BBV about to break another big one

Heads up, gang. I am awaiting quotes from the "other side" -- or the ability to report their refusal to speak to me to rebut the very important story that I'm about to break.

I liken this one, in importance, to the "GEMS hack" story I did on July 8, 2003, which was paired with the public release of the Diebold software, resulting in the Hopkins/Rice study, which in turn resulted in the SAIC, CompuWare, and RABA studies.

I began turning my attention to the following investigations, and this is what you're about to see begin to unfold this afternoon on http://www.blackboxvoting.org.

1) Procedures -- to what extent are we protected by secure election procedures

2) Actual opportunity to tamper, in real elections, recently

3) Specific conflict of interest and inappropriate financial transactions between election officials and vendors.

I wish to heck this article was up already, but it is very important and needs double fact-checking.

Watch for this headline: Money, Access, and Stunning Security Flaws -- A Poor Recipe for Fair Elections

Bev Harris

P.S. I'll post a synopsis here, in this thread, as soon as the article is up. Stay tuned.

Looking forward to reading that one.

:yourock:

You're a hero and a patriot! Thank you for all of your hard work.

I can't wait to read some details on that level! Will be waiting :)

Just wanted to say thanks. again. your work is so important and you have done such a great job to bring this issue to light from absolutely nothing to hundreds of stories and we really appreciate that you are working towards protecting our rights and democracy.

Bev Harris is a hero in my book . . . she took on this issue when virtually no one else was interested, did the research on her own dime and her own time, and has single-handedly brought BBV to the forefront of political discourse . . . if there were a Nobel Prize for "Good Citizen," she would get my vote . . . thanks, Bev, for your commitment to good government and for all you've done to try to preserve the integrity of our voting process . . .

I will be watching for it! :)

like you are what makes America GREAT. Thanks!

Many thanks for your tireless efforts!!!!!!

You are a true patriot.:kick:

I'm sure no matter how accurate the facts and how thoroughly they're checked there'll be someone wrapped in tinfoil along any time now to 'continue a flame-war from another discussion'. :)

Now that you've awakened the sleeping giant please by all means keep poking at the bear!

We'd like to have a few words with him if you can get his attention! :evilgrin: :thumbsup:

the sleeper has awakened.

......AIR AMERICA? :shrug: :evilgrin:

interesting idea.

Words can't express my gratitude, and admiration.

Kudos and bless you for your hard work and dedication.

:yourock: :yourock: :yourock: :yourock: :yourock: :yourock: :yourock: :yourock:

If you haven't signed yet, please click on over and add your support

Point 1: If electronic voting systems are used, we insist that they produce a paper ballot, verified by the voter at the time the vote is cast, placed in a ballot box.

Point 2: We insist on unbiased voter registration procedures.

Point 3: We insist on the implementation of improved procedures to audit elections

http://www.andystephenson.com/?q=petition/sign/1

We'll be a-watching.

No other journalists bother fact checking, why should you? Be like the NYT's Judith Miller and just post sketchy information as if it were hard facts!

j/k Keep up the good work!

"The President is not a fact-checker." - Ari Fleischer

You've gotta be kidding. That's a funny quote.

Yeah. I know -- I can't tell you how many times reporters have gotten a whole slew of facts wrong because no one checked them, and then took ME to task for something that was actually correct. For example, I wrote that Hagel omitted mentioning his involvement in the voting machine company on his personal disclosure forms in 1995 and 1996, both years that required this disclosure.

Some reporters wrote that I was incorrect. Why? Because Hagel's office told them so. Nearly a year after I broke that story, Hagel's people came up with a piece of paper from May, 1995 that showed his position with American Information Systems, the predecessor to ES&S. What these doofus reporters didn't see is that the report, ostensibly for 1995, was filed only five months into that year and therefore couldn't possibly be a legitimate 1995 statement, and they also didn't check the real statement, which is on file. Instead, they just reported that I got my facts wrong, and repeated Hagel's incorrect statement as fact.

That's why I was so glad this month's Vanity Fair actually used fact checkers. They spent over 3 weeks, with about 3 people and a lawyer going over my stuff with a fine toothed comb, and it checked out.

Bev

"The pResident is not a mathmetician"

oh, and :kick:

Many things, this president is not.

Bev

president.....

the VF article was outstanding. This month's copy from my subscription has been read by about 17 people so far. Thank you so much for your work - you are my definition of the word hero.

:hi: I'm so glad you're kickin' these guys butts! :kick::kick:

Now that we've got Air America up and running, and as soon as Al Gore starts getting programming going on his new TV Station, we MAY have more outlets for this type of research to go public.

I honestly believe that once these new stations get a following, the other, right wing stations, are going to have to start getting a little more honest. Sure, CNN, MSNBC, etc., will still spin for the right, but they're not really doing any investigative journalism, which I think there's a HUGE market for! I hope the bad guys will lose a huge chunk of their markets. And I also hope that it all happens in time for BBV to put a halt to using Diebold and the others before the November elections. I'm sorry, but I still think the primaries were, shall we say, questionable, in many cases.

O8)Many blessings and prayers for your continued safety and success!O8)

BTW, Bev, I sent you a private e-mail the other night. I'm PM'ing your DU mailbox after I post this.


:kick::kick::kick::kick::kick::kick::kick:

:kick:

this month on BBV, worth a read if you have access to it.

Actually, Mischelle Townsend did call back, but caught me in the car and did not take my repeated calls to reach her afterwards so that I could take notes.

Alfie Charles, of Sequoia, declined to answer any questions unless I submit them in writing ahead of time, which is a poor idea for any journalist, since you can't ask follow up questions or clarify any answers when you do that.

The phone has been ringing off the hook, slowing me down a bit, but Andy Stephenson has been great, and is helping to put some of the pieces together -- HarmonyGuy, I'll email you shortly.

I'm now checking a videotape to make sure my computer info is exactly correct.

Estimated time of arrival is 3 more hours -- 6 p.m. Pacific.
Also need to figure out how to digitally sign my DMCA notice pertaining to publishing a file, so my ISP can't shut me down this time. :)

Bev

Great to see the revelations continuing...

On the Vanity Fair article it is AMAZING.... it covers all the bases and as you say checks everything and puts everything to Diebold to BS about... but then comes back and points out the BS...

In short it is FANDAMTASTIC even if it doesn't mention the New Zealand connection in all this :)

One thing in particular that struck me about it was how its structure seemed to be more closely based on the revelations as they appeared on the internet in the first instance rather than as the story was told in the book? Did you think that too or am I imagining something.

Best regards
Al

:kick:

:kick:

:kick: this

The phone has been ringing nonstop, but let me at least fill you in on the outline of the report, which I am formatting for the Web now. I'll add the links in after the report is up.

The Sequoia WinEds software, found on the Web in September 2003, has been examined by computer programmers now. Andy and I have together worked with programmers in New York, Washington, California, and Wisconsin and we are getting confirmations on this material from additional sources.

The software, WinEds, is equivalent to GEMS, in that it resides on the county servers that collect and tabulate all the votes gathered from the polling place. It therefore has the potential to manipulate as many as 600,000 votes at once.

The following flaws were found in the Sequoia central tabulation software:

1. The Spanish language ballots can quite easily be altered so that the touch-screen records the vote for the opposite candidate than the voter intended. This works with foreign language votes only.

2. The code, when altered, defaults to erase the manipulations after you close the program. Therefore, if you create ballots using the Spanish language manipulation, install the ballots onto the touchscreens, then close the program, your handiwork will no longer exist when the program is reopened.

3. The program uses VBA, which is a highly insecure language. In fact, the interpretive language used in the Sequoia touch screens appears to violate FEC standards.

4. The Visio programming allows anyone with access to the machine to rewrite source code, not by going in a back door or getting access at the factory, but by opening the program and walking right in the front door.

5. The WinEds program examined also includes a large amount of business logic, stored procedures that can easily be manipulated. This imperils the tabulation of votes that have already been cast.

6. The level of access required is quite minimal -- any tech who works for the county as a database administrator, or a support rep for Sequoia, can execute the manipulations easily and with very little chance of getting caught.

7. Such access has been documented in ways that show weak security protocols. For example:

In Snohomish County, Washington, county auditor Bob Terwilliger admitted on the Mike Webb radio show that one of his employees did a patch on his Sequoia touch screen system. Later, at a League of Women Voters meeting, Terwilliger said that this patch was only to change a font. However, because of the way the WinEds program is constructed, you can put programming in so that when you do a simple thing like change a font, it changes the way the vote is recorded.

In Riverside County, California, I recently participated in videotaping a statement that is of great concern.

On election night, March 2, two people who do not work for the County, Sequoia employees Michael Frontera (a former Denver Elections Commission executive who took a position with Sequoia right after placing $6.6 million in Sequoia orders with Denver) and Eddie Campbell were observed to access the WinEds central tabulator during the middle of the count. At this time, more than 50 of the 157 precincts had been counted. The count stopped, Frontera began entering information into WinEds, with Eddie Campbell standing next to him, and then the count resumed. The results, according to one campaign manager, were unusual. More on that in the full report.

Two days later, still in the middle of the count, while 5,000 absentee ballots were being counted, with only 72 votes separating two candidates from a mandatory runoff, Sequoia employee Eddie Campbell was observed outside the building. While there, he pulled a memory card out of his pocket. "Let's see if this will work," he said to a County employee named Paul Shook. He then went into the central counting room, over the loud protests of election watchers, who demanded to know what was on the card.

Campbell then went into the central tabulation room and a Riverside County employee named Brian Foss logged him onto the central tabulator with his (Foss's) password. Foss then left the room. Campbell touched a handful of central tabulator machines, apparently entering the password belonging to Brian Foss. Witnesses report that he then took the card that had been in his pocket, and uploaded information into the machine. He took the card back, put it in his pocket, told bystanders it was his "personal" card, and he left the building with it, got on a plane and flew out of the state to Denver.

In California, unless the company technicians have been certified and sworn in explicitly, it is a felony for them to touch voting systems after votes have been cast.

Now, assuming these two employees had officially sanctioned access, which we have not yet been able to determine, there are two obvious problems with the above: 1) Using someone else's password defeats the purpose of the event log, or audit log. Eddie Campbell will show up as Brian Foss. and 2) Leaving the state with a card that uploaded data into a live election tabulator during the middle of an election is outrageous. That card needed to be retained by the County of Riverside, at least until the election was certified and recounts were settled.

In addition, I'll outline a host of conflict of interest problems that have cropped up with Mischelle Townsend, including:

- taking over $1000 in illegal travel reimbursements from Sequoia. (Today's LA Times)

- Four years of her personal financial disclosure documents seem to be missing in action.

- Her husband, it turns out, is or was a Vice President for Maximus, a company that is part of the RFP sales proposals for Hart Intercivic and, according to one report, handled some of the business with Sequoia when Riverside bought its system.

- Also, Riverside negotiated delivery of something like 1500 extra smart card devices, and research needs to take place on who they came from and who got the commission, as well as what these extra devices are doing during elections and who is monitoring their activity.

- The public relations firm for Sequoia in Riverside, O'Reilly, also apparently has ties to County business.

There it is in a nutshell. It will be late before the whole thing goes online. At that time, you may see a link that releases the Sequoia files into the wild.

Bev

.....on Air America? :shrug: :evilgrin:

With all you keep uncovering it needs to be a weekly segment at the very least! :toast:

Look forward to the full report.

:kick:

Logic and accuracy testing is designed to catch things like the posited subversion of Spanish language ballots, or magic font changes that alter the way votes are tabulated.

VBA is not inherently "insecure" -- that's an absurd statement. On the other hand it is true that interpreted languages are specifically prohibited by FEC requirements. (On an unrelated note, someone should point out to the Open Voting Consortium that their silly Python-based offering violates a bunch of FEC requirements for the same reason.)

The rest of your big "report" consists almost entirely of innuendo and speculation, lol. Of course that's your usual MO. Did anyone actually expect anything else at this point? :eyes:

JC

.....VBA, exploits! LOL! :evilgrin:

Google is your friend! ;-)

Still defending the scammers? Have you no shame?

You can't fool me. I have been programming for 30 years, the last 10 in VBA (Excel/Access).

You are a waste of bandwidth. Always pop up as if on cue. How much are they paying you?

full compliment of naysayers.

Logic and accuracy testing is designed to catch things like the posited subversion of Spanish language ballots

Guess what? The main Riverside L&A test does not check Spanish language ballots.

why should now be any different?

Frightening, scandalous.

Godspeed, Bev. The word "thanks" isn't enough.

Thank you Bev Harris.

n/t

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Indeed it does sound like it is on a par with the July 8th breaking story. And as usual compelling and easy to understand even though inherently complex and difficult to express...

Well done... Very well done..

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:



Hekate needs to wear her tinfoil hat around this project!
:tinfoilhat:

This never ceases to amaze me. Thanks Bev.

Sonia