The Politicus USA headline typified MSM coverage of what Brad Friedman often refers to as the “horse race” — “Democrats Surge As Michelle Nunn Leads Georgia Senate Race In Third Straight Poll.”
For The BRAD BLOG, and for a good many election integrity advocates and computer scientists, that narrow focus ignores “the track conditions,” which, in Georgia entails the continued use of touchscreen voting systems courtesy of a 2009 determination by the Georgia Supreme Court that “unverifiable elections are just fine.”
Where horse race coverage focuses exclusively on the here and now, this site feels it helpful to look back a dozen years to what took place in Georgia shortly after Democratic Secretary of State Cathy Cox signed a May 2002 contract with what was then known as Diebold Election Systems Inc….
Privatization and the ‘patch’
One of the deeply troubling features of the election integrity movement is how few people are acquainted either with the Velvet Revolution interview of Chris Hood, a former Diebold contractor turned whistleblower, or with “Will the Next Election be Hacked,” an explosive investigative piece by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. which appeared in the Oct. 5, 2006 edition of Rolling Stone.
RFK, Jr. reports that Hood had been present in May 2002 when officials from the office of Georgia’s then Secretary of State signed a contract with Diebold, which, at that time, was the world’s third largest seller of ATMs but a novice in the voting machine business, having just acquired Global Election Systems. Of nine bids for the Georgia contract, Diebold’s was the highest, but then Diebold’s lobbyist was Lewis Massey, who had preceded Cox through the revolving door as Georgia’s Secretary of State.
The contract required that Diebold install the entire system in five months. Hood asserts was a “very narrow window of time” that could be met only if Diebold “had control over the entire environment.” And that is precisely what took place.
And, with that, RFK Jr. reports that Georgia’s entire electoral system was instantaneously privatized. “The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state — all without any official supervision. ‘We ran the election,’ says Hood. ‘We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes.”
Diebold, however, did a bit more. In August of that year, Bob Urosevich, then President of Diebold Elections Systems, personally provided Hood and other Diebold employees with a memory card “patch.” Urosevich said it was software intended “to fix the clock in the system, which” Hood says, “it didn’t do.”
Hood told RFK Jr., “It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state. We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich.”
Hood claims Diebold covertly altered software in some 5,000 Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touchscreen) voting systems in two heavily Democratic counties. Diebold employees, who had a “universal key” to all of the DREs, evaded detection by performing the task early in the morning.
The Diebold whistleblower added: “There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results. Your program says, ‘I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.’ Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it’s done.”
As reported by Atlanta Progressive News at the time, Hood’s account provided independent confirmation of allegations made by another former Diebold employee, Ron Behler, who informed Black Box Voting that “there were several patches illegally applied on Georgia voting machines in the lead-up to the 2002 elections and that efforts were made to prevent the State from learning about them.”
Inexplicable results
While RFK Jr. acknowledged that it is “impossible to know” whether the ensuing GA election was stolen, the November 2002 election produced another of those statistical anomalies that have become so common place where 100% unverifiable e-voting is involved. “Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss…by five percentage points.” The Diebold DRE system declared that Chambliss received 53% of the vote to Cleland’s 47%-a twelve-point turn around.
In the Governor’s race, the same polls showed Democrat Roy Barnes leading by a whopping 11%. The Diebold DRE system declared that his Republican opponent, Sonny Perdue, had won 51% of the vote. Sonny is the first cousin of the 2014 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, David Perdue.
Those types of anomalies have continued. Earlier this year, statistical analyst and polling whiz-kid Nate Silver found it difficult to explain David Perdue’s two point victory in the Georgia U.S. Senate Republican primary run-off against Jack Kingston — a seven point turnaround from Kingston’s five point lead in pre-election polls. Noting that “polling in Georgia’s Republican primaries has a history of being accurate,” Silver, who looked at every factor, other than the voting machines themselves, described the result as an “unexpected quirk.”
Perhaps it was. Nobody can ever know one way or the other.
Judicially approved faith-based voting
In its 2009 decision in Favorita v. Handel [PDF] the Georgia Supreme Court rejected the contention that “the right of ‘elections by the people’…is violated by the delegation of critical electoral functions to voting machine processes that allegedly cannot be verified or audited ‘by the people.'”
The court said that the mere fact that voters “cannot actually see the electronic record within the machine does not mean that the vote was not accurately recorded or not recorded at all. The machines have an internal storage unit that can be audited in order to count the votes casts.” The court added that “the undisputed evidence shows that the touch-screen machines accurately record each vote when they are ‘properly operated.'”
This latter contention would no doubt come as a surprise to the 25 to 30 voters who, during the June 2006 Georgia primary, called into the campaign office of then U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D) to complain that they saw their votes “FLIPPED BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES on Diebold machines,” as reported by the Atlanta Progressive News. “They pushed the button for Cynthia McKinney and Hank Johnson came up.”
The Georgia Supreme Court’s blanket and unknowable declaration that “touch-screen machines accurately record each vote” no doubt would have also come as a surprise to the Center for Information Policy at Princeton University, who, on Sept. 13, 2006, released the results of their “independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine.”
That study’s principle findings were:
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute…
3.[Diebold’s] AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity…
So here we are on the eve of another election, with touch-screen votes flipping all across the country, as they have, election after election since 2002, and with Brad Friedman appearing on Thom Hartmann’s TV show this week to lament, with the paraphrased words of the late Yankee catcher, Yogi Berra, that its “Déjà Vu All Over Again. Again.”
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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Excellent post, Mr. C.
Let’s see … we’ve got unverifiable voting machines, unlimited campaign funding by corporations, a TV “news” network devoted to demolishing liberalism, and a crackpot, “grassroots” political party created and funded by billionaires …
We need only move Election Day to Halloween to commemorate the death of our democratic process.
Electronic voting machines are the ebola of elections and US democracy. RIP.
We can only pray that the undocumented workers will finally not be disenfranchised in great enough numbers to tilt this election in favor of the Democrats. They are our only hope. It’s a sad day in this country when those here illegally will be the ones, not our own ignorant and selfish citizens, to save us from global warming and the dismantling of the world’s safety net that is the U.S.A.
Nice to see that those taken in by right wing propaganda, like Thorny @3, lack the ability to so much as digest what this article is about.
First, this piece deals with unverifiable e-voting systems. While the GA examples entail mostly inexplicable results in which Republicans, trailing in the polls, won, they also included the example of David Perdue’s inexplicable victory over a fellow Republican, Jack Kingston.
Election integrity is not about Right vs. Left. It’s about right and wrong.
Next, it is high time that the uninformed learn that there is simply no evidence that Democrats are elected by what Thorny politely describes as “undocumented workers” (but his ilk more often denigrate with the moniker, “illegal alien”). In fact, there is simply no evidence whatsoever to support GOP claims of massive voting by suspected “non-citizen” voters.
See, e.g., our coverage of Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s failed effort to purge as many as 182,000 perfectly legal registered voters from Florida’s eligible voter roles as “suspected non-citizens.” Those who were placed at risk of losing their constitutional right to vote included Bill Internicola, the 91-year old, Brooklyn-born, World War II veteran and Bronze Star recipient who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and Archibald Bowyer, another 91-year old WWII vet who has been a citizen since the age of 2.
Our investigation revealed that there were only nine (9) confirmed non-citizens to be found amongst the 11.2 million registered voters, and most of those did not attempt to vote.
Sorry to trouble you with the facts, Thorny.
Ernie @ 4 said:
In case you’ve yet to see it, this is the “evidence” that wingnuts are now citing high and low to support their faith-based belief that non-citizens are somehow affecting the results of elections in large numbers. Though that article was posted by guest bloggers on a non-edited blog at WaPo, the wingnuts are using it to claim “Washington Post is reporting!…” all over the place over the last few days.
The article itself, and the study its based on, is weak, to say the least. The very same WaPo blog, largely debunked the piece, destroyed it actually, in two separate posts (here and here) that ran on the same blog immediately after the first faulty report.
Lots of folks, largely fellow academics, have debunked it, in fact, as its based on an Internet poll with a tiny sample that includes just 5, unverified self-reported non-citizen voters. Then, it takes the unverified tiny sample and extrapolates like crazy.
But, when one is grasping for straws, everything looks like a straw. And the original post (as opposed to the debunkings) are now playing on Rightwing “voter fraud” fraud sites and “news” outlets everywhere.
The most fun part: they are citing that article to support why polling place Photo ID restrictions are needed. Of course, two problems with that assertion, even if the data used in the study wasn’t already known to be faulty: a) Many non-citizens have Photo IDs, such as drivers licenses. b) The authors of the original blog item even write within it that Photo ID restrictions are “strikingly ineffective” at deterring the type of “voter fraud” they are writing about in the piece! For some reason, the wingers fail to notice that paragraph (and all the articles now published that debunk the original) 🙂
Georgia’s system in the 2000s was judged worst in the nation, which didn’t bother the SoS at all. Here’s a quote from my 2012 book “Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols”: “[Kathy] Cox was still in office in 2004 when, according to VoterGA, the Free Congress Foundation rated these machines as obsolete, the worst in the nation at F-.”