. These machines are electronic black holes. What goes into them on election day is forever lost to us, and about the only means to check against that is to individually canvass all of the voters.

Clint Curtis did that as part of his challenge when he lost to Tom Feeney, but Congress refused to accept that evidence.

One would hope that this latest farce will finally provide the impetus to meaningful electoral reform, but the problem for both Democrats and Republicans is that to admit that e-voting is unverifiable is to call into question the validity of every election which has been conducted not only on DREs but on optical scans where the machine count rather than the paper fed into the optical scanners determined the election.

i bow to clyburn and rawl and chant..we are not worthy

Hacking to 60% or 65% can work in a fraudster's favor. In many states (such as here in Wisconsin) the cost incurred by the losing candidate to file an election challenge or recount increases with the percent by which the candidate lost.

In WI, if the vote total for the jusrisdiction of the office is within 0.5% then the cost to the loser to file for recount is $0. If the vote percentage difference is >0.5 and WI Statute 9.01(1)(ag)1,1m, and 2

If SC has a similar, graduated fee/cost structure for election challenges, then hacking to 60% would be beneficial to the hacking.

The above assumes some malicious manipulation of the machinery. There is no was to verify or refute that speculation.

Hacking to 60% or 65% can work in a fraudster's favor. In many states (such as here in Wisconsin) the cost incurred by the losing candidate to file an election challenge or recount increases with the percent by which the candidate lost.

In WI, if the vote total for the jusrisdiction of the office is within 0.5% then the cost to the loser to file for recount is $0. If the vote percentage difference is >0.5 and <=2% then the cost is $5 per ward. If the difference is more than 2% the feee is the full cost of the recount as determined by the re-counting election official.
Source:
WI Statute 9.01(1)(ag)1,1m, and 2

If SC has a similar, graduated fee/cost structure for election challenges, then hacking to 60% would be beneficial to the hacking.

The above assumes some malicious manipulation of the machinery. There is no was to verify or refute that speculation.

""Clint Curtis did that as part of his challenge when he lost to Tom Feeney, but Congress refused to accept that evidence.""

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." (Josef Stalin)

$56 billion spent and still no guarantee .You have to wonder if "secure elections" was ever the intention.

Here's a research topic: which political party was in power in each state when they adopted the DRE voting machines?

I keep remembering the pledge by the CEO of Diebold promising that Ohio would go for Bush in 2004.

Tom Stickler @ 16:

It varies from state to state, of course. It was a Republican in OH at the moment you mention.

But prior to that, most notably, it was supposed Democrats in MD (Linda Lamone, State Election Dir.) and GA (SoS Cathy Cox) who approved the use of Diebold DREs statewide in 2002 --- the first two states in the union to do that.

Great job reporting on this one. I put a bunch of BradBlog links at the end of a little quicky on voting machine diagnostics specific to the parameters we are seeing in South Carolina, the new lead at http://www.BlackBoxVoting.org -
http://www.bbvforums.org...ms/messages/8/81009.html

Here ya go - reprinting here.

As you've probably heard, a South Carolina election yielded implausible --- some would say impossible --- results this month. I'm following up on tips provided by some people on the ground there, and Brad Friedman, of the Brad Blog, has been doing an excellent job of reporting the daily updates on this unusual situation; I've included several links to his stories at the end of this article.

Just a note or two on the questions that really need to be answered at this point in time:

1. The profile of this particular anomaly appears to rule out voting machine malprogramming at the county level. Whatever went wrong in South Carolina voting machines happened (most likely) in Omaha, or (less likely) at the state board of elections level.

Therefore, it's about time that we find out the name(s) of the programmers in Omaha who coded the iVotronic cartridges that went out to South Carolina.

Typically, ES&S programs its iVotronics in Omaha, or sometimes with a subcontractor.

2. A results flip on voting machines can be caused by inverting candidate ID numbers in the internal mapping. This can happen either at the voting machine level (and could produce a global effect, transversing all precinct machines), or it could happen at the central tabulation level.

- To shed more light on this, more specifics are needed on the L&A testing, to learn the number of machines tested and whether a script was used for the L&A test or real voters physically entered votes. MY BET: Not many machines were tested, perhaps 1-3 percent of them, and they made ample use of scripts to test. More on why this could be important in a minute.

I also want to see a complete comparison of 100% of the poll tape results with the final tabulation. This helps pinpoint any source of any voting machine misprogramming.

The candidate ID number assigned on the memory cartridges needs to be compared with the number assigned on the Unity tabulation system.

Here's how internal Candidate ID swapping works. Note that it can be purposeful or accidental:

Let's say the candidate mapping is supposed to go as follows ...

Name of Candidate / Internal mapping number
Vic Rawl / 820
Alvin Greene / 670

With this mapping, each vote for Vic Rawl is tagged to internal ID number 820, each vote for Alvin Green is tagged to internal ID number 670. On the screen, you see the names spelled out, but the computer inserts the data into a candidate ID number field, which is hidden from public view.

Now, without changing any spelling on the names, nor any positioning on the ballot, you simply swap the internal ID numbers in the data table(accidentally or on purpose). Like this:

Vic Rawl / 670
Alvin Greene / 820

Vic Rawl's votes get mapped into the data tables corresponding to ID 670, Alvin Greene's to the 820 portion of the table.

The beauty of using the candidate ID field to swap votes is that the references in all other parts of the system will automatically swap the data as well.

I've experimented with candidate ID swapping in the Diebold GEMS system. It's a gorgeous little hack - and you can do it in any precinct, or even just with the absentee votes, a perilous process here in Washington as votes float in AFTER election day to be counted.

Any time the absentee results have an opposite trend from the Election Day results, internal ID mapping may be the place to look.

Now, this ID mapping swap can happen on the front end from the election management system used to program the memory cartridges, or it can happen on the back end, on the central tabulation machine as votes are added up on Election Night.

The reason I'm so interested in Omaha's potential role in South Carolina is that if there was a candidate ID mapping swap, if it came through the state board of elections into the tabulator system through some patch or update, the poll tape results would NOT match the Election Night results. A complete set of matching poll tapes would point AWAY from any state involvement in the tabulator (or any middleman results reporting system), and TOWARDS Omaha's front-end programming.

If an internal candidate ID swap took place on the front end, it would have been the vendor that programs the cartridges.

There is one additional wrinkle: A Logic and Accuracy Test should catch this. But as we know, L&S tests don't always catch voting machine miscounts, and the DRE machines often use a computer script, rather than real voter input, to execute the L&A test.

MORE DIAGNOSTICS

Copies of all Unity and iVotronic audit logs need to be printed out and examined.

The memory cartridges need to be examined by dumping their contents and reviewing the code and data.

I think we'll be seeing some interesting forensics on this one.

This issue needs to get into Federal Courts. I am not convinced that South Carolina's political parties, election commissioners, elections administrators, and state elected officials don't like for elections to be riggable. In my state (Texas) elections administrators will not periodically examine election software in spite of a statutory requirement to do so (http://manaugh.googlepages.com/). Nor will they investigate citizen complaints of vote flipping and misrecoding of ballot chices (http://manaugh.googlepages.com/blankenshipcomplaint2008). Both parties make having some kind of paper trail a party platform, but years pass with no action on the part of the Republican-controlled legislature. Rather they spend a lot of energy arguing the need for photo IDs to solve voter impersonation at polls --- a non-problem.

Bev @ 18:

Excellent analysis. I'll get it to the Rawl campaign ASAP (on the presumption that you haven't already).

And, by way of my usual conservatism --- for which I'm given absolutely zero credit --- I should note that the ID swap you point to could have happened non-maliciously. As in, an accident. Seems an unlikely accident, of course, if it happened, but it could have been a programming error/typo. Potentially. FWIW. Just noting that

Thanks for the smart insight.

Brad,

Wonderful that you'll get the information to the right places. It took me months to recover from my surgery and I got so far behind --- plus all the NEW breaking stuff --- that I'm feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed. But getting back in the game, little by little. And down 37 pounds now, accelerated by removal of several internal organs. Now ya don't see THAT on America's Biggest Loser, now do ya!