If I killed democracy – and of course I wouldn't – this is how I would do it.
First, I would depend on an incurious press.
On Nov 7, 2000, in a county on Florida's east coast, I would have someone insert an extra memory card into an "Accu-vote" tabulator at 10:30 p.m. that would create an illusory negative 16,022 votes for one of the presidential candidates in a medium-sized precinct that contained 585 voters. (Precinct 216 in Volusia County)
Though Dana Milbank of WaPo eventually caught up to the error, the Post reported it on A22 on Sunday Nov. 12.
By Nov. 29, an opinion piece in USA Today on p. 15, brings up the incident.
The internal company memos from the vendor of the voting machine, dated January 2001, came to light when the company's ftp site was breached, via a simple google reach, in 2003. That's where programmer Tab Iredale considered the possible scenarios that had transpired, possibility #4:
4. Invalid memory card (i.e. one that should not have been uploaded). There is always the possiblity that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an un-authorised source.
If this problem is to be properly answered we need to determine where the 'second' memory card is or whether it even exists. I do know that there were two uploads from two different memory cards (copy 0 (master) and copy 3). |
Fast forward to the election of 2004. For the sake of brevity, I'll bypass for now the dire problems with elections administration, including the systematic disenfranchisement of legitimate voters via database filters applied to registration rolls, allocation of machines to precincts, etc.
In battleground Ohio, the Secretary of State's Election site switched hosting at an opportune time. The servers switched to SMARTech servers in Chattanooga, TN which are the same servers that host the RNC and that ate the Rove missing emails. On Monday, Republican operative Michael Connell will be deposed in Ohio about the internet interface.
[Larger, clearer image here.]
IP addresses obtained originally from "What's that site running?" tool of netcraft.com. It was originally written about here and at epluribusmedia.org by luaptifer and others.
People scratched their heads and wondered if Ken Blackwell's decision about the IP hosting could have led to a MIM (man in the middle) interception of Elections night tally reporting in Ohio.
Are there any servers today are in the middle of results reporting for precincts and counties? Sure there are.
A lesser known one is SOE Software of Tampa, Fla. (not to be confused with an Australia company with the same name).
SOE will be reporting results from all NC counties, says the Charlotte Observer.
Vendor LDS is in the middle of the voter registration checks in all of Colorado's counties. Also in the middle of the results reporting for Colorado.
A firm named Governmental Business Systems, GBS, publishes results for many counties in Illinois, 1 in Indiana, and several in Iowa. - as reported by Bev Harris here.
As far as SOE Software, it services some of the largest counties in the US; a list of about 25 jurisdictions in 10 states includes -
More info here
The following locations are using software and, in some cases, hosting voter registration data and results on the servers that belong to a Florida company called SOE Software:
(CA) Contra Costa, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Clara, Shasta, Ventura; (CO) Arapahoe; (FL) Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Pasco, Palm Beach, St. Lucie; (IL) DuPage, McHenry, Lake; (KS) Johnson; (NC) North Carolina Board of Elections; (NM) Dona Ana, (NY) New York State Board of Elections; (SC) South Carolina State Election Commission; (TX) Dallas, Tarrant, Williamson. |
Oh, note that SOE's high-stakes involvement in elections doesn't preclude its officers from being involved in party politics, and it's not on behalf of Democrats.
As a confidence inspirer, I'll let you know also that 1 of the companies that certifies the operability of voting machines, Systest, was suspended this week from certifying of voting machines going forward for deficiencies in its evaluations.
As far as I know, Systest isn't an especially partisan firm, unlike machine certifiers Wyle Laboratories and Ciber, Inc. whose 1-sided political donations I tracked long ago here at dailykos. Unfortunately, opensecrets.org has revamped their website drastically so that the old links don't work right, and you would need to dig if you want to replicate the findings. The individual searches are easiest to replicate.
Personally, I believe in "security by antiquity." [The summer blackout several years ago in the northeast cascaded across several states until it was stopped at a utility that wasn't connected via Internet to all the others. There's a lesson there.]
Now that fancy databases, instead of election administrator decisions, are called on to weed out pesky Democratic voters, accountability is diminished. It's hard to subpoena a database.
It takes a landslide to win an election these days. Anything else is up for grabs.