Vendor lies re: election security
Voting machine vendors have an alarming history of deception. In July 2018, cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter reported that, despite ES&S’s prior denials, ES&S’s election-management system (EMS) computers were sold with remote access software between 2000 and 2006. ES&S won’t say where it installed the remote access software that it lied about, but claims it’s been removed. According to Zetter’s article, Diebold’s EMS computers were sold with remote access software as well, and Dominion refused to comment.
The installation of remote access software in EMS computers is a big deal because these are centralized county or state computers used to program all voting machines in the county or state. According to Zetter’s reporting, some of these computers also include the central tabulators that aggregate all precinct totals.
But the vendor lies don’t end there. On August 8, 2019, Zetter further reported that ES&S’s EMS computers also connect to the internet, something else that ES&S had said was not the case but that leading election-security experts had long suspected.
Meanwhile, ES&S installed wireless modems in ballot scanners in Florida, Wisconsin, and Illinois starting in about 2015. Although some election officials claimed that these modems do not connect to the internet, this too was a lie, as further reported by Zetter.
Vendors’ misleading new definition of “paper ballots.”
In terms of solutions, experts say that the only way to know for sure if electronic vote totals have been altered is to compare a hand tally of the paper ballots to the electronic totals.
But over the past several years vendors, have changed the meaning of “paper ballot” to include not only unhackable hand marked paper ballots, but also hackable machine-marked summary cards with barcodes from expensive new electronic ballot marking devices (BMDs). The barcode, which voters can’t read, is the only part of the printout counted as your vote.
Although the printouts also include a human readable summary, the BMDs can be hacked to change or omit the selections on the summary.
We’ve seen the problems with vote-flipping touch screen voting machines in Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. The situation will be no better if voters notice vote flipping or deletions on the paper printouts marked by these new BMDs. As before, the concern will not be the voters who notice and correct problems, but rather those who don’t.
This is extremely problematic because any manual audit or recount based on a corrupted paper trail will produce a corrupted result. Thus, according to leading election-security experts, BMDs cannot assure the will of the voters and should be purchased only for those voters who are unable to hand mark their ballots.
The critical takeaway here is that, if election officials or lawmakers don’t mention the “hand marked” prefix, they are probably about to scam the public with machine-marked summary cards with barcodes from pricey and insecure BMDs.
The following states include one or more counties that have already chosen barcode BMDs for 2020: Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Kansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, Delaware, and California. I’m told that Florida recently passed a law to enable to the use of barcode BMDs as well.
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