The Waukesha County Clerk has suddenly found just the right amount of votes to make sure that her former boss, (not kidding) Judge Prosser, remains on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.
I wasn't thinking about any fraud until I heard the following:
She was tabulating results through Microsoft Access. On her personal computer. To which no one else seems to have access (pardon the pun).
More after the fold.
First of all, my background. I am an information technology specialist. A database administrator and developer to be exact, mostly with Microsoft products. I have over 11 years experience with databases, including Microsoft Access. I do know something about this application.
Microsoft Access was introduced in 1992 as an alternative to the monstrous mainframe database systems of the previous generation. It was light, programmable and easy-to-use.
It was also easy to hack and copy over to other media. You don't even need the base Microsoft Access application to access the database. Any decent programmer can do it.
For years, businesses used Access for a lot of things, from internal business data to Social Security numbers of its customers. Some still use it for those things today. (If you are shuddering, you should be.)
I pity the business that still uses Access for any purpose other than football pools.
The maximum size of an Access database is 2 GB. If you go to your local Best Buy or Office Depot or Office Max, you can find flash drives the size of your little finger that can hold 4 times that data. All you need to load stuff on it is a USB port, which exist in every computer made over the last 10 years.
Microsoft Access databases can be encrypted, but it is not an easy process. You can't really move the database to your personal computer after you do that either. You can protect the database with a non-encypted password, but that does not really prevent hacking. Just google "How to hack microsoft access" and you will get over 3 million responses in less than .15 seconds. (At least on my machine, you will)
You can import data into an Access database in a variety of ways. You can also preset these imports with what are called import specifications. In other words, if you keep the data in the same format (say in an Excel workbook) you can save how it imported so you don't have to reset the import specs over and over again. I assume she did this. I have no idea as of this writing.
If this process fails, it gives you a warning. If it doesn't, it saves data automatically. A good example of someone testing out this theory is contained in this diary.
She apparently had an issue importing data from Excel workbooks into this database. I wonder why it took her so long to notice this error? Why did she not notice this at the time? When imports go bad and you check the data, anyone who has worked with data before can tell pretty quickly if something is wrong. It doesn't take over a day. Did she not check the data? She has to report results throughout the night. If she wasn't saving data, then the numbers would have been exactly the same for a long while. That should have been the first red flag. She also has to keep track of how many people voted altogether. How could she have missed over 10,000 votes in a small county like Waukesha? At the end of the night, (or even during the night) did she compare the number of voters to her totals? It was over 24 hours before she made this announcement. What happened during that time?
There is no way to find out when data was updated, new data was inserted or other data was deleted in a Microsoft Access database. Most real database systems have what are called log files. These files basically are a copy of the records in a database. They are used for a variety of things, but mostly they are there to ensure that if a user deletes a bunch of stuff that you can get it back through the log files immediately. Where I am going with this is that I know of database people who keep lots and lots of spare data. They use it for testing out applications, like e-commerce web sites that need a robust database. Being the county clerk, she might have access to all kinds of data, especially voter rolls. I would bet that she keeps them in Excel spreadsheets. She imports data into Access through Excel spreadsheets, this much we do know. Does she keep them around for later use? Just asking. I know this is a bit paranoid, but the fact that the incumbent, Judge Prosser, got just enough votes today to avoid a recount does not pass the smell test.
I have a gut feeling about this. She screwed up and lost the data. She decided to update things on her own. If found out, she gets fired. To make it even better, she makes sure that her side wins. Like I said, there is no way to find out when exactly the data was put into this type of database.
I will probably be testing out some of my theories over the next few days. I'll keep you posted.
We need to get the sign-in sheets from Waukesha county to verify the exact records in that database. We need to hire someone to painstakingly walk through the paper records and find the matching records in that database. If we can't match them, then the database cannot be considered good.
Get someone from Bold Progressives on the horn. We need to raise some money for an investigation.
Updated by willynel at Fri Apr 08, 2011 at 07:56 PM CDT
Thanks for the recs, folks. I really appreciate it.
I thought I would share in my diary one of the comments from it because it gets to the heart of the matter.
I am a db administrator and developer with Access as well as with "real" DB's that are SQL-based (SQL Server, Sybase), and having done quite a bit of this import from Excel into Access (and then do a lot of data cleanup and normalization), I have to say that any election whose results are saved in Excel and then imported into Access in such a haphazard manner by a single person, without a rock-solid tailor-written and thoroughly tested application to do it, with backups, encryption, log data, etc., is not worth the electrons it's recorded on. This election has been tampered with, whether intentionally or due to incompetence, and should either be voided by the state, or else its results recounted and retabulated by people who actually know what they're doing, with tested software. Otherwise, this is election by electron fraud.
I will be running some tests tonight on some versions of Access with Excel as a import data source. I will keep you posted.