by Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO…
Now that ES&S has finally submitted their previously withheld source code and documentation to California Sec. of State Debra Bowen, new members of her “Top-to-Bottom Review” team have been able to look at the ES&S Inkavote Plus system used across the entirety of Los Angeles County. And whaddaya know, the system is easily susceptible to fraud, hacking and manipulation.
The full report from the new testers — not the original members of the TTBR team at University of California, but testers sub-contracted by the ubiquitous private e-vote consulting firm of Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group (FCMG) [Ed Note: See additional thoughts/concerns from John Gideon on FCMG in comments here] — is now posted at the SoS TTBR page [PDF]. The LA Daily News summarizes the findings this way in today’s paper…
The report found that seals on boxes used to carry the system hardware could be opened and resealed without detection, making the machinery susceptible to tampering.
Plus, some password-protected systems could be hacked with certain programs, and some encrypted files containing sensitive data could be decrypted.
The study was performed as part of Bowen’s “top-to-bottom” review of statewide voting systems. Los Angeles County’s InkaVote Plus system is the last to be studied, because vendor Election Systems & Software failed to provide information to Bowen’s consulting team on time earlier this year.
In August, Bowen decertified the InkaVote system for use in the February presidential primary because of the missing information.
A public hearing will be held on Monday in Sacramento so that the SoS may receive public input on how she should proceed, and whether the ES&S Inkavote Plus system should be recertified in advance of February’s Presidential Primary.
Of particular note is the possibility that the hackable system may be used to vote on a Republican-sponsored ballot initiative to divide California’s 2008 electoral vote by Congressional District which could be on the Primary Election ballot next February. Such an unprecedented measure, if passed in the Golden State, could well hand the November General Election nationally, to the Republican party given the large number of electors that would be thrown to the GOP if the current winner-take-all system of choosing electors in California — the same one used by almost all other states — is changed for proportional representation.
Reports of potentially fraudulent signature gathering, in order to see the measure added to February’s ballot, have already surfaced.
Los Angeles County itself, a reliably Democratic-leaning county over all, carries an enormous number of votes for the state. It’s the largest such county in the nation, larger even than two-thirds of the states in the country. Tampering with the vote tabulation in that one county alone, could easily change enough votes to see the Electoral College initiative passed successfully across the state.
Last week, Bowen announced a $15 million lawsuit against ES&S for the illegal deployment of uncertified AutoMARK voting systems across the state. The next day, San Francisco announced its own separate suit against the company, the world’s largest supplier of voting systems, charging fraud, false claims and breach of contract.
Of great concern is that the “Top to Bottom Review” team for this system was not the same team that was involved in the previous TTBR. In this case the team was subcontractors for a company called “Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group” (FCMG).
It is inexplicable why this company gets any contracts to do voting system certification work. Stephen V. Freeman and Paul Craft were both members of the failed NASED Voting Systems Technical Panel that qualified every failing voting system that is presently being used nation-wide. Freeman was in large part responsible for the Sequoia VVPAT being qualified by NASED before testing was completed in 2004.
Paul Craft has no qualifications except that he managed to work his way into a position of being the voting systems certification director for the state of Florida. He did this with no computer sciences background. In fact, his degree is in Restaurant and Hotel Management.
Kate McGregor was a tavern hostess who worked her way up to managing taverns. Craft gave her a job in the Florida SoS office and now she is an expert in voting system certification.
These people were originally hired by ex-SOS McPherson to test and certify voting machines for the state of California. They gave the rubber stamp to everything they saw except a low-tech voting system for voters with disabilities, Vote-PAD. They unfairly and inappropriately tested and recommended against certification of that system. Bowen has, unfortunately, refused to reconsider that testing even though evidence and testimony has been given that the testing was biased and unacceptable anywhere but in California.
A continuing tie between FCMG and California may undo much of the good work accomplished by Secretary Bowen.
“the possibility that the hackable system may be used to vote on a Republican-sponsored ballot initiative to divide California’s 2008 electoral vote by Congressional District which could be on the Primary Election ballot next February.”
That is a straight up nightmare.
And if memory serves me, at one point in time California used electronic voting machines to vote for more electronic voting machines. (Or the increased funding thereof.) I used to have the links to this information, but have long since lost that. Not sure if anyone else caught it. I maybe said something about voting for electronic voting machines on electronic voting machines in the past Bradblog, but frankly I been pretty skitzy here lately, this stuff can drive you nuts at times if you really care about about your country or these issues, if your the type that just hears it then goes off shopping, or watching tv, I guess ya sleep well at night, but in the end the nightmare will reach you as well, as some of these folks are finally being woke from their sleep rather brutally when it does happen.
Actions have consequences, no amount of Karl Rove re-writing history will change that.
John #1, what I would like to know is who originally hired all these
assclowns in the first place, like who hired Freeman to the SOS Florida office ?Who hired Southworth ?, Lewis ?, Coggins ?, and the list goes on.
Whose payroll were they on before they slipped into the electioneering racket ?
Me thinks it was something to do with politics of the “R” persuasion.
Were they all in the military before their previous jobs ?
Maybe it was innocently a random thing (but I doubt that)
Just some shit I would like to know to find a common connection somehow.
This is a HUGE issue.
We know close to 100% of anomalies on e-vote machines favor Republicans. We know the history of e-vote machines, that Republican money financed the creation of the e-vote companies. And, we know Republicans were using dirty tricks to get enough signatures to get this on the ballot. We know Rudy Giuliani’s campaign is behind this ballot initiative, don’t know if you saw that article. And we know a Republican now in jail, Bob Ney, authored the legislation to install e-vote machines in the first place. And, finally, if this does get on the ballot, e-vote machines will be used to vote on this initiative.
You can kiss the 2008 presidential election goodbye and ever having a non-Republican president! And meet our new 2008 president, President Rudy Giuliani!
This is the most important “surprise” issue, that isn’t getting the attention it deserves.