It has become clear to me that it may no longer be possible to vote our way out of the mess we find ourselves in. Much of the voting process has been put into the hands of a few private corporations of which only two, Election Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems, provide the vast majority of the voting hardware, software and services. Two additional corporations that play a large role are Sequoia and Hart Intercivic. All of these companies have been implicated in multiple instances of fraud and other illegalities, the following representing only a fraction:
- Voting Machines And The Bamboozling Of America
- HAVA complaint filed against Saguache County Clerk
- Harrison County To Manually Count Primary Votes
- Romney family buys voting machines through Bain Capital investment
- Romney Owned Voting Machines Get Software Patches Days Before Election
- Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed
- Diebold Stock Soars After $3 Billion Takeover Bid by Defense Contractor Conglomerate United Technologies
- Insecurities and Inaccuracies of the Sequoia AVC Advantage 9.00H DRE Voting Machine
- NY: 50 Percent of Sequoia Voting Machines Flawed
- Hacking voting machines: Easier than ever imagined
- Possible voter fraud in Pennsylvania — or just voting machine malfunction?
Hundreds more instances have been cataloged by Black Box Voting.
Electronic voting machines are in use everywhere and the vast majority of voters, at least in the U.S., are forced to use them. As with any electronic device, they are susceptible to hacking and in some cases seem to be intentionally designed to be hacker friendly.
While many may appreciate their right to elect our representatives, let us not fool ourselves; if the outcome of elections in the 21st century can be, and in fact are manipulated, then we must ask ourselves, how it is that we can reasonably expect to effect change when votes are registered by insecure electronic voting machines and then counted in secret.
Forget about the alleged Russian meddlers that the mainstream media entertains you with. We have far more serious problems. The following is a video of Clint Curtis, a computer programmer at the time, testifying during a Senate hearing that a), computer programs exist to manipulate the vote count of electronic voting machines, b), that it is trivial to write one and c), that he himself was paid to write such a program for Tom Feeney, a Florida politician:
In the article, Voting Machine Company Admits Installing Vulnerable Remote-Access Software, we read:
One of the nation’s largest voting machine vendors, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), has admitted to installing vulnerable remote-access software on some of its election management systems (EMSs) equipped with modems and sold to states between 2000 to 2006.
In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), written this past April and recently obtained by Motherboard, ES&S disclosed that it installed pcAnywhere — a third-party remote-access software produced by antivirus and cybersecurity software company Symantec — on some of its EMS workstation machines.
A 2018 article, Voting Machines — Unregulated, Unverifiable, Easy to Hack, says the following:
In computer terms, many voting machines are antiques that have been in use for decades. A person with nefarious motives and access to these machines could change the results without anyone knowing, because there are no real safeguards in place.
At the Def Con cyber conference earlier this year, experts pronounced that seven models of voting machines — all still in use around the country — were highly vulnerable to hacking. One, the Express Poll-5000, actually comes with the root password “password — breaking the one password rule even the least tech-savvy person is aware of.
Just three companies — Dominion Voting Systems of Denver, ES&S of Omaha, Nebraska, and Hart InterCivic of Austin, Texas — sell and service more than 90 percent of the voting machines used in the US. Critics claim that these firms favor convenience over security, making it both easier to manipulate the machines and harder to detect such manipulation.
Watch this week’s video to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH3sHaX9NnM
For a great deal more on the absurdity of electronic voting machines, i highly suggest watching the very informative documentary, Hacking Democracy:
HACKING DEMOCRACY follows investigator/grandmother, Bev Harris, and her citizen-activists as they set out to uncover how America counts its votes. Proving the votes can be stolen without a trace culminates in a duel between the Diebold corporation's voting machines and a computer hacker - with America's democracy at stake.
This is a ground breaking documentary investigating allegations of election fraud during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. A group of concern citizens heading up watchdog organizations investigate the 2004 election in the wake of these allegations on the 2000 presidential election which ended up decided in the Supreme Court. These ordinary citizens investigate voter machine hardware and software security holes in systems used in numerous states including Ohio, Florida and California. They demonstrate with the help of a computer programmer how easy it is to change the numbers tallied on Diebold voting machines that count ballots. They are forced to the extreme of picking the trash at a Florida county warehouse to discover ballot tapes with numbers that mismatched the official election authority records, giving George Bush a lead in the numbers.