[ale] [OT] Update on the VoterGA Voting Rights Law Suit

[aaron]

On 2009, Oct, 21, , at 8:09 PM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 22:10, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>> Earlier this month the Georgia Supreme Court handed down
>> a decision in the VoterGA lawsuit challenging the
>> constitutionality of Georgia's zero-evidence,
>> unaccountable electronic voting systems.
>
> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/20/voting-machine-sourc.html
>
> Aaron, do you know if GA uses any of Sequouia's equipment?
>
> -Jim P.

We don't use any Sequoia equipment in Georgia. The Diebold
monopoly runs the whole show in most every county, from the
design of the electronic and paper ballots to paper ballot
printing to the (Hursti Hacked) optical scanners to the
Zero Evidence black box vote fraud DRE touchscreen machines
to the vote tabulation systems (running an unsecured M$
Abscess database on stock windisease Xcrement Pile boxes).

Diebold recently sold off their elections devision to ES&S,
but it's still all in the family.  Bob Urosevich ran Deibold,
his brother Todd runs ES&S.  I'd expect Bob to officially join
his brother Todd as another ES&S exec shortly. My recollection
is that there is also some executive inbreeding with Sequoia
as well, but I don't have specifics at hand. Together, the
Urosevich brothers control about 80% of the electronic voting
machines used in U.S. elections, which in 2008 reflected about
33% of the total votes cast.

So now there are only two corporate electronic election
systems manufactures running the monopoly, but nothing
has really changed and there is no real separation or
competition between the parties. All the systems are equally
secretive and corruptible. Regardless of manufacturer, the
software and inner workings of all of the electronic voting
systems is kept totally secret. There is no peer review of
the code and all of the sycophant system testing companies
who are supposed to "certify" the machines are locked behind
"non disclosure" and "trade secret" claims so we don't even
know what their voodoo "certification" processes are, let
alone any details of their "testing" results. Public auditing
of election results is equally abysmal, as none of the machines
in use produce paper ballots as evidence and, to my knowledge,
no statistically valid audits of election results from machines
that produce a paper audit trail have ever been performed.

In the end, it may well be that there is malicious code in
the Diebold ES&S boxes similar to what is being discovered in
Sequoia's boxes with this leak, but it is nearly impossible
to know.  When voting rights advocates tried to examine the
2004 Georgia election results with Open Records requests to
the county registrars for copies of the database archives kept
on CD, the Secretary of State shut them down using a Diebold
claim that the disks contained "Trade Secret" software. The
folks doing the Open Records requests lacked the funds to
file formal charges against the State officials and take
the issue to court, but the boing boing article in your link
suggests that Diebold might have been telling the truth
about being so grossly incompetent that they put evidence
of felony crimes on their election records CDs.

It only gets worse when you learn about the origins of all
these companies. The company that Diebold bought up 30 days
before taking over Georgia's election systems, the one they
bought so they would actually own some voting machines and
thus might be able to fulfill the largest election systems
purchase contract in history, the company that actually
developed all the software and systems that Diebold dumped
in Georgia, was Global Election Systems (based in Texas,
of course). According to some investigative reports, the top
execs of GES, at least one of whom was a felon convicted of
grand larceny and tampering with computer files, admitted in
memos to forming the company and creating the zero evidence
machines with the specific intent of making it easier
manipulate elections. Again, reportedly, the GES founders
were self identified religious extremists who didn't think
democracy should be trusted or that the people should be
allowed to elect their own government.

The loud BOOM was my head exploding. Again. I really
shouldn't try to answer questions about this stuff.  :-)
Only bright spot is my understanding that, with the
notable exception of Georgia, every State employing
electronic voting is in the process of discontinuing
the use of Zero Evidence style Diebold-ESS-Sequioa
machines.

Felons working for GES / Diebold [/ ? ES&S ?] details
can be found here:
<http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2003/12/61640>

peace
aaron