Former Circuit Court Judge Vic Rawl’s official protest against the results of South Carolina’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary election last Tuesday — when he was purportedly beaten by Alvin Greene, a jobless man who didn’t campaign and didn’t even have a campaign website — will focus on what he describes as “systemic issues involving the software of the voting machine,” according to the four-term, former state legislator in an interview with Fox “News” today.
The video and transcript of that interview — in which Rawl displayed a very impressive command of the issues surrounding the 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines used in the election — are posted below. It’s well worth reading and/or watching.
But first, Democratic House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) also appeared on Fox today where he said, “I believe there was hacking done into that computer.” He later added, that because SC used the type of voting machines that have been decertified by so many other states, “maybe somebody wanted machines that were easily hacked into.”
Take a look…
Clyburn’s comments are remarkable — certainly for a currently-serving Democratic official, much less one as high ranking as he is. Perhaps his comments will help change the way the bulk of the mainstream media has been covering this issue to date. They’ve been looking at everything but the obvious potential for computer failure or manipulation, even though Rawl has been going out of his way to point to it — as we saw in his remarkable statement announcing his protest of the election results filed yesterday, due, in no small part, to “the well-documented unreliability and unverifiability of the voting machines used in South Carolina.”
Since speculating on the accuracy of the results, or lack thereof, is all that most of us can do, given the nature of the type of e-voting system in use in SC which offer zero proof of actual winners and losers, there is certainly every reason to believe the election could have been hacked. The state’s woeful ES&S system — both its voting machines and its central tabulators — has been shown time and again, in scientific report after scientific report, to be easily manipulated, particularly by a well-placed election insider.
That said, there still remain other less nefarious explanations for the results, and it should also be noted that Clyburn got quite a few of the details — albeit fairly minor ones in the scope of his main point, if rather important to the rest of the country — wrong…
Here’s the key portion of the interview, as it applies to the oft-failed ES&S voting machines in question:
REP. JAMES CLYBURN: I’m saying I believe there was hacking done into that computer. Remember, these are the same machines that the state of Ohio, the state of California, uh, Louisiana, uh and Alabama, I believe — all outlawed this machine. I think that 49 states have decided that this machine is not reliable, and ought not be used for campaigns.
Yet, South Carolina — the administration of South Carolina — decided to go down to Louisiana and buy these machines, machines that Louisiana discarded. So, maybe somebody wanted machines that were easily hacked into.
The fact of the matter is, that’s a proven fact, and we had no business with those machines in South Carolina, but this administration made the decision to buy machines that 49 states rejected as being unreliable. Why?…
Clyburn is wrong in his assertion that “49 states have decided that this machine is not reliable.”
In fact, though many states have indeed found the ES&S iVotronic unreliable for a number of reasons, including the fact that they can be easily hacked, and have either recommended against their use or decertified them all together, many are still using the very same Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems to this day.
In addition to South Carolina, the exact same ES&S iVotronic machines — the ones without the so-called “Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail” (or VVPAT, the cash register-type tapes that print out a supposed record of the voter’s vote, even though few read them, nobody actually counts them, they can also be hacked, and they don’t actually have any bearing on how the computer records votes) — are still used, according to VerifiedVoting.org’s 2008 database, in Colorado, Florida (for disabled-accessible voting only), Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
The equally-unverifiable version of the ES&S iVotronic with VVPAT, is still used in Arkansas, Colorado, D.C., Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia.
Moreover, similarly unverifiable DRE/touch-screen voting systems, also oft-failed, easily-manipulated and equally-unverifiable, though made by other private companies, are used in dozens of other states across the country.
Of course, as we’ve pointed out in previous articles on this SC mess, simple machine failure, versus malicious hacking, is also quite possible with these systems, as they have failed on many occasions — most notoriously, perhaps, in the 2006 FL-13 special election for the U.S. House when 18,000 votes disappeared in a race decided by just 369 votes. Whether the cause was hacking or machine failure remains unknown to this date, though it did help lead Florida to return to paper ballots as they decertified all DREs other than for limited use to meet the disabled voter requirements of the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.
There are other reasons that SC’s results could have been what they were. Though not many. As Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight.com has speculated, the only other known explanation at this time would be a wildly possible cocktail of combined factors like ballot position, and a tiny percentage of voters who knew who Rawl was, but didn’t like him. Though those factors would seem to apply to votes on paper-based absentee ballots as well, where there was an inexplicable 11-point disparity with the Election Day votes cast on the touch-screens.
Once again, that returns us to the possibility of machine malfunction or manipulation.
And that is squarely where Rawl seems to be focusing his attention, as explained to Fox’s Bill Hemmer today.
The video is well worth watching or reading (transcript is also posted below). The most impressive part of it all, from where we sit, was early in the interview, when Rawl appropriately interrupted Hemmer to disabuse him of the notion that the major concerns were not in “the voting booth”, but in the software that runs the entire system.
Rawl has done extraordinarily well in a series of recent interviews over the last 48 hours, particularly given the speed at which he’s had to climb the sharp learning curve involved with the complexities and concerns of Election Integrity issues.
The good news is that, as a former Circuit Court Judge, he should be very familiar with the idea of what actually constitutes “evidence“, and the fact that there is absolutely none to prove that either Greene won, or that he lost.
Rawl’s protest will be argued before the 92-member SC Democratic Party executive committee in Columbia on Thursday at 3p ET.
The BRAD BLOG has reached out to both Rawl and his campaign for a number of questions we still have, but we have yet to make contact. We are, however, getting closer.
Also related today… D.C. watchdog group Citizen for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), took two actions related to the election. In one, they asked the SC Attorney General to investigate whether “was induced to run for the Senate in violation of South Carolina law.” In the other, they “filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) alleging that primary-winner Greene and three other candidates in the June 8, 2010 Democratic primary in South Carolina: Gregory Brown, Ben Frasier and Brian Doyle and their campaign committees, violated the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and FEC regulations by failing to file mandatory disclosure reports prior to the election.”
There has been speculation that Greene, who has said he saved up for two years in order to raise the $10,440 filing fee to enter the election, was a “plant” in the race.
He is currently scheduled to face incumbent Republican Sen. Jim DeMint in the general election this November, unless Rawl’s protest leads to a new election, or if DeMint himself is somehow tied to a malicious scheme — in which case, it could turn out to be DeMint’s Waterloo.
Judge Vic Rawl’s 6/15/10 interview with Bill Hemmer on Fox “News” follows in full…
BILL HEMMER: Yeah, it’s the voting booth that is at the core of your investigation. Now, I can understand…
RAWL: No, sir. It’s not the voting booth…
HEMMER: Go ahead.
RAWL: It’s not the voting booth. It’s the software that runs the touch-screen, non-paper controlled machines.
HEMMER: Okay, now this…these machines…I believe the ones in South Carolina have been used in Louisiana and that Louisiana officials got rid of it and went to a new system. Now I can understand in 2000, a difference of 537 votes and we hold the Presidency up for 36, 37 days, but this guy got almost 60 thousands…or, sorry, 60 percent of the vote. That’s a huge discrepancy. What explains that? I mean, what’s your theory?
RAWL: Well, theoretically, I have to rely on my experts. And talking to experts is very interesting unless you are one. However, it’s pretty clear that the patterns indicate a systemic problem with the machine. And the systemic problem in my opinion, from the information that I have, is contained in the software.
HEMMER: Do you think this election, as some have theorized now, publicly, do you think this was rigged?
RAWL: I don’t know if it was rigged or whether it was a technical error, it was a software error, it was a software breakdown. I can’t say it was rigged ,per se, intentionally or otherwise. But it certainly appears to be a software problem with the election.
HEMMER: As some have suggested, this Alvin Greene was a Republican plant. Do you buy that theory?
RAWL: I have no comment on what Alvin Greene is or is not. I campaigned very diligently from March the first until the primary date. I never saw Alvin Greene. I never met Alvin Greene. I never saw any materials whatsoever containing his name or campaign paraphernalia and that’s all I know about Alvin Greene.
HEMMER: On Thursday, the Democratic Party in South Carolina is going to take up your case. In the 15 seconds I have left, will you win on appeal? And can you win, technically?
RAWL: This isn’t an appeal. This is a protest. And in a protest, you have to show that there is a significant problem, and that that problem has a significant outcome on the election. An appeal would be from an adverse opinion by the [SC Democratic Party] Executive Committee and I don’t know if I will appeal or not. I cross that bridge as I get to it. We take this situation one step at a time…
HEMMER: Alright, if the story…
RAWL: … I would, however, like to make sure… Go ahead?
HEMMER: One more thought you have there?…
RAWL: I would like to make sure that people understand that this is not a campaign against two people that did nothing. That is very disingenuous to my campaign people that worked very diligently from March the first until the Election Day.
HEMMER: I can understand that. We’ll see what comes of this on Thursday. If the news changes, I hope you come back. Vic Rawl, I thank you for your time…
RAWL: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.
HEMMER: …out of Charleston, South Carolina. Martha?
MARTHA MCCALLUM: Must have been a shock to him to lose to someone who had never seen or run into on the campaign trail and never saw a bumper sticker or poster and then he wakes up in the morning and goes ‘what?’. It’s bizarre.
UPDATE 6/16/10: Rawl also appeared on the Thom Hartman Program on Tuesday, and did a fine job there as well. Here ya go…
Previously related at The BRAD BLOG:
- ‘Experts’ Eye 100% Unverifiable E-Vote System in ‘Win’ of SC’s Mystery U.S. Senate Nominee
- UPDATE: More Statisticians Focus on ‘Tampering, Malfunction’ of E-Vote System in SC Primary
- BREAKING: U.S. Senate Candidate Files Challenge to SC’s ‘Unreliable, Unverifiable’ E-Vote Results
- SC Election Commission Hoodwinks Local Media
Usually the best thing to do is scream loudly into the spy microphones if you think an election is about to be stolen. Especially if it’s your close relatives doing it. Could disrupt the possibility of nuclear holocaust, for the time being. Metaphysical pressure builds up in closed-loop social and human systems as well as technological ones. The earth weeps black tears for the black deeds she has seen.
Well maybe now, since an unqualified poor person won on the hackable machines, we can finally get some action.
Of course, it seems they want to portray this as a voting booth problem, but since ACORN is gone now, what do they have?
If this “voter fraud” story has legs, I am a Greek God!
Brad, I’m sure you know about this. Just at the mainstream media is finally getting a whiff of the facts they’ve been suppressing regarding the unreliability of voting machines, now the lies that the mainstream media published on ACORN are all being nakedly exposed. How truly despicable the US media is. Accepting the media’s reporting of lies as fact, Congress destructively and maliciously cut funding to ACORN based on the extremist right pimp. Congress has now cleared ACORN of wrongdoing. Whoops.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0615/preliminary-report-clears-acorn/
Larry @ #2 ~ “…now, since an unqualified poor person won on the hackable machines, we can finally get some action.”
HAhHhehahIIIIihaeeeee!
Brad,
You may remember an election in IA I believe, Potowatamie Country comes to mind, a small election but some sort of Republican primary, in which a college student on a lark decided to run in the election agains an incumbent Repub who was well-liked and had evidently done a pretty good job. The college student with no campaigning ala Greene ended up getting the most votes. Naturally, the elections officials were suspicious. In this case, they had paper and were able to recount. Turned out that the “ballot definition” for the optiscans was not done properly. Without paper, of course, this case would have been just like the SC debacle. I tried to find a link to this happening on google and couldn’t find what I was looking for, but I’m pretty sure this is one of the election snafus involving e-voting that was reported on by BradBlog. Maybe you remember this case. It would be a good one to use to remind people that this e-voting problem is nono-partisan, inherent when you use this technology to count votes.
Expert / M.I.T. computer expert weighs in on ES&S 14.5% UNDERVOTE RATE from FL-13 on the same paperless DRE-junk machines used in the SC election…
“Charles Stewart’s Bubble Chart: Voting Machine Implementation’s relation to Sarasota’s Massive Undervote Rate”
http://www.youtube.com/user/jeanniedean#p/u/32/4acC583ZfWc
(The above is cobbled together stills and video. Did the best I could as we were not allowed to film in the Tallahassee court room. Despite having filled out all the required paperwork, we were denied video rights at the last minute by Judge William L. Gary. The scratchy audio is culled from a camera I kept running under my jacket.
**Features insight/ analysis from computer programmer, engineer, and activist Leonard Schmiege; also Ion Sancho, Hero Supervisor of Elections (“Hacking Democracy”) comments on video logs mysteriously disappearing from the Sarasota Warehouse**)
Great job on Nicole Sandler, today, Brad!
The question is who is backing Greene, that he gets his own hacker to pitch for him?
To Steve:
Here is the BradBlog link you ar looking for.
Here is a link from my blog about the incident.
In 2004, I was the Asst. Director of Special Programs for a huge political organization in one of the most highly contested states in the nation. I was invited to a panel convened to discuss, mainly, the adoption of DRE/paper receipt systems. After spending an inordinate amount of time researching the ins-and-outs, I was absolutely awed with the unreliability and the ease with which manipulation of these machines can occur, as well as the incestuous relationships between-and the highly partisan nature of-the manufacturers.
What shocked me most was that after half an hour of speaking (and watching me out of the corner of his eye feverishly pulling pages from my three inch thick file of research) and another twenty minutes of ignoring my attempts to ask a question, when I was finally able to speak he hadn’t a single answer to the most basic queries. Two dozen questions later, he finally said, quite tersely, “Look, I don’t know, I just sell the things.” Then the meeting adjourned and he literally fled the building.
This was one of the greatest moments in my young career, and I was greeted with congratulations from the audience.
The machines, which were a mystery to the man selling them, sit in my polling station today.
Check out Black Box Voting, the supreme site for information on this issue: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
In the reporting I’ve seen, it would appear as though Mr. Green first tried to pay the $10,400 filing fee at Democratic HQ with a personal check.
When that didn’t work he apparently “walked down te street” and opened a “checking account under the name of his campaign” and then came back and paid the fee with that check.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/alvin-greene-tried-to-pay-filing-fee-with-personal-check/58146/
This sounds very odd. What bank will open a ‘business account’ without proof of business? What bank will allow a customer to immediately draw a significant amount of money from a just-opened account without a holding period?
Maybe Mr. Green already had an account at NBSC and they cut him some slack. But if this account is true it sounds like the bank cut corners.
Bill Hemmer’s remark, “Now I can understand in 2000, a difference of 537 votes and we hold the Presidency up for 36, 37 days, but this guy got almost 60 thousands…or, sorry, 60 percent of the vote,” reveals an incredible lack of understanding of the issue of election fraud by way of a hack.
The numbers reported by these unverifiable DREs can be whatever the hacker decides them to be. Even if Green received no more than a handful of votes statewide, the ES&S central tabulators could report that Green received 60% of the vote.
When Brad uses the word “unverifiable,” he means just that. These machines are electronic black holes. What goes into them on election day is forever lost to us, and about the only means to check against that is to individually canvass all of the voters.
Clint Curtis did that as part of his challenge when he lost to Tom Feeney, but Congress refused to accept that evidence.
One would hope that this latest farce will finally provide the impetus to meaningful electoral reform, but the problem for both Democrats and Republicans is that to admit that e-voting is unverifiable is to call into question the validity of every election which has been conducted not only on DREs but on optical scans where the machine count rather than the paper fed into the optical scanners determined the election.
i bow to clyburn and rawl and chant..we are not worthy
Hacking to 60% or 65% can work in a fraudster’s favor. In many states (such as here in Wisconsin) the cost incurred by the losing candidate to file an election challenge or recount increases with the percent by which the candidate lost.
In WI, if the vote total for the jusrisdiction of the office is within 0.5% then the cost to the loser to file for recount is $0. If the vote percentage difference is >0.5 and WI Statute 9.01(1)(ag)1,1m, and 2
If SC has a similar, graduated fee/cost structure for election challenges, then hacking to 60% would be beneficial to the hacking.
The above assumes some malicious manipulation of the machinery. There is no was to verify or refute that speculation.
Hacking to 60% or 65% can work in a fraudster’s favor. In many states (such as here in Wisconsin) the cost incurred by the losing candidate to file an election challenge or recount increases with the percent by which the candidate lost.
In WI, if the vote total for the jusrisdiction of the office is within 0.5% then the cost to the loser to file for recount is $0. If the vote percentage difference is >0.5 and <=2% then the cost is $5 per ward. If the difference is more than 2% the feee is the full cost of the recount as determined by the re-counting election official.
Source:
WI Statute 9.01(1)(ag)1,1m, and 2
If SC has a similar, graduated fee/cost structure for election challenges, then hacking to 60% would be beneficial to the hacking.
The above assumes some malicious manipulation of the machinery. There is no was to verify or refute that speculation.
“”Clint Curtis did that as part of his challenge when he lost to Tom Feeney, but Congress refused to accept that evidence.””
“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” (Josef Stalin)
$56 billion spent and still no guarantee .You have to wonder if “secure elections” was ever the intention.
Here’s a research topic: which political party was in power in each state when they adopted the DRE voting machines?
I keep remembering the pledge by the CEO of Diebold promising that Ohio would go for Bush in 2004.
Tom Stickler @ 16:
It varies from state to state, of course. It was a Republican in OH at the moment you mention.
But prior to that, most notably, it was supposed Democrats in MD (Linda Lamone, State Election Dir.) and GA (SoS Cathy Cox) who approved the use of Diebold DREs statewide in 2002 — the first two states in the union to do that.
Great job reporting on this one. I put a bunch of BradBlog links at the end of a little quicky on voting machine diagnostics specific to the parameters we are seeing in South Carolina, the new lead at http://www.BlackBoxVoting.org –
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/81009.html
Here ya go – reprinting here.
As you’ve probably heard, a South Carolina election yielded implausible — some would say impossible — results this month. I’m following up on tips provided by some people on the ground there, and Brad Friedman, of the Brad Blog, has been doing an excellent job of reporting the daily updates on this unusual situation; I’ve included several links to his stories at the end of this article.
Just a note or two on the questions that really need to be answered at this point in time:
1. The profile of this particular anomaly appears to rule out voting machine malprogramming at the county level. Whatever went wrong in South Carolina voting machines happened (most likely) in Omaha, or (less likely) at the state board of elections level.
Therefore, it’s about time that we find out the name(s) of the programmers in Omaha who coded the iVotronic cartridges that went out to South Carolina.
Typically, ES&S programs its iVotronics in Omaha, or sometimes with a subcontractor.
2. A results flip on voting machines can be caused by inverting candidate ID numbers in the internal mapping. This can happen either at the voting machine level (and could produce a global effect, transversing all precinct machines), or it could happen at the central tabulation level.
– To shed more light on this, more specifics are needed on the L&A testing, to learn the number of machines tested and whether a script was used for the L&A test or real voters physically entered votes. MY BET: Not many machines were tested, perhaps 1-3 percent of them, and they made ample use of scripts to test. More on why this could be important in a minute.
I also want to see a complete comparison of 100% of the poll tape results with the final tabulation. This helps pinpoint any source of any voting machine misprogramming.
The candidate ID number assigned on the memory cartridges needs to be compared with the number assigned on the Unity tabulation system.
Here’s how internal Candidate ID swapping works. Note that it can be purposeful or accidental:
Let’s say the candidate mapping is supposed to go as follows …
Name of Candidate / Internal mapping number
Vic Rawl / 820
Alvin Greene / 670
With this mapping, each vote for Vic Rawl is tagged to internal ID number 820, each vote for Alvin Green is tagged to internal ID number 670. On the screen, you see the names spelled out, but the computer inserts the data into a candidate ID number field, which is hidden from public view.
Now, without changing any spelling on the names, nor any positioning on the ballot, you simply swap the internal ID numbers in the data table(accidentally or on purpose). Like this:
Vic Rawl / 670
Alvin Greene / 820
Vic Rawl’s votes get mapped into the data tables corresponding to ID 670, Alvin Greene’s to the 820 portion of the table.
The beauty of using the candidate ID field to swap votes is that the references in all other parts of the system will automatically swap the data as well.
I’ve experimented with candidate ID swapping in the Diebold GEMS system. It’s a gorgeous little hack – and you can do it in any precinct, or even just with the absentee votes, a perilous process here in Washington as votes float in AFTER election day to be counted.
Any time the absentee results have an opposite trend from the Election Day results, internal ID mapping may be the place to look.
Now, this ID mapping swap can happen on the front end from the election management system used to program the memory cartridges, or it can happen on the back end, on the central tabulation machine as votes are added up on Election Night.
The reason I’m so interested in Omaha’s potential role in South Carolina is that if there was a candidate ID mapping swap, if it came through the state board of elections into the tabulator system through some patch or update, the poll tape results would NOT match the Election Night results. A complete set of matching poll tapes would point AWAY from any state involvement in the tabulator (or any middleman results reporting system), and TOWARDS Omaha’s front-end programming.
If an internal candidate ID swap took place on the front end, it would have been the vendor that programs the cartridges.
There is one additional wrinkle: A Logic and Accuracy Test should catch this. But as we know, L&S tests don’t always catch voting machine miscounts, and the DRE machines often use a computer script, rather than real voter input, to execute the L&A test.
MORE DIAGNOSTICS
Copies of all Unity and iVotronic audit logs need to be printed out and examined.
The memory cartridges need to be examined by dumping their contents and reviewing the code and data.
I think we’ll be seeing some interesting forensics on this one.
This issue needs to get into Federal Courts. I am not convinced that South Carolina’s political parties, election commissioners, elections administrators, and state elected officials don’t like for elections to be riggable. In my state (Texas) elections administrators will not periodically examine election software in spite of a statutory requirement to do so (http://manaugh.googlepages.com/). Nor will they investigate citizen complaints of vote flipping and misrecoding of ballot chices (http://manaugh.googlepages.com/blankenshipcomplaint2008). Both parties make having some kind of paper trail a party platform, but years pass with no action on the part of the Republican-controlled legislature. Rather they spend a lot of energy arguing the need for photo IDs to solve voter impersonation at polls — a non-problem.
Bev @ 18:
Excellent analysis. I’ll get it to the Rawl campaign ASAP (on the presumption that you haven’t already).
And, by way of my usual conservatism — for which I’m given absolutely zero credit — I should note that the ID swap you point to could have happened non-maliciously. As in, an accident. Seems an unlikely accident, of course, if it happened, but it could have been a programming error/typo. Potentially. FWIW. Just noting that 🙂
Thanks for the smart insight.
Brad,
Wonderful that you’ll get the information to the right places. It took me months to recover from my surgery and I got so far behind — plus all the NEW breaking stuff — that I’m feeling a bit exhausted and overwhelmed. But getting back in the game, little by little. And down 37 pounds now, accelerated by removal of several internal organs. Now ya don’t see THAT on America’s Biggest Loser, now do ya!