Bev Harris of Black Box Voting Releases Accenture's Voting Software

Gottesser writes with this excerpt from Bev Harris's Black Box Voting: "I have found and posted the actual voter list software used widely throughout the USA (TN, WI, PA, CO, KS...) for Accenture voter registration and voter histories. I located the files on a magnetic backup tape of the hard drive of a county elections IT employee, part of a 120-gig set of discovery files. The Accenture voter registration / voter history software is highly problematic, and has been reported switching voter parties in Colorado, and losing voter histories in Tennessee. Although it is now widely known that Accenture voter list software gets it wrong, just WHY the program misreports voter information so often has never been explained. I am hoping that by releasing this software to the public, it may shed light on what's really going on with our voter registration systems. I also posted a Tennessee file with work orders and release notes which shows the Accenture software has a history of tripling votes in certain ('random') voter histories, going back to 2004. Except it is not random: Other files I discovered prove it is with primarily suburban Republican precincts that votes are somehow being recorded twice and sometimes three times for certain voters in the voter history report, and this didn't just happen in 2004; it also happened in the 2008 presidential primary and in May and August 2010, and according to election commission notes in Shelby County, also in the 2012 presidential primary. Computer buffs, have at it. Much source code exists within the structure because it is built on MS Access. I do not read source code, though I can see some structural problems with the software (for example, it allows political party ID to be set differently from one precinct to another)."

Comments

Re:This will be really interesting

[Mister Transistor]

How about the President of Diebold quoted as saying they were "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions).

If that isn't a obvious Freudian slip indicating their conflict of interest with the Republican party, I don't know what the fuck is. Yes, the Dems liked the idea of e-voting but this was before the Repubs perverted the realization. The Republican party objected, then quickly found a way to get their unregulated business-connected fucktard "partners" to trample all over the process and game the system in their favor. Yeah, letting businesses run wild and do whatever they want is a REALLY GOOD thing for this country. NOT.

Pearls of Wisdom from 6+ years in the field.

[Gottesser]

I posted the article from Bev's press release. I worked on election fraud in 2004 for six years in Ohio. I was *hoping* all that time that we would find Democrats rigging for democrats. I had a punnet square going in my head. By and large 2004 was rigged for Bush. However, in the 18 of 88 counties we looked at what we found in over 30,000 photos of 126,000 ballots, poll books and signature books is that yes, Democrats sometimes rig for Republicans and Republicans sometime rigged for Democrats in down ticket races. The thing is that in a lot of Boards of Elections (county level) the "bipartisan" means someone switches parties. Sometimes this is a even a family member (the easiest one to push around).

The recommendation and rationale goes like this... The person I trust is not necessarily the person you would trust therefore we need transparency. No system can be secured against its administrators therefore we need transparency over security.

We must be able to verify four things. 1) Who can vote 2) Who did vote 3) Chain of custody 4) Vote count

Failing any of these points our elections are simply staged theater. Right now, we're failing ALL these points. No electronic system can be verifiable. Can't be done. Even under a paper system its difficult to put checks in place and to have mechanisms where a single voter or group of voter can raise a concern (even an honest mistake) and have it taken care of. A botched election is notoriously hard to clean up. Especially because recounts can and have been rigged. Litigating election issues is nearly impossible. The integrity of the election cycle must be maintained so no voter off the street and even most candidates can't get an issue in court with enough time to change the outcome of an election.

Therefore. *Most* Long term Election Integrity activists have come to support this basic starting principal: "Voter Marked Hand Counted Paper Ballots, Counted at the polls, on election night, no matter how long it takes, in full public view before all those who want to witness the count and before the ballots are moved and chain of custody issues arise."

Now. That handles points 3 and 4 but to be honest. 1 and 2 are tricky. They kinda require databases at this point because unlike the pool of poll workers this system don't scale well with the population. Bev's been finding voter histories have been erased in several counties in Tennessee. This is important because if a registered voter hasn't voted in a while then as part of house keeping (the person may have died or moved) they eventually get purged from the voter rolls. So someone(s) in Tennessee is erasing peoples' vote history so they get purged, show up at the polls and can't vote. There's already been some court rulings to handle this. The point is we need to remain vigilant and we need things transparent so we CAN be vigilant. We don't need computers to solve everything. We need the public to relearn how to do their civic duty and to do that civic duty.