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.

2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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