Why People Say Georgia Is The Center Of Electronic Vote Theft-- It Is

-by Valley Girl

I live in Georgia. I voted early. I voted last Friday at an early voting location, not where I usually vote during primaries, midterms, or general elections. I waited in line for an hour and a half. I got off easy considering waits at many other voting locations in GA, both in early voting, and on election day. Four to 7 hours waiting to vote.

  I voted for Stacey Abrams for Governor. I voted on a Diebold machine. No paper trail. No punch-card ballots with hanging chads. There is no other choice in Georgia. One has to “vote Diebold.”

  I’ve been closely following the Abrams- Kemp race, and related events on election day and after. I have read and bookmarked so many articles that if articles were horses, I would happily imagine imagine SoS (Son of Satan) Brian Kemp being ground into the dirt by a pack of horses. Like the field trying to chase Secretariat to the finish line at the Belmont, to win the Triple Crown. But, I digress. Forgive me. I just had to watch a “feel good” moment on youtube.



Just earlier today I happened upon this article from Medium. It was published on June 29, 2018, updated August 20, 2018.

Title of the article is: Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections

The article discusses the Georgia 6th District special election of 2017 Jon Ossoff v. Karen Handel, which was the catalyst for the Georgia paper ballot suit, as well as the disturbing history of Georgia’s corrupted electronic elections from 2002 through the present. This is a VERY long article, but well worth reading in it’s entirety.

  However, not to be left out, is this from the article:  "Republican Karen Handel an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, pro-gun 'Christian.'"

For this post, I’m going to cut it down to Diebold, but alas I’ll have to leave out some very interesting Diebold history. There a lot of crooks and liars involved. And, anything in bold or underline below is my doing.

And, I’m leaving out a huge amount of text and information from the article that have to do with this important subject-- electronic voting machines. It makes me feel sick to do so. But, please, go read the article at the link above!   

August 7, 2018, the plaintiffs in the federal action titled Donna Curling, et al. v. Brian Kemp, et al., filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the state of Georgia from using its paperless touchscreen voting machines in the November midterm elections. As explained in the lawsuit, when voting machines are paperless, there is no independent record of voter intent with which to confirm the legitimacy of an electronic vote tally. Thus, according to the plaintiffs, the state must instead allow voters to hand mark paper ballots at the polls.

The court denied the motion. It reasoned that although the plaintiffs are likely to win on the merits of their claim that Georgia’s paperless machines are unconstitutional, it would cause too much “chaos” and “confusion” to switch to paper ballots at this late date.

[VG: Gawd forbid that we should have chaos and confusion]

...Georgia is one of just five states that still exclusively uses paperless voting machines. Paperless voting machines are an especially attractive target for hackers because there is nothing to compare against the electronic tally to confirm whether it was manipulated. Thus, the only way to know if a paperless machine has been hacked is to conduct a forensic audit, which courts have consistently refused to allow based on the purportedly proprietary nature of the vendors’ software.

Georgia bought its paperless machines from Diebold Election Systems in 2002, making Georgia the “first state to launch electronic voting statewide.” At the time, Georgia’s Secretary of State was Cathy Cox, who allowed Diebold to use her image on its promotional materials.

….Diebold had entered the voting machine business just a few months prior with its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a company founded by three criminals….Global’s Senior VP was a convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, who had served time for sophisticated crimes involving “computer tampering.” …Soon after hiring Dean, Global hired convicted cocaine trafficker John Elder to oversee punch card printing in several states.

Diebold acquired Global during President George W. Bush’s first administration, just as Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which allocated billions for states to buy new voting machines.

…The bill’s primary sponsor was Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio who used his position as chairman to defeat legislation that would have required voting machines to include a paper trail.

Ney would eventually go to prison for corruption involving his acceptance of bribes from Washington DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 to lobby the federal government on behalf of Diebold, the number one vendor of paperless voting machines… Abramoff was a member of Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers, an elite group of fundraisers who had raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s reelection campaign. He too would eventually land in prison for corruption involving his lobbying work.

…Georgia Secretary of State Cox -- who had been “very active in working with members of Congress on the Help America Vote Act”-- signed Georgia’s contract with Diebold on or about May 3, 2002.

  …The ensuing election in November 2002 yielded several surprising Republican victories in Georgia. The most notable upset occurred when Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian Right and President Bush, defeated incumbent senator Max Cleland (D).

Karl Rove and Ralph Reed-- a Republican strategist in Georgia-- had personally recruited Chambliss to run against Cleland. Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran, lost to Chambliss by 7 points even though election polls on the “eve of the 2002 general election showed… Cleland ahead… by 2–5 points,” a swing of 9–12 points.

An analysis of Chambliss’s victory revealed that, “nearly 60% of the state’s electorate by county switched party allegiances between the primaries and the general election.” Chambliss’s surprising victory helped the GOP take control of the US Senate. (It needed only two seats.)

…During the same election, Brian Kemp  [Nov 2002]-- Georgia’s current Secretary of State--  defeated Doug Haines, a liberal incumbent in a left-leaning state House seat that had been held by Democrats for more than four decades. Kemp won by only 486 votes, an exceedingly small vote margin that likely would have triggered a recount but for the paperless machines.

In 2003, “A former worker in the Diebold warehouse in Georgia” alleged that the company had patched Georgia’s voting machines after they were delivered to the counties and shortly before the… election in 2002… Equally disturbing, in 2004, the DHS quietly released a Cyber Alert concerning an “undocumented backdoor account” to the Diebold Global Election Management System, which programs the electronic ballots for its touchscreen machines.

Georgia Secretary of State Cox was unconcerned. In 2005 or 2006, she doubled down on Diebold with a $15 million purchase of new electronic poll books, which (according to voters) would later fail in multiple locations.

Unlike Cox, the media and public had at this point begun to question the wisdom of continuing to use unverifiable voting machines. Here is a quote from a 2006 article in Savannah Now, a local Georgia publication:

At first, it was easy to brush aside complaints by small but noisy groups that e-voting invited vote-stealing.

…Avi Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says devices like Diebold’s can be rigged-- without detection.

“There are major flaws in the security design of the software,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Southern California.

In June, The Brennan Center for Justice, a non- partisan New York think tank, said systems like Georgia’s “pose a real danger to the integrity of… state… elections.” 

This was the year that a team of computer security researchers published a report finding that “touchscreen voting machines made by the notably litigious vendor Diebold were vulnerable to ‘extremely serious attacks.’ The researchers were so afraid of being sued by Diebold… that they broke with longstanding practice and didn’t tell the company about their findings before publishing.”

The same year, a Diebold whistleblower named Chris Hood spoke to RFK Jr. about the 2002 Georgia election. “Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the [Georgia] contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.”

Hood claimed that, in late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, [former Georgia Secretary of State] Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. The company [Diebold] was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state-- all without any official supervision.”

Hood reported that in mid-August, Diebold’s president, Bob Urosevich, personally came to Georgia from Texas to distribute a software “patch” for the voting machines. He said they were “told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do… The curious thing is the “very swift, covert way this was done... It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state.”

According to Hood, “Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties-- the state’s largest Democratic strongholds.”

In 2006, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would at least have required the addition of a paper audit trail to the paperless voting machines themselves. But the bill was defeated after Cox’s appointee, Georgia Elections Director Kathy Rogers, objected to it.

Several months later, Rogers took a job with Diebold.

Meanwhile, Cox pursued an unsuccessful run for governor, and Karen Handel won the election to succeed her as Secretary of State.

During her campaign, Handel had promised to make Georgia elections verifiable with a paper audit trail. But once in office, Handel instead defended and defeated a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s unverifiable voting machines. When the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Handel’s favor, she “praised the Georgia Supreme Court ruling and claimed that ‘Georgia has the most secure elections in the nation…’”

Plaintiffs later discovered that Handel “had taken about $25,000 in campaign contributions from employees and family members connected with [Diebold’s] lobbyist, Massey & Bowers”

…In 2007, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a security evaluation of ES&S optical scanners and ES&S touchscreen voting machines and published a report (the “Everest report”), stating that they had found “numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in nearly every component of the ES&S system… These vulnerabilities enable attacks that could alter or forge precinct results, install corrupt firmware, and erase audit records.”

In 2010, the Department of Justice forced ES&S to sell Diebold because the combined company accounted for more than 70% of US election equipment, violating anti-trust laws. In a settlement with the DOJ, Diebold purportedly dissolved, and its assets were split between ES&S and a Canadian company called Dominion Voting.

The following year, an interim election board in Venango County, Pennsylvania commissioned a forensic audit of the county’s 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting systems. The court, county Commissioners, and ES&S eventually shut down the audit (with ES&S threatening legal action against the board members and scientists). But an interim report stated that the scientists had found “evidence that the system was repeatedly accessed by an unidentified remote computer, for lengthy periods of time, on “multiple occasions.”

The same year [2011], a laboratory run by the Department of Energy showed how Diebold voting machines-- used by a third of all voters nationwide (at the time), including Georgia-- could be hacked via remote control.


By then, Georgia’s governor, Sonny Perdue, had appointed Brian Kemp to the office of Secretary of State, replacing Handel who had left office to pursue an unsuccessful bid for governor.

Kemp expressed no interest in replacing Georgia’s paperless machines, and the national media gave him little grief.

But that has begun to change courtesy of the Georgia 6th District special election in 2017. On March 3, 2017, a little more than a month before the primary, Politico and other national news outlets reported that the FBI was investigating a breach at Georgia’s Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.”

And a few weeks later, equipment “used to check-in voters at the polls”--  including a “flash card with a voter list”--  was stolen from a parked car.

A concerned national election integrity advocate, Marilyn Marks, filed a lawsuit to compel Kemp to use hand marked paper ballots (counted on optical scanners) in the race. But Georgia Secretary of State Kemp swiftly defeated it on a procedural technicality (sovereign immunity), declaring that the machines are “safe and accurate.”

Kemp assured voters that Georgia’s voting machines could not be hacked because they aren’t connected to the internet. But he omitted to mention that all voting machines, including those in Georgia, must receive programming before each election from centralized election management systems that can and often do connect to the internet.

Kemp also omitted to mention that Georgia uses a single flash drive to upload its election results from a central tabulator to an online Election Night Reporting System and then reinserts the same flash drive into the same central tabulator for the next round of results. Thus, if the flash drive becomes infected with malware from the online reporting system, it could spread the malware to the central tabulator and change the results from each polling place as they are uploaded.

Here are some tidbits about Karen Handel from the article’s August 2018 update:

As for Karen Handel, who is up for reelection this year*, she has yet to hold an in person town hall. But she did make time to oppose birthright citizenship in a telephonic town hall last year.

She has also made the top ten list of candidates to whom the Koch Brothers have donated money in 2018.

Recently, in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border, it was Karen Handel who tried to silence Representative Ted Lieu’s audio on the House floor of children crying as they were ripped away from their parents.

And about Brian Kemp:

In August 2016, Secretary of State Kemp refused help from the Department of Homeland Security to secure its systems.


UPDATE: Valley Girl here:

Lucy MacBath has defeated the odious Karen Handel in GA-06.

As for Brian Kemp, may he rot in Hell. I have read and bookmarked articles about this slimeball and his doings for ages, including many recent ones. I’m hoping to highlight the most relevant ones in a future post.