The Real Winner in Virginia Last Night - Paper Ballots

[babylonsister]

https://thedailybanter.com/2017/11/real-winner-in-virginia-paper-ballots/

The Real Winner in Virginia Last Night - Paper Ballots
The commonwealth abandoned electronic voting machines. It's time everyone else followed.

Jeremy Fassler
19 hours ago


Last night's elections in Virginia were a stunning victory for the Democrats. As I reported on Monday, voters in the commonwealth didn't care about Donna Brazile and DNC fundraising squabbles: they were too busy organizing to usher into power their new governor, Ralph Northam, their new Lt. Governor, Justin Fairfax, and a diverse slate of House delegates, including the first transgender woman to ever assume elected state office in this country, Danica Roem. Their victories have been the strongest rebuke to Donald Trump and his administration so far, and should give hope to all who resist the Russian-Operative-in-Chief as we start organizing for 2018. However, Virginia had another big winner last night that cannot be ignored going forward - paper ballots.

Before this election, Virginia had been at the mercy of WINVote, a brand of electronic servers described by Wired as "America's worst voting machines." They were filled with bugs upon their debut in 2003, when they subtracted one out of every hundred votes cast and caused Rita Thompson to lose her local school board election by a close margin, and never improved throughout their decade of usage. Thanks to their easy passwords (one of them was, I kid you not, "abcde" ), lack of security, and reliance on wi-fi to work, they were a boon for hackers who could crack the system's WEP key in under three minutes to insert their malware. Aided by WINVote's lack of internal logging capabilities or paper trail, there was even built in plausible deniability that any hacking had occurred.

It wasn't until 2014, when the state experienced a myriad of problems on Election Day, that Governor Terry McAuliffe proposed an overhaul of the state voting system. By 2015, the Virginia Board of Elections decertified the use of WINVote, but they were still stuck with other DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) systems. This past summer, at a DefCon conference in Las Vegas, computer scientists staged a "Voting Machine Hacking Village" to prove the instabilities of DRE, which included a single password for all machines, physical ports to insert malware, and reliance on outdated software that had not been updated since the mid-2000s. The combination of this demonstration and the vulnerabilities exposed by the Russian targeting of last year's presidential election, led Virginia's Board of Elections to decertify all electronic machines, forcing the counties that used them to return to paper ballots and electronic scanners.

Other states that face demands for transparency have not been so forthcoming. Although Georgia elected three Democratic representatives to its state house last night, the state still relies solely a machine called the AccuVote TS, including in the extremely close congressional special election last June, where Democrat John Ossoff lost by less than 10,000 votes to Republican Karen Handel. Following these results, voters filed a lawsuit against the state, arguing that its voter database was left exposed to Russian hackers for seven months between August 2016 and March 2017, leaving the state open to all kinds of mischief.

Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said through a spokesperson that the claims of hacking were "meritless," but both sides now find this much harder to prove due to a key server containing election results being wiped in July, just after the suit was filed. Kemp said, again through a spokesperson, that his office had nothing to do with the error, but as computer scientist Richard DeMillo accurately stated, “People who have nothing to hide don’t behave this way.” Due to this impropriety, Georgia's attorney general has stated their office will not defend Kemp, who will be represented by a private firm.

Voting rights have been assaulted over the last decade by Republican gerrymandering and voter ID laws. The election of Ralph Northam last night against Ed Gillespie, whose REDMAP system allowed the GOP to retake the House of Representatives in 2010, ensures that Virginia will remain safe from these disgusting practices when the next census, and presidential election, occur in 2020. Hacks like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Brian Kemp, both of whom plan to run for governor of their respective states, would love nothing more than to see us disenfranchised, lest we should challenge the "legitimacy" of their victories, or the permanence of their offices. What happened in Virginia last night must send shivers down their spine, since it can, and must, lead to all fifty states demanding transparency in their electoral processes, and that starts by protecting our votes with a paper ballot.

[samnsara]

1. I agree...next ALL mail in ballots like my state of Wash..

...so simple. mark.. lick... stamp... mail=VOTE!

[concreteblue]

6. Not a fan

Mail can get "lost".

[Bengus81]

15. I've gone that route before but always wondered about WHO opens and looks at the vote

And this is here in Kansas where every Dem vote is a precious commodity.

[Merlot]

21. I've heard that here in CA the mail in ballots are the last ones to be counted

if even counted at all.

[unblock]

27. yeah and the people in the back of the plane arrive later than the people in the front.

the order of the vote count doesn't matter.

only the total matters. paying attention to the order of the vote count only introduces completely artificial drama.

[Merlot]

33. Not talking about the order of the votes being counted - duh

Last to be counted means that they may not be counted.

[unblock]

36. they're always counted when they matter.

they should always be counted regardless, imho, but if it doesn't affect the outcome, well, it's not much of a problem.

[IronLionZion]

28. That's absentee ballots. It's different when it's everyone in the state

[Merlot]

34. Good to know.

[Qutzupalotl]

39. Here in Oregon, the public can observe the opening/counting

at the precinct office. It’s a highly accurate process and very convenient, as shown by our high turnout numbers.

[OregonBlue]

38. Yes they can get lost in the mail but you can drop them off directly at the registrar of voters

office or at one of many boxes outside the county court house of every county. They are collected several times a day. Don't have to pay postage and you know they got there.

[brooklynite]

45. Tell me...how do you know your ballot was counted?

It didn't fall out of the mail truck?

It wasn't delivered to the wrong address?

It wasn't just thrown out when it arrived?

I have no objection to mail-in ballots, but there is no voting system that's immune to chicanery.

[cemaphonic]

52. There's a tracking system.

(This is WA's system - not sure how Oregon works)

Your ballot goes into a screening envelope, and then that goes into a mail envelope with your signature. When your ballot is received and opened, they record it onto a database that you can check. And if you don't trust the mail, there are secure dropboxes all over the place on election day. So it is in fact quite possible to know that your vote arrived and was counted.

[L. Coyote]

2. Hopefully we will see some analysis of how the voting changed in relation to machine changes.

Suddenly, when voting technology changes, Dems win big. Move along, nothing to see here ......

[Madam45for2923]

11. I agree, hmmmm, freaking interesting.

[uponit7771]

41. IKR !?!!?

[mythology]

43. Or the party out of power where the president is at sub 40% approval

Is a good environment for our electoral fortunes.

[blueinredohio]

3. That's the way my county votes I encourage everyone to push for this

[Hortensis]

4. Virginia has paper ballots only because it had a Democratic governor.

Thank you, Gov. McAuliffe, and all others who should be thanked.

David Frum, editor of The Atlantic, thinks right-wing powers are deciding they need to get very serious about voter suppression. They know they can't win in honest elections, but they have no intention of losing.

"One risks underestimating how intense the struggle for power is going to be." -- David Frum

[Ligyron]

8. We're going to be experiencing record attempts at voter suppression for sure.

I doubt any GOPer Governors want to allow fair elections. Frum is so, so correct.

[BoneyardDem]

44. Agreed

The machines are too problematic

[Hortensis]

54. For sure. And that's only one technique of election theft.

[Botany]

5. +1,000,000

n/t

[Roland99]

7. Yes. Awesome. Didn't know this. And now to work on dismantling gerrymandering

[crazycatlady]

19. This election guarantees Democrats a seat at the table for VA redistricting

Plus we just won a lot of GOP gerrymandered districts.

[Roland99]

22. Oh I hope this is a harbinger of change!

[crazycatlady]

25. I do too

Eric Holder and President Obama now have the National Democratic Redistricting Coalition (NDRC). They invested heavily in VA as they knew the consequences.

Send some $$ their way if you want to see them keep up the fight.

[Roland99]

26. Thanks. Are they fighting in WI and NC right now?

[crazycatlady]

29. Not sure

I'll see what the next email I get from them says.

I know they went all hands on deck in VA this year because that was the 2017 prize.

[kentuck]

9. Amen to that!

All Democrats should get behind the movement to paper ballots, in my opinion.

[democrank]

10. K & R

Hope a majority of voters start demanding paper ballots.

[mia]

12. Good news!

Thanks for sharing this. Thanks to you, I just posted the article on Facebook and it's already being shared by others.

[G_j]

13. K&R!

[dalton99a]

14. There is a reason most EU countries don't allow electronic voting

Hint: Russia

[bullwinkle428]

16. K&R. This, to me, is as important as the gerrymandering issue. Iowa has

been using paper ballots with the optical scanners, and there's really never been any kind of integrity issues with regards to the vote count.

[GoCubsGo]

17. Yep, and not just because of the tampering/hacking potential.

Some states, like mine, don't bother maintaining the damn machines. I had to practically pound on the so-called "touch screen" to cast my vote. They are a joke.

[Left-over]

18. We chose the paper ballot

My wife and I were given the choice of a paper ballot or an electronic ballot. We chose to use the paper. I have never trusted the electronic ballots.

[FailureToCommunicate]

20. "Still" using paper (by optical scanner) ballots in our district, even as several generations

of whiz bang options were considered. Nice to know it's back in fashion again.
Old school rules!

[PatrickforO]

23. We use paper ballots in my state, and we get them early.

They can be mailed in or dropped off at designated ballot drop-off points.

Fair, clean and lots harder to cheat.

[bluestarone]

24. absolutely 100% for paper ballots

and then 2people from each party to count them!!!

[underpants]

30. Credit to Gov. McAuliffe

He pushed this from the beginning

[rogue emissary]

40. +1

[FakeNoose]

31. Thank you! This is so important

Every state needs to understand what's happened with the electronic voting machines.

They've been hacked and secretly programmed to favor the rightwing candidates. Also the vote counts can be changed via subterfuge and it can't be traced - because there's nothing on paper to back it up. It doesn't happen a lot, but it can happen at any time when nobody is looking. This has been the GOP's plan all along, and it's taken them 30 years to get all the states and counties online. (Still there are a few rural areas that don't have the machines yet.)

Paper ballots cannot be hacked. We have a verifiable (and recountable) record of every vote.

[Amimnoch]

32. Funny how it seems polls and results seem to be a lot closer

in places where paper ballots are used.

[AllaN01Bear]

35. interesting article but a lot of bold lettering in this article

i feel like i am being yelled at. good win for us though .

[turbinetree]

37. Rachel Maddow sum's it beautifully.............all the way up to 24 minute mark

[RandomAccess]

42. This is SO incredibly important

If there's anyone who thinks electronic voting hasn't contributed to a ton of Democratic "losses" over the years, think again.

The machines were developed by Reconstructionist conservatives with all sorts of built-in backdoors and innate vulnerabilities, programmed to never be inspected (because the simple adding of votes is "proprietary," don't you know), with contracts with the states that FORBID any inspection of the code or anything else ever. The lobbyists also persuaded state governments to shorten the time candidates can contest an election after the fact, but no matter: "Recounts" amount to running the machines to merely get the same results spit out. Most don't have any sort of paper trail for manual recounts, but even if they did -- it's child's play to program a machine like that to show one thing on the screen and print it while storing a completely different result. And oh yes, the exit polls are now altered to reflect the "actual" machine results so can no longer used as a warning flag for vote tally manipulation / fraud, as they''re used in all the rest of the world.

I'm so sick of seeing all the handwringing on our side, and the scolding by pundits, and the gloating by opponents, and the WRONG DAMN QUESTIONS being asked when Dems lose elections when I know in my heart they lost.

Think about all the lost elections that ended in Dems being scolded and lectured about getting their act together, coming up with a message - or the right message, and how they have to appeal to (basically) Trump Deplorable when the real problem was the elections were stolen from us. Dems and our message are FINE, or would be, if it weren't for hackable voting machines. The voting machines in concert with all the other anti-American, anti-democratic (small d) efforts (hyper gerrymandering resulting in more Dem votes means the Republican still wins, and intense voter suppression) have given us anything but what the majority of people want.

THE U.S. IS A LIBERAL NATION, and I can show you poll after poll proving that. (Just ask.)

[questionseverything]

47. the theft in georigia special election is on going

We've been covering this entire mess for months now (years, really), but particularly since the lawsuit [PDF] was filed in July, after the somewhat surprising results from June's U.S. House Special Election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, where GA's former Republican Sec. of State Karen Handel reportedly defeated Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff, but only on the state's 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems. (He defeated her nearly 2 to 1 on the only verifiable ballots in the race, the mail-in paper votes. Everything else regarding the results is unverifiable speculation.)

Late last week, we learned via Frank Bajak at the Associated Press, that technicians at Kennesaw State University's Center for Elections, which has been contracted to program all of Georgia's computer voting and tabulation systems systems for some 15 years, "wiped clean" the election server that was used to program the elections, ballots and tabulators, just days after the suit was filed in July. Its two backup servers were also subsequently wiped and "degaussed three times" in August, the day after the suit was moved from state to federal court.

GA's chief election official, Republican Sec. of State Brian Kemp, claims he knew nothing of the server deletions until AP's report last week. Previously, a huge fan of the Center for Elections at Kennesaw, Kemp cited the "gross incompetence" and "undeniable ineptitude" of the folks at KSU for whatever happened. Nobody has yet to take credit, however, for giving the instructions to delete the servers which held critical evidence that plaintiffs had hoped to have forensically investigated as part of the lawsuit. And then yesterday, in another flip-flop, Kemp called the entire matter "#fakenews".

///////////////////////

http://bradblog.com/?p=12358

they cheat us in a thousand ways so why wouldn't people believe they cheat inside the computers that "record" our votes?

[RandomAccess]

49. Yes, that's one of the elections I know in my heart

wasn't "lost" by the Dem.

Here's some other interesting info that points to big problems with voting machines or tabulation --

PALMER: Rigged election: Donald Trump won every surprise swing state by the same 1% margin
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/rigged-election-donald-trump-won-every-surprise-swing-state-by-the-same-1-margin/118/

The most commonly posited explanation of Donald Trump’s shocking election victory was that every professional pollster in the nation – despite each working independently and using differing methodologies – somehow managed to overlook the same pockets of Trump voters in these states. If such pockets did exist, they would have existed in varying sizes in each of the four states, thus resulting in different sized wins in each.

Ask any statistician and they’ll tell you that a reasonable distribution of the results would have been Trump winning one of the states by one percent, won one of them by perhaps three percent, won one of them by two percent, lost one of them by one percent, or something along those lines. But instead the voting tallies looked startlingly different from any natural distribution. In fact they looked startlingly the same.

According to the New York Times, the voting results broke down like this: Trump won Florida by just over one percent of the vote. He also won Pennsylvania by just over one percent. He won Michigan by just under one percent. And he won Wisconsin by precisely one percent. That’s not how numbers tend to work in the real world.

On its own, this kind of suspiciously consistent numerical dispersion across the four states that decided the election would be something that could be written off as a mere fluke. But when you put it within the context of the numerous other ways in which the voting tallies make no mathematical sense, it points to the numbers having been rigged or altered.

[questionseverything]

50. there was a court order in ga to preserve that hard drive

so they aren't off the hook there yet

[RandomAccess]

55. Wow. Great.

I didn't know that.

[questionseverything]

57. court order might be wrong term but "preservation obligation" has legal weight

One thing not mentioned during the interview that is worthy of note is that on July 10, plaintiff's counsel submitted a letter to all counsel in the case, asking them to notify their "clients of their obligation to take reasonable steps to preserve and retain all hard copies and electronically stored information."

He reminded defendants of their "preservation obligation" which mandated that they suspend "data destruction" policies and retain "and to take "reasonable steps necessary to prevent the destruction, loss, override or modification of relevant data either intentionally or inadvertently."

Either the attorneys for defendants failed to communicate this to KSU, which I seriously doubt, or the Aug. 8 degaussing must be seen as a deliberate destruction of evidence in violation of KSU's "preservation obligation."

COMMENT #7 [Permalink]
... Ernest A. Canning said on 11/5/2017 @ 8:41 am PT...


Re my comment @6, the central question is whether KSU wiped the data with the intent to deprive the plaintiffs access to data that could have established that the official results of the GA06 election were the product of illegal manipulation.

Rule 37(e), Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, provides that a District Court Judge may, "upon a finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information's use in the litigation: (A) presume that the information was unfavorable to the party...(C)...enter a default judgment."

[questionseverything]

48. did hc really lose?

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029722275

since no one actually checked the machines programs...we don't really know

[brooklynite]

46. I had breakfast with Jason Kander yesterday...

He's launched Let America Vote which campaigns for strong advocates of voting rights and against those supporting voter suppresion.

[SoCalMusicLover]

51. The Democratic Party Doesn't Care

The party is obviously unaware of these problems, or they are aware, and figure it's not worth the effort to try and do something about it.

Perhaps there is some sort of quid pro quo, because there have been many different races over the past 13 years which looked suspicious, but we'll never know the truth. The entire direction of our country may have been altered forever, and we just have to live with it.

[KelleyKramer]

53. Kick! Because this is important

Thanks for posting this

[ecstatic]

56. I wonder if the blue counties of Georgia can opt out of the machines?

Or if all counties in the state are mandated to use the same system?