– Brad Friedman, The BRAD BLOG
“I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to…make bad things happen,” CIA cybersecurity expert Steven Stigall explained, in a stunning presentation to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) field hearing held one month ago in Orlando.
As initially reported earlier this week by Greg Gordon at McClatchy, “Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren’t connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn’t always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines.”
“The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago,” Gordon reports Stigall as explaining at the EAC hearing, “after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems.”
But as disturbing as Stigall’s presentation was, what’s almost as disturbing is that it took more than 11 days, McClatchy’s coverage, a number of FOIA requests from VotersUnite’s John Gideon (a frequent guest blogger here), and a couple of articles from BRAD BLOG alum, Michael Richardson of the Examiner (his coverage is here and here), before the EAC finally released the complete transcript of the meeting [WORD], including Stigall’s remarks.
“The presenter did not provide the presentation, ‘Computers and Elections: The Growing Potential for Cyber Vote Fraud’, to the EAC, so we have no materials responsive to your request,” Gideon was told in response to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the EAC, as reported by Richardson. “We received the transcript on March 16, 2009, and it will be publicly available in the next few days.”
As of last night, 10 days since the EAC admits they received the transcript of their own event which had taken place 20 days earlier, they had neither sent it to Gideon in response to his request, nor posted it on their website. As of this morning, a month since the hearing, it’s finally up on their website, thanks in part, no doubt, to the pressure brought on the EAC by the public to do so. Even then, Stigall’s remarks are not posted separately, as other presentations are, but rather, one has to go looking for the full transcript of the actual event to find it. So why both the delay and obfuscation from the famously dysfunctional (a nice way to put it) federal agency? Make your own best guesses, since there is no official explanation for the moment.
Happily, there were others at the meeting who had transcribed the CIA cybersecurity expert’s startling remarks — decimating the idea of supposedly “secure” e-voting — independently, who then helped to bring it to the public’s attention. Clearly, the strongly pro-e-voting EAC had/has little intention of doing so themselves.
Stigall’s presentation, and we’ve got much more of it excerpted below, include a passel of disturbing thoughts. Many of them we’ve tried to impart on these pages for years, including comments which point up the dangers we’ve tried to warn about concerning pre-election voting machine “sleepovers” at the houses of pollworkers, and more indications of the dangers of Sequoia Voting Systems clandestine, on-going relationship with the Hugo Chavez-tied Venezuelan e-voting firm Smartmatic, as we reported exclusively here one year ago — to little interest from the corporate media, despite Sequoia’s claims to federal investigators that they had severed all ties with the firm…
First, here’s a bit more from Gordon’s coverage at McClatchy:
Appearing last month before a U.S. Election Assistance Commission field hearing in Orlando, Fla., a CIA cybersecurity expert suggested that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his allies fixed a 2004 election recount…
…
Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now.
Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.
“You heard the old adage ‘follow the money,’ ” Stigall said, according to a transcript of his hour-long presentation that McClatchy obtained. “I follow the vote. And wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to…make bad things happen.”
Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren’t connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn’t always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines.
The CIA got interested in electronic systems a few years ago, Stigall said, after concluding that foreigners might try to hack U.S. election systems. He said he couldn’t elaborate “in an open, unclassified forum,” but that any concerns would be relayed to U.S. election officials.
We’ll post more disturbing excerpts from the CIA cybersecurity expert’s presentation in a moment, but two issues of note were raised by Stigall, and in McClatchy’s coverage, that we want to make sure to highlight here…
Exit Polls Are Accurate…(Everywhere but in the U.S.A., of course)
In addition to the troubling (if well-familiar to readers of The BRAD BLOG) assertions that Stigall makes about the dangers of e-voting in general, he goes on to explain, via the complete transcript, how a statistical analysis of an August 2004 referendum on recalling Hugo Chavez in Venezuela set off red flags among statisticians that the election was likely gamed by a “subtle algorithm” implanted into the e-voting system.
“[T]he mathematicians,” Stigall pointed out in his presentation, “produced lots of interesting facts and figures in the statistics to show that [the voting patterns were] statistically really not possible. And they used that as an argument that Chavez, because of his complete control of the voting machines and their infrastructure, that Chavez was able to insert computer code into the system to adjust the vote surreptitiously.”
Of course, as regular readers here know well, when similar statistics, compiled by well-respected mathematicians and university professors in this country were produced following the 2004 Presidential election, suggesting a similar statistical impossibility for the variance from Exit Polls to the final results declaring George W. Bush the “winner” of that election, the academics were dismissed as crackpots and conspiracy theorists, and the startling numbers were otherwise all but ignored by the establishment media and politicians alike.
“Polls in thirty states weren’t just off the mark — they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in Rolling Stone in June of 2006.
“[W]hen exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment,” he explained, describing the alarming dismissal of Exit Poll analysis made by U. of Pennsylvania’s Steve Freeman and others. “Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ‘corrected’ numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.”
“As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast,” RFK continues, “exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states — including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida — and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush’s neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.”
But, in the end, Kennedy details in his landmark article, “In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush.”
If, as Stigall alleges, the CIA’s own mathematicians found a similar statistical anomaly in Venezuelan to be of concern, why then are similar anomalies in the U.S. seen as little more than fringe “conspiracy theories”? We report, you decide.
One of U.S.’s Top E-Vote Companies, Still Tied to Chavez-related Firm
McClatchy’s Gordon describes Stigall’s explanation of how Chavez was likely able to “defeat the paper trail” in a post-election “audit” of the “receipts” produced by the country’s, supposedly “open source”, touch-screen e-voting system, before explaining how the concerns about Venezuela’s election system tie directly into concerns about the voting systems used in more than a dozen states across the U.S.:
Reacting to complaints that the arrangement was a national security concern, the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States launched an investigation. Smartmatic then announced in November 2007 that it had sold Sequoia to a group of investors led by Sequoia’s U.S.-based management team, thus ending the inquiry.
But as The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively last year, the “sale” of Sequoia by Smartmatic was not all that it seemed, despite apparently having fooled federal legislators and the media into believing otherwise.
As we revealed, Sequoia — one of this nation’s largest voting machine companies, controlling 20% of the votes cast here — uses software that is still actually owned by Smartmatic, the Venezuelan firm associated with Hugo Chavez. Despite Sequoia’s claims to have broken all ties with the company, after the matter had piqued the ire of several members of Congress, and a number of rightwingers in the media (such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs) and in the blogosphere, Smartmatic still retains the Intellectual Property (IP) rights to virtually all of the Sequoia voting systems now in use in the United States.
Court documents [PDF] obtained and posted by The BRAD BLOG last year, while covering the previously-unreported hostile takeover attempt of Sequoia by Hart Intercivic, a competing e-voting company, confirmed that Sequoia had no claim to the IP rights of voting systems bearing the name Sequoia. That, despite an agreement between federal investigators from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and Smartmatic which disallowed even “indirect” control over Sequoia by the Venezuelan firm with murky ownership associated with Chavez.
Following our story, Sequoia CEO Jack Blaine further confirmed his company’s continuing ties to Smartmatic during a hastily convened, “confidential” company-wide teleconference, scheduled to explain our exposé to Sequoia’s rank-and-file employees who had previously known nothing about the attempted takeover by Hart.
“It doesn’t matter whether you have the IP rights, or you don’t have the IP rights,” Blaine explained to an employee who inquired on the call about the IP rights licensing agreement Sequoia maintained with Smartmatic, as we’d disclosed. Blaine admitted — while repeatedly stressing that information discussed on the call should remain confidential: “We have the source code, and we have the right to modify it any way we want to modify it…So it doesn’t matter really whether we have the IP or not.”
“I didn’t particularly want the IP,” Blaine revealed to employees on the “confidential” call, about the agreement he’d struck with Smartmatic when supposedly divesting from the Venezuelan firm. “As we’ve discussed in the past, I believe we’ve really come across the perfect time to change our portfolio going forward. And it’s not gonna be dependent on the Smartmatic technology, or the IP or anything else. It’s gonna be dependent on what we collectively believe the market, and what the future standards, will require.”
In a later report we revealed that Blaine had blatantly lied to Cook County (Chicago), IL officials during testimony, in which they had expressed concern that the Smartmatic divestiture might be “a sham transaction designed to fool regulators.”
But despite Blaine’s misleading testimony to Chicago officials, and his company’s own press release trumpeting the “new corporate ownership” of Sequoia in late 2007, maintaining that they’d “completely eliminate[d] Smartmatic’s ownership, control and operational rights of any kind in Sequoia,” the transaction was a sham which seems to have, apparently, succeeded in fooling federal regulators.
Despite all of the hard evidence unearthed by The BRAD BLOG at the time, the matter has still not been picked up and/or advanced by the mainstream corporate media in this country, despite Sequoia/Smartmatic’s e-voting systems continuing in use in more than a dozen states across the nation.
Gordon’s McClatchy coverage of Stigall’s remarks to the EAC panel represents the first coverage by a major outlet to revisit the matter to any extent since our series in March and April of last year, though he too has yet to deal with the Smartmatic ownership issues that we divulged on these pages a full year ago.
More From Stigall’s Startling Presentation
The complete transcript of Stigall’s remarks [WORD] offers much more than Gordon or Richardson’s articles have been able to cover to date. One point after another underscores so much of what we’ve been reporting on these pages for years, but it’s worth highlighting them in the exact words of a CIA expert whose job it is to monitor how electronic voting systems work — or don’t — around the world:
- “For several years, I’ve worked with others in my organization to try and identify foreign threats, emphasis on ‘foreign threats,’ to important U.S. computer systems. A few years ago it occurred to us that that should include potential foreign threats to the computers upon which our elections in this country are increasingly dependent.”
- “[W]hen I look at an election system, I’m not an election analyst. I’m not a political analyst. … When I look at an election system, I see a computer system, because increasingly that’s what they are. And to the extent that there are foreign hackers who have shown interest in developing unauthorized access into U.S. computer systems, that’s where I get interested in it.”
- “I am not a politician, a political analyst. … I looked at this as a computer network, as a computer security issue. … [Y]ou’ve heard the old adage, “Follow the money.” Here I follow the vote, and wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer that is an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to get into the system and tamper with the vote count or make bad things happen.”
- “I’m not so much looking at shenanigans on Election Day as I am all of the things that foreign actors try and do to effect the outcome of the election long before Election Day.”
- “[A]ny computer hooked up to the Internet either through a wire or through a wireless connection is a portal for hackers. You’ve heard that and I’m here to confirm it very simply.”
- “[I]f you think a computer is not hooked up to the Internet there’s a variety of things that also are into play. We now have, of course, wireless connections. Perhaps a wireless connection is enabled, is file sharing enabled, this kind of thing. It’s no longer enough simply to unplug something, to unplug that Ethernet jack or that, you know, 56K modem wire. A computer that is hooked up to the public Internet is problematic in this regard and the computerized registration of voters is the first indication we see that there’s a potential for fraudulent behavior in the electoral process.”
- An electronic voting machine is a computer. That’s the way we look at it. It has memory. It has so-called firmware, it has software built in to the hardware of the machine to tell it what to do, and most interestingly not only can it be networked but it can be interrogated from outside. It’s a computer. That’s essentially what it is, and because it’s a computer it carries with it all the vulnerabilities that a computer has.
- The first question that one asks about these voting machines is, are they password protected? Okay, well there’s passwords and then there’s passwords. Is the password the name of your granddaughter? Is it the name of your pet? If it is, I’m going to have that password in an hour. Not me personally, but I mean a dedicated hacker. That’s what they do. If it’s a so-called “strong password”, in which you use a mix of letters and numbers and special characters, you do greatly complicate the task for a malicious actor. But then you have to ask yourself, are the passwords changed from election to election or is it the same? And our favorite scenario, where I come from, is your password p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d? You would be surprised.
(Ed Note: We’re not surprised at all. Diebold’s default password, often never changed by the administrator, is “1111”, and everybody has known that for years. And still, it’s often not changed by election administrators in this country.)
On “sleepovers” and other pre-election storage issues that we’ve long tried to warn about here (we’ve been credited with having coined the word “sleepovers” in regard to the pre-programmed, election-ready voting machines that poll workers are often allowed to take home with them for sometimes days and weeks prior to the election, before bringing them to the polling place themselves on Election Day):
- “When I look at a foreign country, and I suspect that the regime may be playing games with the computer component of the election system, one of the first questions I ask is, where are those machines stored? Or where are they stored, period, long before Election Day and afterwards? And I want to know if those machines can be interrogated electronically remotely on Election Day. Is there a wire or a connection connecting those machines to, quite frankly, the public Internet?”
- “[I]n a traditional voting scheme the greatest opportunity for fraud that we have seen in other countries, is at the local level. When you introduce computers into the equation, you’re moving that fraud potential upstream and you’re allowing an electronic single point failure, meaning the potential for mischief, can occur higher up the food chain electronically much faster and affect a lot more people in terms of the vote count than would be the case of fraud at an individual level where again you’re talking about the classic scenario where ballot boxes get thrown in the river or fraudulent ballots get produced; here it’s electronic.”
The greatest threat to e-voting security, as we’ve reported frequently over the years, based on the repeated warnings from computer scientists and security experts, is not from the voters on Election Day, but from election insiders who have access to the voting machines, memory cards and electronic tabulation computers. That, despite repeated admonitions from election officials and the e-voting industry that, though their systems may not be secure, we can trust that election officials and the company employees who often program and service them would never do anything untoward. Stigall seems to concur that assessment, made by election insiders about election insiders, is absurd:
- [W]hen you look at all the reports from overseas about where computer vote fraud is most likely to occur, if you judge it simply by where all the reports in various foreign press or whatever discuss, it’s pretty clear that the central election headquarters, which is where all the computers are processing the votes or the one computer, this is a place where a lot of this can occur.”
The way the results of the 2004 election in Ukraine were transmitted and reported electronically, Stigall recounts, when the ruling party there was set to lose the election to the challenger, was startlingly similar to the allegations of what may have occurred on Election Night 2004 in Ohio when the incoming vote counts of the state’s 88 counties were surreptitiously rerouted to a hard-right Republican firm in Tennessee, in the middle of the night, before the final numbers were released to the public and the media:
- [The ruling party in Ukraine was] monitoring the vote count coming in from different parts of the country, and they were making subtle adjustments to the vote. In other words, intersecting the votes before it goes to the official computer for tabulation.
That’s nearly the precise allegation of those who have questioned the Election Night results reporting system created by then OH SoS J. Kenneth Blackwell in cahoots with the GOP’s high-tech guru Mike Connell. Based on those concerns, Connell was subpoenaed and then forced by a federal judge to give testimony in Ohio to plaintiffs who have had a long-standing voting rights lawsuit concerning the ’04 Presidential election there. Not long after Connell was compelled to sit for a deposition with plaintiffs, on the Monday prior to Tuesday’s 2008 General Election, following reports that he had been threatened by Karl Rove if he did not “take the fall” for what happened in ’04, Connell died in a tragic single-engine plane crash in December.
- “I’ve referred a lot to hackers in this presentation, but understand I’m not really concerned about the 18-year old wannabes. I’m concerned about the 28 or the 38-year old folks who have been doing this a long time and who may be under contract for some other organization. In other words, an organized structured effort to throw an election, or to compromise a computer system in that context.”
- “[W]here is the voter registration list before the election? Is it sitting on a computer that’s hooked up to the Internet? Is it sitting on a computer connected to another computer that’s hooked up to the Internet? Basically, that gives me an opportunity, simply, to reassert that the security of these elections that use computers begins long before Election Day and that the computers that hold that voter registration data should be nailed down in terms of their security, just as you would secure an electronic voting machine on Election Day. … You dont want it hooked up to the public Internet in terms of, you know, voter registration data if youre concerned about securing those names.”
Other than that, our years of reporting on the many concerns of e-voting here at The BRAD BLOG have been little more than the wacko, kooky, sour-grapes, fringe conspiracy theory ravings of a sore loser (even though we didn’t vote for John Kerry in 2004).
CORRECTION 3/28/09: We originally referred to the EAC meeting in Orlando as a “field hearing”, as McClatchy’s piece did as well, and to Stigall’s presentation as “testimony”. In fact, though Stigall answered questions from election officials at the EAC meeting, at the end of his Powerpoint presentation, he was not under oath, nor cross-examined, and so, as an attendee at the meeting pointed out to us, it’s inaccurate to refer to it as “testimony”. We’ve corrected the article above to more accurately reflect the setting for Stigall’s remarks to the EAC-convened panel.
Well La Te Da, is that a rainbow I see outside?
Thanks Brad and all! Oh yeah, does this finally mean the nearly worthless eac can be sunsetted and a real election reform can happen now?
Another great article.
BTW, has there been any investigation of Connell’s plane crash?
Inquiring minds….
Well, Duh. My computer successfully booted this time so I can leave a comment, but anybody who uses computers knows they are prone to…glitches. It has been reported that hacks into White House and presidential campaign web sites were tracked to foreign servers. Why would anybody think our unregulated computerized voting systems are secure. Media would never report a hacked election due to the potential of civil unrest. Election fraud is the news story that is not fit for print.
Glad to see this. In 2006 on election night as we watched results coming in from various counties in Florida CD 5, a VERY curious event occurred…
As we were watching the Marion County results suddenly Marion county which would total less than 40,000 votes if EVERYONE voted showed me ahead 250,000 to about 125,000 for my opponent Ginny Brown-Waite!
So HOW does something like that happen if there is not a “problem” as it were or someone screwing w/ the the vote tallies At minimum it should bring into question the ability of the system to accurately count the votes.
This notwithstanding the issues noted on page 375 of Mark Crispin Miller’s revised version of “Fooled Again” that we ferreted out in our election challenge in 2006.
I am becoming a big fan of hand counted paper ballots at the precinct level. That is why we have precincts in the first place and what is a couple of hours wait when our democracy is placed at risk w/ the current obviously CORRUPT system as noted in this article. Thanks, John Russell, Dade City, Florida
Another excellent article. Maybe now the issue will get some interest from Congress. Or maybe the CIA is just setting up a play for more money in the upcoming budget talks. There’s a lot of money in internet security protection.
John Russell writes:
Glad to hear it!
I think sometimes election integrity folks are reluctant to publicly promote hand-counted paper ballots because they fear they will immediately get the “wingnut” label and people will stop listening and their influence will wane.
I say, SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS!
At our current level of technology and security, there is no better way to protect the integrity of the vote.
All together now, let’s hear it:
HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS AT THE PRECINCT LEVEL IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW, WITH AN IMPECCABLE CHAIN OF CUSTODY, FULL TRANSPARENCY AND CITIZEN OVERSIGHT!!!
yet another smoking gun added to the stack of smoking guns, and still, at the county level, e-voting is receiving massive funding, and organizations such as NASS continue to advocate e-voting and never release statements that address these smoking guns
More excellent reporting!
Even the CIA dude is uninformed about B(roadband) over P(ower) L(ines)?
You are looking at the tree and not seeing the forest, dude.
Wireless? net cable?…too obvious.
A person has to know that some are up to no good when they are trying to hide testimony from you, the funny thing is that it happens a lot more than not.
OT but relevant to all blogs… a reminder that our elected or selected officials often don’t have a clue as to what fee speech actually means:
http://www.themudflats.net/2009...poses-himself/
It doesn’t ring strange to anyone that when Suntron, manuf. of Hart Inter-civic machines was taken private by Thayer-Blum funding III in Dec of ’07 that TBF III used to have Bob McNamara on its board and is partly owned by Finestains husband who is a MIC insider, lawyered up by none other than Maurice Greenberg of AIG infamy?
Then you have an ex(?) military guy who was the head of a front company, again named Suntron, a MIC contractor, making up another front company called Kwaidan Consulting who was contracted to do the testing on the Sequoia systems up in New York, suddenly outed, he ends up dead three months later?
Again, doesn’t this ring strange to anyone?
If not,I guess we’re all a bunch of blind babies then, Grampa IKE told us to watch out.
The link…
https://bradblog.com/EAC_022709...mfinal_add.doc
… does not work
So, the implication here is that Hugo Chavez is manipulating elections here in the U.S.? And as part of his dastardly plan he fixes it for Bush in 2004? Does this read like a hit piece against Venezuela/Chavez/Socialism to anyone else? Since when did people on sites devoted largely to the idea that U.S. elections are fixed start trusting CIA information regarding elections or companies that make voting machines? Who the hell you think has been fixing the elections in the first place?? This have anything to do with Venezuela kicking the Israeli ambassador out? Speaking of dangerous foreign influence…
… Gos said…
“So, the implication here is that Hugo Chavez is manipulating elections here in the U.S.?”
Hell of a strawman ya gots there 🙂
The “implication” here is that e-voting is vulnerable to anyone who wants to flip an election… be they right, left, corporate tool, U.S. native or foreign agency.
The simple fact is that due to the conflicts between election requirements and the innate vulnerabilities of computers that computers are inherently insecure for running elections… which is hardly some great revelation. Especially here.
The news is that even a spook with a presumed pro-status quo agenda seems to have admitted as much in public testimony.
Will wait until the document is up before commenting further.
EAC doesn’t have it mentioned, although the visit there was grimly amusing…
It will become clear in the days to come that Connell’s plane crash was pretty coincidental to this investigation.
It’s also clear that Kenneth Blackwell who was Ohio Sup. of Elections in ’04 was “in on the fix” for Bush’s second term. It’s time to put Blackwell under oath, bring in the whistleblowers who KNOW what this man did, and put him behind bars.
This is NOT NEWS for any of us who have been following these hacked elections but it’s taken a CIA under a “real” president (not the complicit one) to tell the american people the truth.
We all know the “how” of the hacked 04 election (RNC server from Ohio (the state upon whose votes the election pivoted) to a bank building in Tennessee where the votes were perverted in Bush’s favor. Now let’s get these criminals under oath!
Bring on the vote hacking trials!
hand counted paper ballots (a return to the past) is where this is headed and perhaps the ONLY way to ensure that our elections are valid.
Thanks for the news, Brad!
I do not know how you keep your cool.
I am so infuriated that even though we have been saying ALL of those things for years, and Bev has been going the distance ferreting our the fraud and documenting it in detail, the media REFUSES to cover it in a forthright manner. (I still remember Peter Jennings sneering! at claims of election fraud.) And out come these “erudite” talkers from left field- as if they’ve discovered bread for the first time.
And even then, our worthless corporate-controlled media will NOT make a federal case out of it, even though election fraud signifies the destruction of everything our nation stands for.
We suffered from an en-elected usurper in the White House for 8 years and no doubt are suffering from many more in various powerful offices- e.g. California Governor, San Diego Mayor Sanders, Congressman Brian Bilbray etc, who never would be there except for election fraud used to deny the previous winners their victories. I consider what our media does- treason.
It’s time to strengthen and enforce anti-trust laws on the media, the banks, the insurance companies. Buts them up to smithereens.
Great piece, Brad.
Thanks, Zapkitty! Link(s) to WORD doc of Stigall transcript now fixed!
Its not like its rocket science, that a clean election cycle will be one of the staightest ways to get OUR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC BACK! How’s that Mr. Washburn?
I just might drive to Harrisburg and place a copy of this report on pedro’s (now head of nass)desk!
We must have paper ballots and a systematic method of auditing a random selection of the ballots after the election.
In South Carolina we have ES&S iVotronics — no paper and no way of ever knowing if the ballots actually cast are accurately counted. Even worse, if a “recount of the vote” is required, the elections people just add the precinct totals together again. When asked if they always got the same result, the State Elections Director said “No, sometimes they forget to count a precinct or count one twice.”
While I would never argue that electronic voting is a secure way to vote it should be noted that ALL voting systems are vulnerable to fraud and corruption, not just electronic ones. So while using electronic systems makes it easier to fix an election you still need the corrupt insiders to game the election in the first place. Kind of interesting that the treasury department (real trustworthy group of ex-wall street scumbags there) and the CIA are ever so concerned about a company, and electronic voting systems in general when they have ties to Chavez, but not when it’s good ol’ amurican boys like Diebold fixing things. I can’t shake the feeling that this is CIA’s way to take ownership of the e-voting security concerns americans have and redirect it towards an enemy of american gangster style capitalism and exploitation. In one fell swoop the story acknowledges legitimate concerns about e-voting, redirects those concerns towards a “dangerous foreign influence”, demonizes a socialist world leader that many on the left in the U.S. find appealing, and makes the CIA(secret army of the uber-rich) look like the good guys because after all it’s a dedicated CIA agent’s diligent work on behalf of the american people that revealed the potential dangers of e-voting systems. I’m sorry but the CIA reporting anything about elections being vulnerable to manipulation is pretty much the same as Jack the Ripper reporting on how prostitution is a dangerous profession.
…notwithstanding, of course, the fact that prostitution is a dangerous profession….
Why wasn’t this in my papers?
When you see all this stock market manipulation, is it that hard to believe that e-vote machines aren’t being manipulated? That’s like saying “everything’s corrupt…except e-vote machines”
Note to self: password is “1111”; fix local election…
So, is Hugo Chavez an Angel? Give me a break, he’s a politician! Even as that is, he’s also a politician of a 3rd world nation.
Yet, despite these crippling facts, he still speaks up when he smells sulpher, and the obvious still remains obvious. What remains obvious to me is that the CIA has tried to “take out” this little brown socialist leader in the past, and I don’t believe that agenda has changed at all.
I must take with a extremely large grain of salt (bolder-size) ANY report about Chavez when that report is ostensibly coming from the CIA because the CIA so casually lies (and tortures, and murders, etc.) about “beaner”-brown foreign leaders whenever that government shadow organization feels that it is necessary. Furthermore, the CIA perpetuates a whole underground industry of manufacturing fake evidence specifically so that the lies it’s telling seem as true as possible.
At least Chavez seems to be working for the best interests of Venezuela first, second and third.
This article best functions as a character-assassination piece. Absolutely no evidence is presented that even suggests that Chavez is personally involved with the identified company. I mean, GIVE ME SOME DETAILS! If Chavez actually did manipulate some election somewhere in America, did his candidate win? As a consequence, what prize did he collect? This is not even addressed. Smells kinda’ like sulpher to me.
Anyway, with Washington perpetually being Zionist-occupied territory along with the CIA having its own dual-loyalty problems, Americans could only hope for a national leader of similar nationalist loyalties as Chavez has for Venezuela(but certainly not with the second-class rating that Obama displays for the United States, as Rahm Emmanual keeps his feet to that Zionazi fire).
DanD
Gos @ 24 said:
Right. But none as are easily manipulated on a grand scaled, but a “conspiracy” of one, as e-voting systems. Nonetheless, you are correct in that all systems are vulnerable to fraud, which is why we argue for the TRANSPARENCY that only hand-marked paper ballots, publicly counted at the precinct provides.
No. You only need ONE corrupt insider, or ONE clever outsider.
You should never have told Danny the default password, Brad… 😛
Well I have to say this article actually interested me a little bit. The same onesided view of a solution still however is absolutely disapointing to say the least. Paper is by far the least insecure method.
You need a trifecta or a quadf***you (as I like to call it) to effectively eliminate corruption possibilities and the allegations of corruption. A one stepped solution is just out of the question. We are a people of complex engenuity, yet our elections are only complex by the means of which county or what side of the road in which you reside. I would have to agree with knowledge in which I like to not disclose that the systems I have incountered are less than disirable and the software comparable to a slice of swiss cheese.
Real reform would be to set a standard in which all elections are run, then how these particular ballots are voted upon and cast. Then and only then can you effectively create a system in which a infiltration or corruption would clearly be noticed. The fact still remains that nothing and no one is infaluable. Attempts will be made on any system or systems which are initiated, history would dictate that this is inevitable.
As with the economy all we need is a little honest creativity.
Can I ask what ever happened to making a product that is the best you can make, now it is only about your profit margin. This is for all of corporate america, consuption nation of garbage products.
anybody know why PDA is voting on whether to back “the Holt bill” or not? Is it up again? here’s the webpage:
http://blog.pdamerica.org/
WE HAVE OUR FIRST CASE OF SUCCESSFULLY PROSECUTED VOTER FRAUD IN OHIO AND (DRUM ROLL, PLEASE) IT’S A REPUBLICAN!!!! Ta Da!!!
Didn’t see this reported in BradBlog yesterday, but I knew all who read this website would be interested. (Gahanna is a suburb of Columbus) Loved the excuse she used – “I don’t remember” – right out of every other Republican’s excusebook.
Saturday, March 28, 2009 3:14 AM
By Dean Narciso
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
A Gahanna woman pleaded guilty yesterday to voter fraud after casting ballots twice in November’s election, once under her own name and once under her daughter’s.
Cathy E. LaMaster, 48, of 4154 Helenrose Lane, registered in Franklin County and also submitted a registration for her daughter in Guernsey County. She then voted twice using absentee ballots, the charges say.
“I don’t remember doing it. But it was possible” that she voted under her daughter’s name, LaMaster said last night. “If it’s true, I won’t continue to try to take care of my daughter’s business anymore.”
LaMaster’s daughter, a student at Muskingum College, had properly registered and voted using a Franklin County absentee ballot. She was not aware of her mother’s actions and was not charged, authorities said.
LaMaster was given a suspended six-month jail sentence, a year’s probation and a $1,000 fine. She also was ordered to pay court costs.
According to voter registration records, LaMaster has voted in Republican primaries. She declined to say how she voted in November.
She was charged in Franklin County because she both filed her registrations and submitted her absentee ballots within the county.
The double registration was discovered by the Franklin and Guernsey county boards of election during reviews of duplicate voter registrations, part of federally required procedures.
“Although vote fraud is historically rare in Franklin County, this conviction should serve as a strong warning to anyone tempted to register or vote illegally that safeguards and procedures are in place to address it whenever it occurs,” said Michael Stinziano, director of the Franklin County elections board.
About 40 names of people suspected of improper voting have been referred to Franklin County prosecutors, said Matthew Damschroder, deputy director of the elections board.
The last voter-fraud conviction in Franklin County happened after the November 2007 election, when a Reynoldsburg resident cast ballots in both Franklin and Licking counties.
http://dispatch.com/live/conten...3.html?sid=101
… miss skeptic said…
If so that would begin to give us a statistical base, right?
Lessee: 206 years as a state, untold millions of ballots cast therein and… 1 conviction?
Hmmm.
… patginsd said on 3/29/2009 @ 12:49 am PT…
Yeah, he’s at it again:
https://bradblog.com/?cat=218
I’m supposed to have an article in to Brad discussing some of the related issues soon. Might submit a draft tomorrow. But even then Brad will have to see if it’s spelled halfway right and is not too toxic 🙂
But the bill? It’s same ol’ same ol’ with new window dressing to distract and split the EI community… again… while Holt gives the corporations as much as he thinks he can get away with.
Miss Skeptic @ 34:
What’s most important about the voter fraud cause you refer to is not that it was carried about by a Republican (though that’s no real surprise, frankly), but rather that it happened via absentee balloting, which is how most such voter fraud takes place.
Most importantly, that underscores (again) how a polling place Photo ID restriction would do little to combat the (imaginary GOP-created) “epidemic” of “voter fraud”. They wish to impose Photo ID restrictions at the poll, which are guaranteed to disenfranchise many, even while no Photo ID is required for absentee balloting, where the bulk of such fraud, such that it occurs, actually goes on!
Unprofessional Distortion
Brad’s summary of the McClatchy news report actually misrepresents CIA Stigall’s testimony. Brad twists the article into evidence against Internet Voting. But Stigall gave some very favorable testimony about Internet Voting in other countries. Here’s more:
“Stigall said that some countries had taken novel steps that improved security.
For example, he said, Internet systems that encrypt vote results so they’re unrecognizable during transmission ‘greatly complicates malicious corruption.’
Switzerland, he noted, has had success in securing Internet voting by mailing every registered citizen scratch cards that contain unique identification numbers for signing on to the Internet. Then the voters must answer personal security questions, such as naming their mothers’ birthplaces.
Stigall commended Russia for transmitting vote totals over classified communication lines and inviting hackers to test its electronic voting system for vulnerabilities. He said that Russia now hoped to enable its citizens to vote via cell phones by next year.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/...ory/64711.html
Internet Voting is coming, and Brad needs to turn around and look forward.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
“For example, he said, Internet systems that encrypt vote results so they’re unrecognizable during transmission ‘greatly complicates malicious corruption.'” And who says that the human race isn’t evolving? Please tell me the above posting comes from someone who writes for The Onion.
… William J. Kelleher, Ph.D. said…
Talk about your cherry picking… did you actually read the EAC transcript?
Hint: What you conclude from Stigall’s comments can’t be derived from what he actually said.
At most he thinks the Swiss effort might be working for them. But in that same context he gives examples of the failures of internet voting, including voter coercion.
Brad’s facing the right way… he’s just not wandering out onto a ledge that isn’t even there.
William J. Kelleher charged:
Actually, I didn’t discuss Internet Voting at all in my article above. I discussed Stigall’s assertions about the concerns of electronic voting period (be it e-voting systems at the polling place OR Internet voting, without making a distinction in my coverage at all).
Having actually read Stigall’s actual presentation, I presented the arguments of most interest to me, but did NOT, as you did (and as others noted above) cherry pick in order to make some preconceived point in hopes of pushing my personal agenda, as you seem to have done in your comment above.
Had I bothered to go into the specifics about what he said about Internet voting in the countries mentioned, I’d have pointed out (unlike you) that while data encryption may “‘greatly complicates malicious corruption.’, it does NOT make transmission incorruptible. It also makes it far less transparent (entirely untransparent, actually) to the public.
An invitation to hackers to try to disrupt a new Internet voting scheme in Russia is swell. But it has nothing to do with whether they can succeed at hacking it, or whether the scheme is either transparent, or relies on the “trustworthiness” of a few insiders (which it does).
As to the scratch-off PIN numbers sent to Swiss voters using Internet voting, Stigall did not mention in his presentation that such a scheme allows for the easy buying/selling of votes, and a near impossibility of such fraudsters ever getting caught.
So…you’re welcome for my NOT having dealt with the Internet Voting schemes he discussed in his presentation, otherwise, I’d have destroyed them.
Looking Straight Forward, With Eyes Wide Open, as Always,
Brad
P.S. Had I covered that part of his presentation, I’d have also had to point out that the folks who run the Swiss e-voting scheme admitted to me, on video, during a presentation in Los Angeles a year or so ago, that their system is entirely “faith-based” with trust given to a number of party/election official insiders. I’d also have informed you about the hacker who they’d brought along on their dog and pony show to discuss how difficult the system was for a VOTER to hack, but who admitted to me that hacking it from the inside is a piece of cake. Again, you’re welcome for my not having discussed that aspect of Stigall’s presentation in any detail. And I’d thank YOU for thinking about the necessities of transparency in order to secure the accuracy of self-governing democracy, rather than pushing for some techno-wizardry scheme which you seem to blindly support for unmentioned reasons.
Paper Ballots Period.
The bad news:
The Final National Exit Poll is always adjusted to match the recorded vote.
The good news:
By forcing the match, the Final proves election fraud caused the 2000 and 2004 elections to be stolen… and the 2006, 2008 landslide margins to be cut in half.
http://www.geocities.com/electi...ctionFraud.htm
In 2004, the returning Bush/Gore 43/37% voter mix was impossible.
In 2006, the returning 49/43% Bush/Kerry voter mix was implausible.
In 2008, the returning 46/37% Bush/Kerry voter mix was impossible.
2000
Gore won by 51.0″“50.46m (48.38″“47.87%).
The Census reported 110.8 million votes cast, but just 105.4m were recorded.
Approximately 4 million of the 5.4 million uncounted votes were for Gore.
Therefore he won the True Vote by 55″“52m.
The election was stolen.
2004
Bush won the recorded vote by 62.0″“59.0m (50.73-48.27%)
Kerry won the unadjusted (WPE) state exit poll aggregate by 52-47%.
He led the preliminary NEP (12:22am, 13047 respondents) by 51-48%.
To force the match in the Final NEP:
a) Bush shares of returning and new voters were increased,
b) The returning Bush/Gore voter mix was changed to an impossible 43/37%.
The mix indicates an impossible 52.6m (43% of 122.3) returning Bush 2000 voters.
Bush only had 50.46 million recorded votes in 2000.
Approximately 2.5m died and 2.5m did not vote in 2004.
So there were at most 45.5 million returning Bush voters.
The Final overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 7 million.
2006 Midterms
Democrats won all 120 pre-election Generic polls.
The final trend line projection was a 56.43″“41.67 Democratic landslide.
At 7pm, the NEP indicated a 55″“43% landslide.
The returning Bush/Kerry voter mix was 47/45%.
The Final was forced to match the 52″“46% recorded vote.
To force the match:
a) the Bush share of returning and new voters were increased,
b) the returning voter mix was changed to an implausible 49/43%.
The landslide was denied.
2008
Obama won the recorded vote by 69.4″“59.9m (52.9″“45.6%)
Obama led the final pre-election registered voter polls by 52″“39%.
The Final 2008 NEP was forced to match the recorded vote.
To force the match, the Final indicated an impossible 46/37% Bush/Kerry returning voter mix.
The mix overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 4 million “” assuming zero fraud in 2004.
It overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 9 million “” assuming the unadjusted (WPE) 2004 state exit poll aggregate (Kerry by 52″“47%).
The Final indicated that an impossible 5.2 million (4% of 131.37m) were returning third-party voters.
There were only 1.2 million third-party voters in 2004.
Assuming no fraud in 2004, the Final NEP mix overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 4 million.
On the other hand, assuming that Kerry won by 52″“47%, the Final NEP mix overstated the number of returning Bush voters by 9 million.
Obama’s True Vote margin was cut in half.
The landslide was denied.