BRAD BLOG EXCLUSIVE: New Voting Machine Whistleblower Comes Forward!

[BradBlog]

EXCLUSIVE: Hart InterCivic Whistleblower Warned of Texas, Ohio E-Voting 'Fraud' Concerns in 2004!
100,000+ Votes Were Errantly Added by Hart Machines in a Single County in Last Tuesday's Primary via Flawed, Paperless 'eSlate' Touch-Screen System!
Former Hart Employee, Tarrant County TX Election Worker Notified State, Legal Authorities in 2004 About Serious Voting Machine Problems, Procedures...All Warnings and Complaints Ignored

Continuing in an exclusive BRAD BLOG series of Voting Machine Vendor and Election Fraud whistleblowers, another insider, from yet another voting machine company, has now come forward to reveal a myriad of known problems inside both the company and in several states and counties with whom they do business.

During last Tuesday's Primary Election in the state of Texas, scores of "computer glitches" -- as voting officials and electronic voting machine vendors like to refer to them -- were revealed occurred across the state. Many of those "glitches" occurred on electronic voting equipment manufactured and supplied to various counties in Texas by the Hart InterCivic company.

One such "glitch" occurred in Texas' Tarrant County, which encompasses Fort Worth. That "glitch" resulted in some 100,000 votes being added to the result totals across the county's paperless Hart-Intercivic "eSlate" touch-screen voting system.

Election Officials in Tarrant claim they didn't look into the problems on Election Night as the problem emerged because, as reported by the Star-Telegram last week, "they were dealing with a new system, new procedures and some new equipment."

The BRAD BLOG can now report, however, that according to William Singer, a Hart InterCivic company whistleblower -- who also happened to have later worked as an "election programmer" in Tarrant County -- the problems with Hart InterCivic's systems in Tarrant County, Texas and elsewhere are not new at all. Not by a longhorn long shot...

COMPLETE STORY & JULY 2004 WARNING LETTERS TO TEXAS & OHIO SEC'S OF STATE:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002542.htm

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Also today on BRAD BLOG (so far)...

VIDEO - Gergen: Bush's New Iraq PR Campaign Will Fail
Former presidential advisor David Gergen says that a PR campaign is the wrong direction and that the White House should tell the truth about the situation on the ground in Iraq.
URL: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002541.htm

---------------------------------------

VIDEO - CNN's Soledad Spars with Feingold Over Censure
CNN's Soledad O'Brien played proxy for the GOP noise machine as she challenged Feingold's proposed censure of Bush with a flurry of misleading Republican talking points...
URL: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002540.htm

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---
Brad Friedman
THE BRAD BLOG - The uprising continues...
http://www.BradBlog.com
VELVET REVOLUTION - The revolution begins...
http://www.VelvetRevolution.us

[mdmc]

1. I don't understand, kicked to return to later... too much...right now

[UpInArms]

2. k & r!

:kick:

[benburch]

3. K&R. nt

[Kelvin Mace]

4. This is NEW?

I reported on this over a year ago:

http://69.13.2.49/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=240

[Boredtodeath]

14. Of course you did, David

But, somehow your work is now a "BradBlog Exclusive."

Stunning.

[Thtwudbeme]

18. Yep. It appears you did.

so, why are the mods leaving this in LBN?

[Wilms]

5. Gee. Whadaya know.

These are the same systems that failed CA Volume test (due to reliabilty problems, but were recommended, anyway...

.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/HART-Sys6_2005-11_StaffReport_FINAL.pdf


The eSlate was then certified by SoS McPherson, though he rejected the OpScan.

.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/hart_systm6_cert_final.pdf


For more on (un)Reliability...
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1041&Itemid=26

[Rex]

6. Obvious disdain for democracy.

The devil is in the technology; inhuman and blameless. It really is the perfect way to scam a nation. I guess all our problems can be blamed on a 'glitch' now.

I've heard Dems say we need a 'hacker force' that should be deployed to keep things fair and balanced on election night, I disagree. It never occurs to them that we shouldn't NEED that kind of thing. Voting should have an accountable trail of evidence on who votes for what. Without it then the very rule of law is meaningless. If votes are unreliable then the very legitimacy of our government comes into question. Without legitimacy then laws have no foundation to stand upon.

I don't think we will be a republic for very much longer; not unless we correct the voting process to be fair and equitable.

[Zhade]

7. K/R

Brad, you're doing great work. Keep it up!

[Joanne98]

8. Brad blog rocks!!!!!!!

[NIGHT TRIPPER]

9. funny how it never comes up w extra votes for any Dems

and it's a simple accident--we'll fix it- nothing to see here- move along-

[Kurovski]

10. K&R (nt)

[Kurovski]

11. K&R (nt)

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

12. Kick...

...eom

[Mr Rabble]

13. K & R

[understandinglife]

15. K&R.

Peace.

[wordpix2]

16. OK. let's see if the officials will NOW do something about this???

[sendero]

17. What cracks me up..

... is that people accept the "glitches" in this sort of software, software which is orders of magnitude simpler than millions of software systems successfully deployed worldwide, as "normal".

How complicated can a voting machine be? It counts votes. It is absurd that seemingly every single producer of these machines cannot build one that works.

It is a joke.

[teknomanzer]

19. Total agreement here...

These voting machines aren't calculating a spaceprobe slingshotting around the sun to reach Pluto on a projected date... they are adding up votes for a series of canditates and ballot issues... its 3rd grade math! What the hell?!

P.S. You might want to start counting your money when you get it from a Diebold ATM...

[eridani]

27. Counting your money is what most people do, and it is why ATMs work

--as a system. Unlike voting systems, which are used only a couple of times a year, ATMs have had most of the bugs that matter shaken out of them by being banged against reality hard and often, billions of transactions an hour system-wide, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Even at that, sometimes they don't work, and the consequences for you, the consumer, are exactly nothing. You aren't "disenfranchised"--you can just go find another one someplace. If your statement has an error, you have 90 days or more to get it corrected. They have quadruple redundancy. If you take out $100, you count the 5 crisp $20s, see $100 on your receipt, crosscheck it with the transaction number on your monthly statement, and if you need more proof of your transaction, you can demand the picture taken of you making it.

And by sheerest coincidence, Diebold brags on its website about the open source software in its ATMs. Seems that their bank customers won't tolerate buying a pig in a poke. Why voters continue to do so is beyond me.

[eridani]

26. Not absurd at all, and not a joke

In my own county of 1.5 million+ voters, with all the jurisdictional splits there are 7000+ different ballot styles. Adding one vote to a total is not a hard problem, but doing it 7000 different ways is.

There is no such thing, ever, as a complex system that is bug-free. All you can do is to get them to be relatively robust and reliable by banging them up against reality hard and often. The basic problem is that we don't vote often enough to do that. How reliable would cars be if nobody ever drove except for a couple of hours twice a year?

[file83]

36. There is a difference between "complexity" and "scalability"...

...and that it is the center of this issue.

The low "frequency" of how often we vote is NOT what is important here. The EFFECTS on our democracy is what's at stake. If those "couple of hours" you drove your car each year gave you a 50/50 chance of dieing in a car accident because the car wasn't properly maintained - that would validate any cost tied to improving that vehicle.

If as you claim there are "7000 different ballot styles" in your county, that is a complexity issue. That, by definition, means that your voting system is inherently flawed - the inevitable "bugs" you speak of arise from "systemic design" of complexity (7000 different styles). That is essentially one of the main arguments fighting for election system reform: remove the complexity because it provides unreliable results.

Once the complexity is removed, and voting systems are standardized, the issue becomes one of "scalability". In the business/financial world, scalability is quite challenging. There are many factors that are uncontrollable between corporate networks - operating systems, network protocols, security protocols, data definitions, etc. - and the problems with system integration are multiplied by the sheer size and scope of growing networks.

But elections are inherently simple. The only process being applied to the data set is addition. Nothing more, nothing less. The data is stored in a relational database (association between vote count and target(politician, bills, etc.)).

They are also completely controllable. There is NO technical reason standardization can not be implemented, yet this still has not happened.

In a situation that is so simple AND controllable, scalability is effortless. We can and must fix this problem.

[Higans]

38. Agreed, and well said.

I still don't understand why we can't do hand counted paper ballots like Canada. Like you said, it's simple addition. every polling place count their own. Post the results on the door of the poling place. seems pretty simple to me. Can any one make a valid argument against this? (beside the voting machine companies who will loose billions.)

[eridani]

43. What causes the 7000 different ballots--

--is the decision to do so many things at once. Elect city officials, county officials, state legislators, Congressmen, Senators, Governors, etc. at the same time. Not to mention school, water and sewer districts. In Canada, national voters vote for a party slate and not individuals, which simplifies things a great deal. Also, they never have provincial and local elections at the same time as the national ones. That's what we'd have to do to simplify elections, and I don't see it happening any time soon.

The frequency of voting has a great deal to do with how easy it is to debug as a process, and that process not only includes equipment, but also a hell of a lot of people, most of whom are temporary workers who have no regular practice at doing their jobs. Getting them all to be in the right place at the right time, doing the right things cannot ever be easy or simple.

[spotbird]

20. Perhaps he notified the Cleveland elections officials

currently under indictment.

[VegasWolf]

21. Ohio??? Gee, was that state important to the re-selection of Georgy

Bush???

[stepnw1f]

22. kick... Kerry is Our President

Sorry, but he is, Freeper!

[Trevelyan]

23. K&R Will return -- with all the Feingold Censure stuff need to read later

DU this poll:

==http://capitalnews.org/
==Sen. Feingold's call to censure Pres. Bush over warrantless wiretaps?
Good Idea 84%

Bad Idea 16%

Total Votes: 2548

[bleever]

24. K&R, with due credit also to KelvinMace.

The more the merrier.

[Catamount]

25. She was despicable, I'm glad he held his ground. Thanks

[Pryderi]

28. When is this story going to make out of the blogosphere?

[Pryderi]

29. FLORIDA EMBRACES DIEBOLD

Ion Sancho may be a hero in California, where grateful election officials have verified the "serious security vulnerabilities" in Diebold voting machines that the Leon County election supervisor uncovered last year. Sancho is regarded a little differently in Florida. Florida's secretary of state's office disparaged Sancho's finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections. California, alarmed by Sancho's report, dispatched its independent, expert-laden Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board to conduct its own investigation. Florida, meanwhile, threatened to sue Sancho.

http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=9157

[SoCalDem]

30. I have been saying the same thing since forever..

110K x 31 states "won" = 3.41 million "mandate".. It's all FAKE.....always HAS been.. The polls are fake, the election fake, the reporting fake..

We will never again "Know" who won any election..

[Higans]

41. agreed. it's all a shell game.

[Imalittleteapot]

31. Equal vote increases for all candidates?

Guess that makes it okay?

Tarrant County elections officials report computer glitch
<snip>
Ann McGeehan of the Texas Secretary of State's Office said the Tarrant County Elections Center inadvertently reported vote totals multiple times yesterday, increasing totals for all candidates equally.
<snip>
http://www.team4news.com/Global/story.asp?S=4606079

Nothing to worry about. Move on. :sarcasm:

[Imalittleteapot]

33. By the way, Bush had the 2nd largest margin in

the country in my Tarrant County in 2004. Makes you wonder.

[The Animator]

32. I have a suggestion, it's sneaky devious, and just plain evil.

Considering the insane momentum the left has picked up due to Bush's litany of scandals, I wouldn't suggest doing this in November. We get enough of our people into power, and actions like the following might not even be necessary:

If there's anybody on this site with any hacking skills...

I'm not suggesting we steal an election, but I think we might need to prove a point.

Imagine all the States with e-voting machines inexplicably turning blue, by a ridiculously wide margin.

Imagine all the "Glitches" occuring in favor of Dems for a change... then it would finally get airtime in the MSM. Then there would finally be politicians willing to get rid of these things and go back to paper ballots. There would be protests and a demand for a re-vote, only this time the people now in power would listen, because this time, a re-vote would benefit them.

Then finally, we would have tricked them into giving us exactly what we really wanted... a level playing field.

[BrainRants]

34. THEN, and only then would the system be "looked into"

I'm not condoning this action, but a little sunshine on the subject is in order and this is one of the only ways that will ever happen.

After all, people don't pay attention to their AntiVirus software until there's a threat...

[Higans]

42. Good one.

[LouisianaLiberal]

45. If this info does make it to the corporate news

I wouldn't put it past Rove and company to deliberately alter the votes for one race to favor democrats, cry foul, and accuse the dems of treacherously trying to subvert democracy. This sort of tactic is Rove's specialty

[Imagevision]

35. ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN etc...when are they going to get the message

instead of ignoring major news stories

[abester]

37. Voting F****?

See no F****, Hear no F****, Speak no F****, and all is well under the sun.

[goforit]

39. Well great......but no one does a damn thing from here.

Where is the justice?

[valerief]

40. Stupid Voting Tricks on David Letterman

I'd love to see these whistleblowers on that show.

[oc2002]

44. Why should we trust the results of our elections?

That is the fundamental question.

We have a system that is broken, and although not proven, could be extremely corrupted.

There is more evidence everyday to show why the results of many elections are completely and totaly wrong than why they are correct.

Again, prove to us that they counted the votes right before asking us to prove that there was fraud.