I'm hoping you can provide an example -- anywhere -- where you have had an opportunity to compare the paper against the machine. Of course, they did that in Cleveland, the only place in history I think that has ever actually compared the DRE "voter verifiable paper audit trail" with what the machines said. That cost Cleveland about $350,000.
It didn't match.
I am currently up to my ears in "auditing." First, you can't get the records. Those records you are allowed to look at, you can't do so in a timely manner, generally until after all recount and contest periods have expired. And those records you get to look at generally have information on them that doesn't reconcile. When it doesn't reconcile, you don't get meaningful answers. And there are no consequences for public officials who run mismatched elections, except in the rarest of cases, such as what's happening in Sarasota right now -- but that took citizens groups from 3 counties and a team of lawyers. Sarasota citizens take back their elections
In every election, we are seeing more votes than voters, zero reports that aren't zero, machines that don't match their paper results reports, lost votes, but mostly, we aren't allowed to see. A little-known secret is that even in locations where they have "random x% manual audits" the random is "selected" (you heard me) and the audits frequently don't match. When they don't, there is no expansion of the audit, and indeed, there is not even a disclosure to the public that it didn't match.
If you are persistent enough to find out when the "random" audit will take place, you MIGHT be able to watch, and if you are allowed to watch, you MIGHT be able to actually see anything. It is common for them to put you too far away to view the ballots, just as it is common on Election Night for them to turn the computer screens away from the observer area so that observers get to watch the back of the monitor, not the front.
Theories of how elections should work run into a bumpy ride when you watch first-hand how elections are actually run.
But let's suppose we solve those problems.
With computerized voting, it takes a small wheelbarrow and about 60 days free time to engage in stupefyingly tedious but precise work to audit just one jurisdiction. You've got to check the (Diebold) computerized voter registration system with the (Diebold) electronic pollbook and then look at the (Diebold) voting machine results tapes and then compare them with the (Diebold) central tabulator report. But all those things can be rigged, as we showed in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy." What remains is counting all the paper votes. Not a sample. All of them.
But counting the "VVPAT" is almost a comedy. It's printed on 8-pt type on a roll made of thermal paper that is about 3 inches wide and a few hundred feet long. If you thought staring at chads was bad, you'll croak when you see this. But that's not all.
The chain of custody for the paper trail, which you MIGHT get to see after weeks have passed, is another of life's little mysteries. But let's assume the chain of custody is acceptable. In San Diego, they charge a dollar a vote to look at the ballots. To look at just 11 precincts (out of over 500) citizens were hit with an unitemized bill for over $8000. At least they could look -- in Marin County, the race was dictated by the absentee ballots, and citizens were told that it is not possible to sort the absentees for just their candidate, so they'd have the choice of paying for looking at ALL of them or paying an even bigger fee to have them sorted.
But that's in the more voter-friendly locations. In Nebraska, a losing candidate for senate tried to purchase a hand recount. "There is no provision in the law" he was told, and I have that letter from the Nebraska Secretary of State, "for you to count the ballots by hand." They must go through the machine again.
Any of us can go out and buy Photoshop, Office, and HalfLife and get at least an operational overview of what they do and how they work.
None of us can buy the secret voting system software that we are forced to use as the sole means of exercising our voice as owners of our own government. Citizens own the government, not the other way around.
When you own something, you have to have a way to convey your management decisions. As citizens, the way we invoke our management rights is through our vote, and the system that defines, authenticates, records and counts our vote is owned by someone else who says we not only can't look at the source code, we can't even install a working version of the compiled code to see anything at all about how it works.
That's what's different. This situation is more akin to the owner of Halflife being told he is not allowed to see how his own product works.
Not to worry. Some of the posts for years have been by a Diebold employee using several different screen names. In fact, we traced him to at least one account on Slashdot. He posted smears about various people in the election integrity movement, and he had/has accounts on Bradblog, DemocraticUnderground, the Yahoo finance message board for Diebold, on Black Box Voting, on his own web site, on Slashdot, and on Fark, among others. By tracing an IP on one of his troll posts to his own little blog, where he and his wife posted photos of their cars and houses we were able to get a positive ID on him. He called himself an "HTML ninja" and a spy. Well, Diebold's Rob Pelletier was perhaps the dumbest ninja in history because he accidentally captured himself on his wife's webcam posting messages.
So watch this thread for a tense man on a webcam as I post the link to a report, with photos and video, showing how we found out the identity of one of the Diebold's Internet smear squad. Here it is: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/diebold-PRmachine.pd f
Now, as to what you can find without access to source code:
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the software contains a double set of books that allows it to pass spot checks -- i.e. random hand count audits -- while still cooking the books
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the MS Access database tables do not bother with referential integrity
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that you can alter results using either a Visual Basic script or Java Script. This was demonstrated on a real election system and is shown in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy" which is showing all month and is on the "on demand" programming right now.
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found a customized set of programs using interpreted code, which is banned by the FEC
Looking at the ES&S Unity software, which they will certainly claim has been changed, will nevertheless tell us something about the original architecture and how the programmers think. It will tell something about the programming culture. It will tell something about any commercial off-the-shelf software used with the databases, and knowledge about those programs will in turn provide information about the kinds of vulnerabilities these guys were willing to put in a voting system.
It may help to craft public records requests, based on guesses as to what vulnerabilities might still be in the system, and thereby elicit more information. And remember, this is the government. Not everyplace could afford new voting systems, so they have a legacy problem. They have to make new versions backward compatible to some extent.
In a vacuum, even a little opening can cause a rush of new knowledge. Hopefully the Unity programs will provide enough hints we can pry loose more information through public records requests, voting machine inspections, and in legal discovery. It will certainly give us ideas for some questions to ask.
Our domain, blackboxvoting.org (and the forums, on bbvforums.org, and the document archives, on bbvdocs.org) are on one server. These ES&S program files are on another server entirely because they are quite large and would slow down our blackboxvoting.org site.
I won't say where they came from. I've checked them out to the extent possible, and they appear to be the real thing. In any situation like this you have to consider that the software might have changed significantly, or that someone could have left a honey pot out there, but I don't think this is a honey pot, not going to publish why on an Internet site. There is a good possibility that current versions have significant changes.
Looking over these files should tell us a lot about how the ES&S programmers think, programming styles, etc. I haven't had time to look at the files at all, and I'm not a programmer. This program is designed to run on Windows, according to the user manuals, so I imagine you can just install it and start tinkering, as we did with the Diebold GEMS program.
Some of the material refers to "Aero," which is definitely an older version that grew into the Unity program.
No source code was provided (no source code was provided for the Diebold GEMS program, either, remember). The software is only for the election management system/central tally system, and we have so far been unable to get programs for the precinct-based individual voting machines, nor for the ES&S equivalent of the memory card, which they call the "PEB".
Black Box Voting is receiving very credible reports of ES&S meltdowns in several states, though they always seem to have a temporary technician around to promise everyone their vote was not lost. Hard to explain, of course, since 18,000 votes are missing in action right now in Sarasota Florida, with about 300 votes separating the candidates for a U.S. House of Representatives race.
We are getting reports of ES&S anomalies from BOTH political parties.
If anyone has any questions, you can e-mail me at the e-mail address on the blackboxvoting.org Web site.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping you can provide an example -- anywhere -- where you have had an opportunity to compare the paper against the machine. Of course, they did that in Cleveland, the only place in history I think that has ever actually compared the DRE "voter verifiable paper audit trail" with what the machines said. That cost Cleveland about $350,000.
It didn't match.
I am currently up to my ears in "auditing." First, you can't get the records. Those records you are allowed to look at, you can't do so in a timely manner, generally until after all recount and contest periods have expired. And those records you get to look at generally have information on them that doesn't reconcile. When it doesn't reconcile, you don't get meaningful answers. And there are no consequences for public officials who run mismatched elections, except in the rarest of cases, such as what's happening in Sarasota right now -- but that took citizens groups from 3 counties and a team of lawyers. Sarasota citizens take back their elections
In every election, we are seeing more votes than voters, zero reports that aren't zero, machines that don't match their paper results reports, lost votes, but mostly, we aren't allowed to see. A little-known secret is that even in locations where they have "random x% manual audits" the random is "selected" (you heard me) and the audits frequently don't match. When they don't, there is no expansion of the audit, and indeed, there is not even a disclosure to the public that it didn't match.
If you are persistent enough to find out when the "random" audit will take place, you MIGHT be able to watch, and if you are allowed to watch, you MIGHT be able to actually see anything. It is common for them to put you too far away to view the ballots, just as it is common on Election Night for them to turn the computer screens away from the observer area so that observers get to watch the back of the monitor, not the front.
Theories of how elections should work run into a bumpy ride when you watch first-hand how elections are actually run.
But let's suppose we solve those problems.
With computerized voting, it takes a small wheelbarrow and about 60 days free time to engage in stupefyingly tedious but precise work to audit just one jurisdiction. You've got to check the (Diebold) computerized voter registration system with the (Diebold) electronic pollbook and then look at the (Diebold) voting machine results tapes and then compare them with the (Diebold) central tabulator report. But all those things can be rigged, as we showed in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy." What remains is counting all the paper votes. Not a sample. All of them.
But counting the "VVPAT" is almost a comedy. It's printed on 8-pt type on a roll made of thermal paper that is about 3 inches wide and a few hundred feet long. If you thought staring at chads was bad, you'll croak when you see this. But that's not all.
The chain of custody for the paper trail, which you MIGHT get to see after weeks have passed, is another of life's little mysteries. But let's assume the chain of custody is acceptable. In San Diego, they charge a dollar a vote to look at the ballots. To look at just 11 precincts (out of over 500) citizens were hit with an unitemized bill for over $8000. At least they could look -- in Marin County, the race was dictated by the absentee ballots, and citizens were told that it is not possible to sort the absentees for just their candidate, so they'd have the choice of paying for looking at ALL of them or paying an even bigger fee to have them sorted.
But that's in the more voter-friendly locations. In Nebraska, a losing candidate for senate tried to purchase a hand recount. "There is no provision in the law" he was told, and I have that letter from the Nebraska Secretary of State, "for you to count the ballots by hand." They must go through the machine again.
Again, why are we doing this?
A bill has been intr
None of us can buy the secret voting system software that we are forced to use as the sole means of exercising our voice as owners of our own government. Citizens own the government, not the other way around.
When you own something, you have to have a way to convey your management decisions. As citizens, the way we invoke our management rights is through our vote, and the system that defines, authenticates, records and counts our vote is owned by someone else who says we not only can't look at the source code, we can't even install a working version of the compiled code to see anything at all about how it works.
That's what's different. This situation is more akin to the owner of Halflife being told he is not allowed to see how his own product works.
So watch this thread for a tense man on a webcam as I post the link to a report, with photos and video, showing how we found out the identity of one of the Diebold's Internet smear squad. Here it is: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/diebold-PRmachine.pd f
Now, as to what you can find without access to source code:
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the software contains a double set of books that allows it to pass spot checks -- i.e. random hand count audits -- while still cooking the books
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that the MS Access database tables do not bother with referential integrity
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found that you can alter results using either a Visual Basic script or Java Script. This was demonstrated on a real election system and is shown in the HBO film "Hacking Democracy" which is showing all month and is on the "on demand" programming right now.
- In Diebold's GEMS, we found a customized set of programs using interpreted code, which is banned by the FEC
Looking at the ES&S Unity software, which they will certainly claim has been changed, will nevertheless tell us something about the original architecture and how the programmers think. It will tell something about the programming culture. It will tell something about any commercial off-the-shelf software used with the databases, and knowledge about those programs will in turn provide information about the kinds of vulnerabilities these guys were willing to put in a voting system.
It may help to craft public records requests, based on guesses as to what vulnerabilities might still be in the system, and thereby elicit more information. And remember, this is the government. Not everyplace could afford new voting systems, so they have a legacy problem. They have to make new versions backward compatible to some extent.
In a vacuum, even a little opening can cause a rush of new knowledge. Hopefully the Unity programs will provide enough hints we can pry loose more information through public records requests, voting machine inspections, and in legal discovery. It will certainly give us ideas for some questions to ask.
Hopefully putting to rest any questions as to who is who. I posted this discussion at Slashdot as the lead story on blackboxvoting.org Cheers.
I won't say where they came from. I've checked them out to the extent possible, and they appear to be the real thing. In any situation like this you have to consider that the software might have changed significantly, or that someone could have left a honey pot out there, but I don't think this is a honey pot, not going to publish why on an Internet site. There is a good possibility that current versions have significant changes. Looking over these files should tell us a lot about how the ES&S programmers think, programming styles, etc. I haven't had time to look at the files at all, and I'm not a programmer. This program is designed to run on Windows, according to the user manuals, so I imagine you can just install it and start tinkering, as we did with the Diebold GEMS program. Some of the material refers to "Aero," which is definitely an older version that grew into the Unity program.
No source code was provided (no source code was provided for the Diebold GEMS program, either, remember). The software is only for the election management system/central tally system, and we have so far been unable to get programs for the precinct-based individual voting machines, nor for the ES&S equivalent of the memory card, which they call the "PEB".
Black Box Voting is receiving very credible reports of ES&S meltdowns in several states, though they always seem to have a temporary technician around to promise everyone their vote was not lost. Hard to explain, of course, since 18,000 votes are missing in action right now in Sarasota Florida, with about 300 votes separating the candidates for a U.S. House of Representatives race.
We are getting reports of ES&S anomalies from BOTH political parties.
If anyone has any questions, you can e-mail me at the e-mail address on the blackboxvoting.org Web site.
Best,
Bev Harris
Founder
Black Box Voting