Quote:

---

I've lived long enough to have heard about at least one rigged election (JFK and the Chicago Machine vs Nixon) and to have witnessed two three more.

2000 Election
With FL State Secretary Katherine Harris busy scrubbing approximately 57,000 likely Democratic voters off the voter rolls, http://www.nndb.com/people/067/000038950/ the power of being able to control the voter rolls became evident. However, much worse was to come. In an extremely close race (thanks in part to Harris) the Supreme Court stopped a vote recount, and gave the election to GWB. An entire state recount the following year by a consortium of newspapers which was determined to figure out who REALLY won Florida found that the "hanging chad" controversy would not have changed the results by much- but that recounting ELECTRONIC votes in Republican-leaning districts would have actually swung the vote to Gore.

Quote:

---

The error cropped up in Volusia's 216th precinct of only 585 registered voters. A Global Election Systems (acquired by Diebold Election Systems now Premier Election Solutions) voting machine showed that 412 of those registered voters had voted. The problem was that the machine also claimed those 412 voters had somehow given Bush 2,813 votes and in addition had given Gore a negative vote count of -16,022 votes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volusia_error

---

The clusterfuck that was the FL vote got a group of activists involved who looked deeply into- among other things - electronic voting. They discovered that electronic voting was extremely hackable. The way electronic vote COUNTING works is that a computer "card" is inserted into a vote-counting machine. As ballots are fed into the machine the votes are recorded on the chips on the card.

At its most primitive level, the final tally can simply be overwritten by a person editing an unsecured system. Another option is to "pre-load" the vote counting card with a certain number of votes for the selected candidate. A third way to change the vote count is to insert a subroutine into the vote-counting program which throws ... let's say, one out of every ten votes to the preferred candidate. And there is always the possibility of having touch-screen voting being "mis-indexed" to improperly record the position of the touched point.

None of this requires being connected to "the internet".

You can find out more about this at Black Box Voting http://blackboxvoting.org/

2004 Election
In 2004, there was an even more widespread discrepancy between exit polls and and vote tallies. Exit polls had Kerry ahead 53% to 47%; official vote tallies more than reversed the result.

Quote:

---

Bush Jr. also did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered, the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush....

Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush’s advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as 9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.

In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri, where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.

One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touchscreen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.... Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.... In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. ... Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, anomalous congressional election results have been increasing.

---

These discrepancies were analyzed by university statisticians, and after ruling out random error etc, the only explanation that they could NOT rule out was fraud.

2016 Primary

Quote:

---

Geijsel and Barragan compared states that used “hard paper evidence” of votes versus states that did not use paper ballots and noted “it is possible to detect irregularities in the 2016 Democratic Primaries” using this method. They also compared election results with exit polls, noting that, in 2008, voting irregularities were not at the same level as they have been in 2016.

The study authors discovered significant anomalies between election results and exit polls, where data indicated lower support for Clinton than what the actual vote tally showed. These types of discrepancies did not occur in either the Republican primaries or in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

---

Snopes' take on this was that this wasn't an "official study" but nonetheless the trend is clear
http://www.snopes.com/stanford-study-proves-election-fraud-through-exi
t-poll-discrepancies/

---

Quote:

---

Los Angeles County to Introduce VSAP E-Voting System: NOT Hand-Marked, NOT Paper, NOT Hand-Counted in Public
Posted on November 29, 2019 by Lambert Strether

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

No doubt Los Angeles County’s VSAP (“Voting Solutions for All People”) rollout will not be covered as a debacle. The real question is: If there were a debacle — like, say, a case of election fraud — would we even know? Doubtful. Just what we want in a voting system! In this post, I’ll give a brief overview of issues with electronic voting. Then I’ll look at VSAP as an institution. Next, I’ll show why the VSAP system is not only insecure, but likely to make money-in-politics even worse than it already is.

We’ve covered electronic voting before — see here, here, and here — and if you want to understand why hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public (HMPBCP) is the world standard, you can read them, especially the first. In this overview, I’ll make a few high-level observations about electronic voting in general.

Digital systems can never be shown not to have bugs. As Computer Science Elder God Edgers Dijkstra wrote: “Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!” Many bugs in many important programs persist for years before they are discovered. A list would include Flash in IE6 (persisted 12 years), OpenSSL (15 years), LZO data compression (18 years), and bash (25 years). None of these examples are outlier programs or trivial; they are all used by millions, essential to enterprises, networks, etc. Each of these bug is an insecurity waiting to happen. And that’s before we get to Trojan Horses, which are bugs introduced deliberately by a developer for purposes of their own. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that any voting system decision maker who advocates electronic voting is doing so for reasons other than security, given that HMPBCP is available, which amounts to saying that such a decision maker regards a certain amount of exploited bugs — election fraud — as acceptable.

... Lest I be thought curmudgeonly in this, recall the example of Bolivia, where one reason the vote was challenged was the use of an unauthorized server for data transmission of the count. Contrast that with the recent vote in Hong Kong, where there were many images of people marking paper ballots, and of people counting them, in public (in fact, of people demanding to be let in to observe). Imagine if electronic systems had been used: First, the Mainland would have had every incentive to have compromised the software, and might well have done so successfully; second, electronic systems, because they are always buggy, are always open to challenge. The fallout could have been extremely ugly at the geopolitical level. Nor would the people’s will have been respected.

With that, lets turn to Los Angeles County and VSAP. As with any software project, we need to understand the requirements. Here is what I can find on the extremely spiffy and well-budgeted VSAP site: “The Design Concepts“:

Quote:

---

The final concept created for VSAP incorporates features driven by the project principles as well as focus group feedback, input and in-person testing.

The concept system features touch-screen technology with a simple user interface, both audio and visual output and a built-in scanner, printer and ballot box. The new voting system will provide voters with options to scan in QR coded ballots from their phone, enter their ballot choices in-person at the polling location or vote-by-mail with printed ballots.

---

(Note that the concept very explicitly does not say that hand-marked paper ballots will be available at polling locations; only vote by mail.) I note with alarm that the concept document includes no mention of security, or even that the voters vote be accurately recorded and tabulated. Let’s look elsewhere for that. From the aforementioned “Principles“:

Quote:

---

TRUST The voting system must instill public trust and have the ability to produce a physical and tangible record of a voter’s ballot to verify the ballot was marked as intended before it is cast and to ensure auditability of the system. It must demonstrate to voters, candidates, and the general public that all votes are counted as cast.

---

(A little too much focus on PR for my taste: “instill,” “demonstrate.”) Note the fundamental equivocation, which I have underlined: The paper is not the ballot; the paper is only a record of the ballot, which is digital. More:

Quote:

---

INTEGRITY The system must have integrity, be accountable to voters, and follow existing regulations. System features must protect against fraud and tampering. It should also be easy to audit and produce useful, accessible data to verify vote counts and monitor system performance.

---

“System features must protect against fraud and tampering.” See comments on bugs above. There is nothing insecure about counting ballots by hand in public. That’s why you count them in public. Finally:

Quote:

---

TRANSPARENCY The processes and transactions associated with how the system is set up, run, and stored should be easy for the public to understand and verify. This should include making hardware components available for inspection, and source code to the extent that the manner of doing so would not jeopardize system security or availability

---

VSAP is being marketed as open source, but that underlined section is an awfully big qualifier. We’ll have to see how it works out in practice.

So, these design concepts and principles are the closest I can come to a requirements document (and I did look using several search tools, as well as doing an image search for diagrams). So, although VSAP uses “ballot marking devices,” we don’t know what requirements they are supposed to meet, and so have no way to judge the success of the VSAP system. If you, readers, can do better, please put your results in comments.

So, the VSA site reads like public relations to me. For completeness, here’s an image of the county-wide rollout:

Pop-up Demo center at LaCrescenta Library. You can interact and use the new ballot marking device!

2809 Foothill Blvd.
LaCrescenta, CA 91214
November 25th from 12-8pm
November 26th from 10am-6pm #VSAP pic.twitter.com/VElhLcPrkl

— Glendale City Clerk (@cogCityClerk) November 25, 2019

Dear Lord. A “voting experience”? So the tiny little alarm head began to ring a little louder, and with this press release it began to clamor: “Votem Corp Selected For LA VSAP Project In Partnership With Smartmatic“:

... underneath all the glossy PR, and the rollout, and the stakeholders, and the lavish website, we have a prime contractor [Votem] that’s an extremely shady business entity. One, morever, in charge of the ballot!

With all that set-up, let’s quickly move to the critique from the HMPBCP world. First, from the essential Bradblog, “L.A. Registrar Won’t Answer Qs About County’s New Unverifiable Touchscreen Vote Systems.” Here is where the QR code becomes important:

Quote:

---

The new VSAP system is a touchscreen Ballot Marking Device or BMD, which prints out a computer-marked paper ballot summary of votes selected via the touchscreen, before using another computer, an optical-scanner, to read the non-human readable QR Code that is also printed on the ballot summary. The QR Codes are used to tally votes. While the QR Code (a type of barcode) cannot be verified for accuracy by voters, it is also impossible with such systems to know if any voter has even verified the human-readable portion of the ballot summary at all, much less correctly, after an election. Studies reveal that most do not verify computer-marked ballots at all, and that of the minority who do, most don’t recall the details or selections on the ballot they voted just moments earlier.

---

---

Quote:

---

That’s just one of the many reasons why most cybersecurity and voting systems experts warn against the use of such systems which are now proliferating — and sometimes replacing verifiable hand-marked paper ballot systems — in many states and counties across the country before 2020. (The list of states where counties or the entire state are moving to BMD systems include a number of key battleground states. Such systems are planned for use next year, or are already being used, in OH, WI, PA, TX, WV, KY, NY, NJ, KS, TN, IN, SC, NC and, yes, CA, unless the public prevents these plans.)

I wanted to find the requirements document and if possible some process flow diagrams, but I’ll take BradBlog at his word. The flow for a Ballot Marking Device would be something like: Voter makes selections on touch-screen (software, hence buggy and insecure), selections are stored (ditto) and printed out (ditto) on a page with a human-readable receipt reflecting the touchscreen selections, and the ballot itself, which is the QR code, which is not human-readable. The page is then scanned (ditto) and QR code is then tabulated (ditto). The sleight of hand is, of course, the ballot itself. A human may think that their reciept, which they can read to check that it matches what they selected on the touch screen, also matches the QR code, which they cannot. But there’s no reason on earth to think that! And the unreadable QR code, since that is what is tabulated, is the ballot! Take the matter out of the delusional digital realm. Suppose voting worked like this: You voted by hand-marking a yellow paper ballot. You then handed the yellow paper ballot to an official who, behind a screen so you could not see, then marked a blue ballot that you could not read, seaked it so you could not read it, and then handed the blue ballot back to you and told you to put it in the ballot box, that’s your vote. Does that make any sense? That is how a “Ballot Marking Device” works.

---