Our votes are vulnerable to being (and have been) shunted through a "secret server" to rig elections

[diva77]

Last edited Thu Sep 26, 2019, 02:13 PM - Edit history (1)

exactly the way they were in 2004 to steal the presidency for Dubya.


Old article about Karl Rove's IT Guru:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/12/26/677386/-

in the late hours of election night in 2004--at 11:13 p.m.,
to be precise--when Blackwell shunted the vote tally from Ohio to GOP servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they were changed just enough to give the election to Bush. We have evidence, from the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, of the election architecture that shows exactly when the vote tally was sent to SMARTech at GOP headquarters in Tennessee, and when it came back. This is how Bush got a second term--and Karl Rove was behind it. Rove will be the next (after Connell) to be subpoenaed in our Ohio lawsuit.

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I wanted to raise this issue since the subject of a "secret server" has arisen in the impeachment inquiry.

[Baltimike]

1. knr

[diva77]

2. Thanks for the kick! I hope more people will keep it kicked for the day.

[Baltimike]

4. ou are very much welcome...they have been fucking with us for too long. nt

[IndyOp]

3. I watched the Ohio tallies changing - not percentages, absolute vote tallies

Dem votes kept dropping in almost all counties - such fucking bullshit.

[diva77]

5. Wow! Negative votes. I'll bet the insiders/or whomever have gotten a bit more

sophisticated since then.

[Ms. Toad]

6. Nonsense.

It is individual jurisdictions that certify the tally. The certification comes days or weeks later, from each local jurisdiction.

What is displayed on the SOS website is a report of the information sent from the separate jurisdicitons - it is a image of those records - not the records themselves. Just like I can't draw a beard on someone in a picture and have it appear in real life, the SOS cannot add or subtract votes to the image and alter the 88 separate original databases. This is especially true, since certification takes place later in each local jurisdiction.

NB: I have been involved in this process as a Democratic observer, and been present more than once during vote counting and certification days after the election. I know when and where the formal vote certification takes place, and it ain't in the SOS office on election night.

AND - there is no secret server in the impeachment inquiry. This is the same kind of mis-information as the misinformation about the alteration of votes by the Ohio SOS. Trump et al ordered politically sensitive information to be stored on the server that is designed to store highly classified information. It is like hiding your jewels in the flour bin. The flour bin is designed only to store flour, so presumably thieves won't look there for them. Only in this case, the "flour bin" is an even more secure place to store stuff you don't want found, since it is secure enough to store highly classified information.

But it is NOT a secret server - just a server that is designed for and routinely used for a different purpose.

We need to be more careful about this stuff - if what we say can be easily disproven, no one will trust whatever accurate information we do provide

[diva77]

9. I placed "secret server" in quotation marks - this was meant to refer to a server being used apart

from the proper server and undisclosed with proper protocol. I will say that I am not an expert on servers.

To shunt vote tallies through a republican server (and this was in a state upon which the entire election 2004 rested) means that a part of the election process became completely NONtransparent and UNOBSERVABLE, and subject to alteration with no accountability. Various totals at various jurisdictions could have been altered slightly to create a different winner. Afterwards, I recall reading horror stories on the Green Party 2004 website of obstruction during attempts to conduct a recount.

This article may be of interest:

https://www.wired.com/2004/12/ohio-recount-stirs-trouble/

"A lot of the (election) boards hire the company that (makes) their program to come in on election night and do all of the computer work and run the tabulators and do that type of thing," Eaton said. "We pay them for that."

Voting activists have long criticized the practice of allowing voting company employees to run tabulation equipment during elections. Iowa's Doug Jones said the practice allows for the possibility of vote tampering and should be stopped.

"If access is being permitted that even allows for manipulation, that's a serious problem," Jones said. He said he hoped that the issue in Ohio will prompt legislators and election officials to re-examine the practice and strengthen laws that would control access to voting equipment.

[Ms. Toad]

10. What you cited to was not various jurisdictions altering a few totals here and there

it was an allegation that somehow the SOS sent out - in essence - a composite photograph of all 88 jurisdictional tallies to a photo editor, and the process of editing teh composite photo actually changed the data. It doesn't work that way.

All that the SOS has on election night are copies of the data, compiled and displayed in one place, for the convenience of the voting public. They could blatantly make Mickey Mouse president (at least as far as Ohio's choice goes) on the night of the election, and when the election was certified a few weeks later Mickey Mouse would not have won the election in Ohio - since all that was changed was the public facing report, not the county-by-county individual results that are certified ib a county level weeks later.

As for the "secret server," there are a lot of people both on DU and elsewhere are shouting about a secret servr, not understanding the server on which the information was being stored was not actually a seccret servr. Especially since you linked it to a vote-changing scenario that could not possibly have impacted the election, you seemed to be in that camp.

[diva77]

11. I don't know if you're familiar with any of the letters written by cybersecurity experts to protest

computerized voting equipment. There are so many ways to alter the data -- as an insider or hacker.

Data can be collected and altered prior to what are considered official SOS results.

Interesting article here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/election-security-crisis-midterms.html

[Ms. Toad]

12. I am intimately familiar with voting,

and voting machines, from both a political (as a frequent party observer in both Democratic and Republican leaning jurisdictions) and occupational perspective.

That specifics in the article about actual intrusions are about the voter registration system - an entirely separate system. Votes cannot be changed by access to the voter registration system, despite implications near the end of the article that conflate the two.

As for the demonstration of theoretical hacks I am familiar with, none have been carried out under election circumstances: on a voting maching in pubic view with election officials and observers from one or both parties. All I've seen require access to parts of the machines which cannot be reached unobtrusively, as they are covered by plates, security devices, or are on surfaces not normally accessible during votes. It is a trivial thing to hack software when you unfettered access to the machines - the circumstances in which all of the publicized demonstration hacks I have seen took place. It is far less trivial to hack the machines in a real live voting scenario, under the watchful eye of other voters, members from both political parties who work for the boards of elections, and potentially observers from both political parties.

Although voters are not present during all aspects of the voting process (through certification), election devices can only be accessed in the presence of members of both poiltical parties - and for most of thoe times, observers from both parties are also permitted to be present. In both the Republican and Democratic jurisdictions In which I have served as an observer, members of both political parties were scrupulopus in following the restrictions - in many instances, the Republican board member or observer alerted me (or a fellow Democratic observer) to the need to rellocate board employees to ensure that both parties were present.

Electronic voting machines were designed in an era when election security depended on physical barriers: Observation by members of both parties, locked rooms, etc. At the time when most of the code was writtten memory was costly and bulky - so the code was written economically (and with the mindset that security would largely be provided by physical barriers). It was, perhaps, naive - but not a plot to steal elections.

And - even with the focus on the many ways computers not designe with preventing election theft in mind - no one has yet demonstrated how this purported ability to steal an election can be carried out in the physical circumstances I've set out. Further, neither parties, nor candidates, are programmed into the firmware. Given the numerous ways such names and designations could be entered (ie. they are non-standardard because they are under the control of each jurisdiciton), it is not as simple as shifting a few votes from Clinton to Trump - you first have to find Clinton and Trump in a system in which neither the party designation nor the name are actually encoded. That makes it a much more complex process than moving votes from one known location to another known location.

Finally, no one has been able to provide a convincing explanation of how the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who would need to be involved in a hack that is carried out simultaneously in hundreds of different, perhaps thousands, of county-level jurisdicitons were able to do so without a single leak about the scheme.

I am not suggesting that voting machines can't be hacked - they can (as can any electronic device). I'm suggesting I have not seen a theoretical demonstration of how it could be carried out on a practical level in a real-life voting set-up - and - if there was such a scheme, no conspiracy I am aware of has been successful in keeping hundreds or thousands of people silent about their roles i carrying it out. Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. Or in this case, hundreds or thousands can keep a secret if all but one are dead.

[triron]

7. And the Russians were helping with this in 2016.

[Doremus]

8. This IT man, btw, was subpoenaed to testify but coincidentally his plane crashed, killing him.

Has a familiar tone, doesn't it?

[triron]

14. Putin.

[bluestarone]

13. KICK!