Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Systemic Vote Theft

Yet more proof came out yesterday of the systemic flaws in the voting machines that were touted as an improvement over the old paper ballots. Of course, the officials that have accepted and used these voting machines are hardly above suspicion, but the computer is programmed by them and increasing flaws that were programmed in are coming to our attention.

Errors have been accumulating, and studies have been run on the operations of the existing machinery. One reported in 2004 has proved seminal, although where it reported amateurism it becomes ever more clear that intentional fraud was committed.

Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, spent two weeks analyzing the software from the world's biggest voting-machine company, Diebold Election Systems, which has over 50 percent of the market.

"We found all kinds of problems in the code," he said. "A computer scientist can look at program and immediately tell you if it was written by professional programmers who know how to do software engineering or if it was just put together by a bunch of hacks. And, upon looking at the source code for Diebold, it was pretty clear that this was a real amateur job."


The report yesterday from California provides more proof that features the voting machines were purported to possess, most particularly accuracy, simply are not there. Once again, voting officials who wanted to provide a way to steal votes were given the perfect vehicle, by a manufacturer who admitted that he wanted the war criminals in office.

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

The problems may lead to decertification of the company's voting systems, as well as an examination of voting systems made by other companies to determine if they too may have been able to sneak such violations past both federal and state testers...

Today's hearing was a response to the startling discovery last December, by a volunteer group in Humboldt County that, under fairly common circumstances, the older version of GEMS used by the county, and several others in the state, dropped all votes from the ballots in the first deck of ballots run through GEMS.


The audit log had been sold as a sure-fire check for any errors that would occur, the backup that was supposed to substitute for paper ballots' sureties. A recount was deemed too time consuming, but an audit log was that swift and sure way to recount questioned results in machine voting. Now we know that the selling point never actually existed. Once again, those instrumental in putting war criminals into high offices show that fraud was their method, and/or intention from the beginning.

The results of elections in this country were very disappointing, so I suppose I am feeling a little bit relieved as the flaws in our voting machines are rolling out. At least my fellow Americans were better than it looked when crooks, liars, and frauds were voted into high office ... twice.

Labels: , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home