Archiv: electronic voting / counting / doing-nothing-wrong-they-promise-programs / systems


26.06.2023 - 10:06 [ OSETinstitute.org ]

Electronic Voting Banned in Germany

(Sep 2, 2022)

Earlier this year, there was an important legal dispute in Germany, about whether electronic voting machines were legal for use in German government elections. The dispute was decided by the German Constitutional Court (similar to the U.S. Supreme Court), and the short answer was „no.“ Now, we have available an official English translation of the ruling. As I had been told before, the ruling really does seem to ban any kind of computing equipment from being used in German elections. The legal reasoning was interesting enough that I thought I‘d share one reflection on it. The basis for the ruling was the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (similar in function to the U.S. Constitution) and the principle that „all essential steps in the elections are subject to public examinability.“

26.06.2023 - 10:00 [ Library of Congress ]

Germany: Constitutional Court Decision on Electronic Voting

(Mar. 25, 2009)

The Court invalidated the Federal Voting Machine Regulation (Bundeswahlgeräteverordnung, Sept. 3, 1975, BUNDESGESETZBLATT I at 2459, as amended, available at http://bundesrecht.juris.de/bwahlgv/index.html). This Regulation failed to require transparent control mechanisms for ensuring an accurate vote count and thereby violated article 38 and article 20, paragraphs 1 and 2, of the Basic Law (the Federal Constitution) (Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz, GG) [in English translation], http://www.iuscomp.org/gla/statutes/GG.htm#20 (last visited Mar. 23, 2009)). Article 38 guarantees free and equal elections, whereas article 20, paragraph 1, requires that governmental power be based on elections and paragraph 2 guarantees that laws and regulations are in conformity with the Constitution.

26.06.2023 - 09:25 [ NYmag.com ]

Trump Wants to Make America Vote Like It’s the 1960s

(Aug. 16, 2022)

Republicans under Trump’s leadership view voting as a privilege that should be zealously guarded against those who can’t affirmatively prove their eligibility on demand or who aren’t able or willing to stand in long lines on Election Day under the watchful eyes of professional intimidators. All the fatuous talk these days of the GOP being the party of the working class is hard to square with its determination to maintain a throwback system of voting that makes it hard for working people to cast ballots during restricted hours on a weekday.

15.02.2023 - 21:38 [ theGuardian.com ]

‚Team Jorge‘ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video

A covert team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media have been exposed in a new investigation. The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym ‚Jorge‘. In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team explained how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking methods to access Gmail and Telegram accounts

15.02.2023 - 09:34 [ theGuardian.com ]

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.

Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.

15.02.2023 - 09:13 [ Haaretz ]

Hacking, Extortion, Election Interference: These Are the Tools Used by Israel‘s Agents of Chaos and Manipulation

Team Jorge, this investigation believes, works with a residential proxy provider, in order to provide its avatars with local digital identities in the form of real IPs that cannot be found by social media sites.

Team Jorge also seems to work with a cellular provider that serves AIMS in a similar manner, likely giving avatars their local numbers and supplying the infrastructure needed to grant them SMS verification.

The deliberately misleading technical infrastructure also serves to hide such actors. The process creates another layer of plausible deniability between, in this case, Team Jorge, the client and the campaign’s content, and helps them further mask the truth. Or, as Hanan put it in one presentation: „My signal is from Indonesia, the WhatsApp from Hong Kong, Telegram from Germany. And none of them are my numbers.“

15.02.2023 - 08:12 [ Haaretz ]

The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide

From a small office building, a group of Israelis is spreading global disruption

30.06.2021 - 19:48 [ NYC Board of Elections / Twitter ]

The Board of Elections conducts rigorous and mandatory pre-qualification testing for every election. It has been determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System (EMS). EMS produces Cast Vote Records (CVR) from ballot images. RCV software uses the CVR to produce unofficial results. When the cast vote records were extracted for the first pull of RCV results, it concluded both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records. Board staff has removed all test ballot images from the system and will upload election night results, cross-referencing against election night reporting software for verification. The cast vote record will be re-generated and the RCV rounds will be re-tabulated.

The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results.

30.06.2021 - 19:18 [ Gothamist.com ]

State Board of Elections Approves Software To Tabulate Ranked-Choice Primary Results

(25.05.2021)

The approval comes after more than 18 months of back and forth between the city and state over the process required to test and implement the Universal Ranked-Choice Voting Tabulator, the software selected by the city which was developed by a non-partisan non-profit called The Ranked Choice Resource Center. It wasn’t until January of this year that state officials finally agreed to allow the mandatory testing and certification to take place.

30.06.2021 - 18:35 [ Douglas E Schoen / theHill.com ]

New York‘s mayoral primary puts ranked-choice voting under the national spotlight

(27.06.2021)

My firm, Schoen-Cooperman Research, has also worked on referenda aimed at passing ranked-choice voting in cities and states across the country.
ADVERTISEMENT

I support the method because, by design, it delivers a more representative outcome and gives voters more choice than a winner-take-all system. In addition, ranked-choice voting discourages negative campaigning and elects fewer extreme candidates.

30.06.2021 - 18:31 [ The Associated Press / Twitter ]

BREAKING: Election officials in New York City have retracted their latest vote totals for the Democratic primary for mayor. They say 135,000 test ballots were inadvertently included in the count.

07.01.2021 - 10:48 [ Nachrichtenagentur Radio Utopie ]

Regarding the US presidential election in 2020: We are done with democracy simulations

(7. Februar 2020)

After the Iowa fraud and Bernie Sanders‘ Al Gore style capitulation (no recount / „recalculation“ of an in broad daylight rigged caucus) and the deafening silence of each and every progressive lawmaker, even from the Squad, we do not support any candidate in this election and furthermore question its authenticity and legitimacy. From this day on, we will rarely post any news to this election-without-a-choice.

We would like to ask you: would the Trumpolini in the White House watch, just for even a few hours, the Republican Party doing this to his campaign? The progressives in the Democratic Party let this happen for days and kept their head down. And Millions of good-willing, hard working people on the ground were let down and deceived, again.

We’re not going along with this dirty game, which can be played again and again and again on people who tolerate it once without resistance.

Notably, we have calculated with this development years ago and described a possibility how Bernie Sanders could have become US president (article in German). Let that sink in, just for a minute or two.

Since decades, only (far) right-wingers, warmongers and egoists have real candidates and political parties.

So, „vote“ yourself.

27.12.2020 - 06:35 [ Washington Post ]

How the Iowa caucuses came ‘crashing down,’ under the watchful eye of the DNC

(Feb. 16, 2020)

The DNC ordered and paid for a security audit of the software, which was completed by NCC Group, a Britain-based cybersecurity firm. Out of the review, which also involved threat assessment conducted with the national party as well as officials in Iowa and Nevada, came directions to guard the name of the vendor, and to take the software live as late as possible to prevent it from getting into the hands of hackers, according to multiple people who participated or had knowledge of the exercises.

27.12.2020 - 06:14 [ KCRG.com ]

County party chair thinks internal audit was too kind to Iowa Democratic Party

(Dec. 16, 2020)

After the caucus, the IDP hired a pair of Democratic lawyers: Nick Klinefeldt, who was a federal attorney appointed by President Barack Obama, and former Iowa Attorney General Bonnie Campbell. They were tasked with identifying and determining the cause of problems that occurred during the 2020 Iowa Caucuses, with the results of their investigation being released to the public on Saturday morning.

27.12.2020 - 06:10 [ Politico.com ]

Iowa autopsy report: DNC meddling led to caucus debacle

(12.12.2020)

The audit states the conversion tool had coding errors that spit out inaccurate numbers and caused confusion about the accuracy of the results, eventually leading to delays in reporting. But the state party’s app never malfunctioned nor was hacked, the report concludes.

27.12.2020 - 06:04 [ theIntercept.com ]

Investigator: DNC Was “Directly Involved” in Iowa Caucus App Development, Countering DNC Denial

(22.12.2020)

The DNC’s meddling, which included a last-minute demand that developers of the Shadow app create a special software that would allow the DNC real-time access to the raw numbers before they went public, didn’t sit well with Zogby.

“Why would [the DNC] need to see that?” Zogby said about the DNC’s insistence on access to the raw caucus results before they went public. “Why wouldn’t you trust the state party to make the determination?”

In the transcript from the closed-session meeting held by the state party, members suggested that the DNC’s goal was to strip Iowa of its prestigious first-in-the-nation status.

19.12.2020 - 09:24 [ Fox News ]

After government hack, media mum on ex-cybersecurity chief highlighted for contradicting Trump‘s fraud claims

„As I said in a news briefing, Election Day was ‘just another Tuesday on the Internet,’“ he wrote. „Normal sorts of scanning and probing were happening, but we did not see any successful attacks or damaging disruptions.“

Yet hackers were arms deep in a slew of federal agencies. The infiltration, believed to have been conducted by the Russians, appears to have compromised the Departments of Energy, State, Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury and Commerce. His name did not appear in CNN’s story about CISA and the hack published Thursday.

13.11.2020 - 20:43 [ Ron / Twitter ]

Having election voting data as an open standard makes it easy to develop programs that can input election data and output election data. With knowledge of these data types, you could theoretically make black box programs that could modify election data.

Something to look for is whether the Image Cast Central (ICC) system stores this JSON data as plaintext or in an encrypted form.
If this json is stored as plain text, then modifying election data before it is turned into the custody of the county is trivial.

13.11.2020 - 20:36 [ National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) ]

NIST Special Publication 1500-100: Election Results Common Data Format Specification

(December 2019)

1.1 Why this specification is needed The purpose of this specification is to provide a comprehensive, flexible, and interoperable pre-election setup and post-election results reporting XML and JSON format for manufacturers to integrate into their voting equipment and for election offices, the media, and other groups to use in their own software. Some advantages of using this specification are that:

• election results can be reported directly from election offices in this format regardless of voting system manufacturer, thus enabling interoperability;

• the need for custom software and custom reporting formats is greatly reduced;

• jurisdictions that use multiple versions of EMSs and tabulators can more easily combine and transfer information between systems

13.11.2020 - 20:33 [ Ron / Twitter ]

It seems election votes are tallied then stored as a DOUBLE in JSON. „can include a factional [sic] component in special cases“

If it is proven that Dominion uses this standard in their machines, then that is proof that votes are stored ultimately as double length floating point numbers.

13.11.2020 - 19:55 [ Bloomberg ]

Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks

(November 8, 2019)

Cybersecurity experts are baffled by local election officials choosing the computerized voting machines. “It’s a mystery to me,” said Rich DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer science professor and former Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer. “Does someone have 8 x 10 glossies? No one has been able to figure out the behavior of elections officials. It’s like they all drink the same Kool-Aid.”

13.11.2020 - 19:49 [ conservativedailypost.com ]

Dominion Election Machines Used In Every Contested State

(07.11.2020)

State Sen. Kristin Phillips-Hill, R-York, says she started getting calls shortly after the polls opened Tuesday morning that the machines were jamming and causing delays. She said those problems could affect voters’ confidence in the election.

“If that ballot is rejected, for example if they over-voted for county commissioner, and that ballot is rejected, then that person has no way of knowing that their vote has been invalidated. That’s not acceptable,” she said.

“One machine per polling place was simply not enough to move smoothly,” county spokesman Mark Walters said in a statement. “The county also misjudged the time it would take to scan two ballot sheets per person.”

Walters said if ballots could not be immediately scanned by the machines, there is a way to store them so they can be counted later. In his emailed statement Tuesday night, he said ballots that were put in “emergency holding boxes will be scanned at the polling places.”

13.11.2020 - 19:32 [ Adam Crigler / Twitter ]

7 minutes alone and a screwdriver.

(12.11.2020)

13.11.2020 - 15:44 [ arstechnica.com ]

Crooks have acquired proprietary Diebold software to “jackpot” ATMs

(20.07.2020)

In previous jackpotting attacks, the attached devices, known in the industry as black boxes, usually invoked programming interfaces contained in the ATM operating system to funnel commands that ultimately reached the hardware component that dispenses cash. More recently, Diebold Nixdorf has observed a spate of black box attacks that incorporated parts of the company’s proprietary software.

13.11.2020 - 12:41 [ Lou Dobbs / Twitter ]

Dominion Voting Systems: Toronto based @dominionvoting was rejected by Texas Secretary of State in 2019 for major flaws in their software. Why was it used this election in 6 battleground states and 22 others?

#MAGA #AmericaFirst #Dobbs

13.11.2020 - 12:30 [ NYBooks.com ]

Who Owns Our Voting Machines?

(November 2020)

These “black boxes” have required both election officials and the public to take on faith that the machines are programmed to capture voter intent, not subvert it. When researchers have attempted to examine the computer code, they have been threatened with lawsuits by the election vendors. (…)

These include machines that can be reprogrammed remotely or in person by surreptitiously (and easily) inserting fraudulent media cards or thumb drives, as researchers have shown over and over again.

Meanwhile, despite claims to the contrary by election vendors, it’s been demonstrated that ballot scanners in precincts in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida use wireless modems that connect to the Internet. (…)

These vulnerabilities—and others—inject doubt into the public’s perception of election integrity. That doubt is compounded by the fact that the three major election vendors in the United States—Election Systems and Software, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion—are owned by private equity. Together, they account for about 80 percent of all election equipment used in the United States.

13.11.2020 - 12:14 [ justthenews.com ]

Michigan county flips back to Trump, following repair of voting software glitch

(November 6, 2020)

Addressing the alleged software glitch, Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said Friday during a press conference that „47 counties [in Michigan] use this same software in the same capacity.“

13.11.2020 - 12:12 [ apnews.com ]

Officials: Clerk error behind county results favoring Biden

The Department of State said Antrim and many other counties in Michigan use the Dominion Voting Systems election management system and ballot tabulators. The tabulators are programmed to scan hand-marked paper ballots.

13.11.2020 - 11:40 [ Politico.com ]

Cause of Election Day glitch in Georgia counties still unexplained

(11/04/2020 01:55 PM EST
Updated: 11/12/2020 10:28 PM EST)

The supervisor, Marcia Ridley of the Spalding County Board of Elections, had initially attributed the problem to a vendor’s 11th-hour update to the equipment. But log files for the devices — electronic poll books that poll workers use to sign in voters at precincts — show that no such update occurred to the devices the night before Election Day, Ridley said in a statement to POLITICO on Thursday. However, she said she stands by her previous statements last week that a representative for the election technology vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, told her office that it had uploaded some kind of update the night before the election and that this had created the glitch.

13.11.2020 - 11:28 [ theGuardian.com ]

‚They think they are above the law‘: the firms that own America‘s voting system

(23.04.2019)

The result is a small network of companies that have near-monopolies on election services, such as building voting machines. Across the spectrum, private vendors have long histories of errors that affected elections, of obstructing politicians and the public from seeking information, of corruption, suspect foreign influence, false statements of security and business dishonesty. (…)

The party narrative is that Democrats are trying to use the federal government to take over state and local elections; the political angle is that recognizing vulnerabilities or flaws in the election system could raise doubts about the legitimacy of the party’s – and Donald Trump’s – victory in 2016.

Raskin’s bill could affect at least two of the largest election companies. Dominion Voting Systems, which is the second-largest voting machine vendor in the US, is based in both the US and Canada.

(…)

Due to that statement and a litany of other scandals – such as leaving an internet-facing server unprotected and revealing the source code for its machines or by installing unapproved software patches on its machines just before an election – that company, Diebold, sold off the election-machine portion of its company in 2009.

13.11.2020 - 11:20 [ Dominion Voting ]

Election 2020: Setting the Record Straight

Edison Research has also categorically denied any claims that their data suggests any voting irregularities, including vote switching.

When asked if the company had noticed these or any other anomalies in the voting data, Edison Research President Larry Rosin told The Dispatch Fact Check, „Edison Research created no such report and we are not aware of any voter fraud.“

13.11.2020 - 11:10 [ theHill.com ]

Voting machine company denies Trump claims about software issues

Dominion Voting Systems, a Denver-based company that supplies voting machines across the United States, on Thursday rejected President Trump’s claim that it had „deleted“ millions of votes in favor of the president.

Earlier in the day, the president said on Twitter that Dominion had struck a total of 2.7 million Trump votes from its machines, including 221,000 in Pennsylvania that he claims were instead tallied for now-President-elect Joe Biden.

06.11.2020 - 12:05 [ Fiorella Isabel / Twitter ]

Note also how at the bottom they go from 1,344,469 vote totals to 1,072,844. Which is obviously not possible. @MichiganDems you’ve been exposed.

(12.03.2020)

06.11.2020 - 11:51 [ the-office.com ]

“The exit poll was subsequently adjusted* for conformity with the final computerized vote count.” THE 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY WAS RIGGED.

Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election fraud, election manipulation or vote rigging, is illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates, or both.

States which had been projected to expect large Sanders wins, corresponded with raw data on exit polls confirming the expected Sanders wins.

Computerized vote counts however, showed very large Biden wins. The DNC accepted computer vote counts and CHANGED NUMBERS on exit polls to suggest that Biden won.

06.11.2020 - 11:35 [ Axel Geijsel (Tilburg University), Rodolfo Cortes Barragan (Stanford University) / drive.google.com ]

Are we witnessing a dishonest election? A between state comparison based on the used voting procedures of the 2016 Democratic Party Primary for the Presidency of the United States of America

(June 7, 2016)

Given the stakes in the outcome of the American presidential elections, ensuring the integrity of the electoral process is of the utmost importance. Are the results we are witnessing in the 2016 primary elections trustworthy? While Donald Trump enjoyed a clear and early edge over his Republican rivals, the Democratic contest between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernard Sanders has been far more competitive. At present, Secretary Clinton enjoys an apparent advantage over Sanders. Is this claimed advantage legitimate? We contend that it is not, and suggest an explanation for the advantage: States that are at risk for election fraud in 2016 systematically and overwhelmingly favor Secretary Clinton. We provide converging evidence for this claim.

First, we show that it is possible to detect irregularities in the 2016 Democratic Primaries by comparing the states that have hard paper evidence of all the placed votes to states that do
not have this hard paper evidence. Second, we compare the final results in 2016 to the
discrepant exit polls. Furthermore, we show that no such irregularities occurred in the 2008
competitive election cycle involving Secretary Clinton against President Obama. As such, we
find that in states wherein voting fraud has the highest potential to occur, systematic efforts may
have taken place to provide Secretary Clinton with an exaggerated margin of support.

06.11.2020 - 11:33 [ Snopes.com ]

Stanford Study Proves Election Fraud through Exit Poll Discrepancies

(June 15, 2016)

What‘s True

Two researchers (presumably graduate students) from Stanford University and Tilburg University co-authored a paper asserting they uncovered information suggesting widespread primary election fraud favoring Hillary Clinton had occurred across multiple states.

What‘s False

The paper was not a „Stanford Study,“ and its authors acknowledged their claims and research methodology had not been subject to any form of peer review or academic scrutiny.

05.11.2020 - 17:50 [ Glenn Greenwald ]

The U.S. Inability To Count Votes is a National Disgrace. And Dangerous.

The richest and most powerful country on earth — whether due to ineptitude, choice or some combination of both — has no ability to perform the simple task of counting votes in a minimally efficient or confidence-inspiring manner. As a result, the credibility of the voting process is severely impaired, and any residual authority the U.S. claims to “spread” democracy to lucky recipients of its benevolence around the world is close to obliterated.

04.11.2020 - 21:03 [ NYBooks.com ]

Who Owns Our Voting Machines?

These vulnerabilities—and others—inject doubt into the public’s perception of election integrity. That doubt is compounded by the fact that the three major election vendors in the United States—Election Systems and Software, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion—are owned by private equity. Together, they account for about 80 percent of all election equipment used in the United States. This leaves the public in the dark about who owns the voting machine companies, or how much money those owners make from elections.

At the very least, not knowing who is behind these companies—and if they have ties to either political party, donate to super PACs, or have a financial stake in the outcome of an election—undermines confidence in the proprietary software undergirding voting machines. The federal government, which does not participate in the administration of elections, could change this by requiring any election vendor paid with federal funds to disclose its full ownership and post its balance sheet. Until then, as Saltman warned, “situations may be created in which conflict of interest is a serious concern.”

04.11.2020 - 20:34 [ Wikipedia ]

Hart InterCivic

Hart InterCivic Inc. is a privately held United States company that provides election technologies and services to government jurisdictions. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Hart products are used by hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide, including counties in Texas, the entire states of Hawaii and Oklahoma, half of Washington and Colorado, and certain counties in Ohio, California, Idaho,[1] Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.[2]

Hart entered the elections industry in 1912, printing ballots for Texas counties.