Computerized Election Theft

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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Elvis » Sat Sep 02, 2017 5:15 pm

Kenya's supreme court has ruled the election "null and void." Damn.
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby DrEvil » Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:42 pm

We have an election coming up here in Norway, and although the votes are counted three times (a provisional count at each voting locale, a more thorough count afterwards and a final count on a regional level), many places use electronic counting machines for the main count, and people have just realized that these Windows machines are all connected to the internet. It would be fairly trivial for someone like the NSA, Cozy Bear or Chinese intelligence to flip one out of every X votes to their lapdogs of choice (labor (NATO uber alles), progress party (Dunning-Kruger'R'Us) and conservatives (will bend over for money), respectively).

The good news is that the government has realized that this is incredibly stupid (the conservative fuckheads in charge are doing well in the polls and don't want anyone to mess it up for them is my guess) and it has just been decided that all votes should be counted by hand. Hopefully this, along with Kenya's annulment, is a sign that people are starting to realize the dangers of anything electronic involved in voting.

Ahahaha, just kidding. We're fucked. They'll hire some overpriced consultants from PWC to look at it and they will say that everything is OK and we'll be right back to electronic counting next election. :wallhead:
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Sep 02, 2017 8:51 pm

Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 02, 2017 9:30 pm

After Trump, "big data" firm Cambridge Analytica is now working in Kenya
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40674
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Morty » Sat Sep 02, 2017 9:50 pm

Iamwhomiam wrote:Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-election-hacking.html

September 01, 2017
No "Russian Hacking" In Durham Election - NY Times Report Belies Its Headline


The last piece pointed out that the NYT headline "U.N. Peacekeepers in Lebanon Get Stronger Inspection Powers for Hezbollah Arms" was 100% fake news. The UNIFIL U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon were not getting any stronger inspection powers. The relevant UN Security Resolution, which renewed UNIFIL's mandate, had made no such changes. No further inspection powers were authorized.

Today we find another similarly lying headline in the New York Times.

Russian Election Hacking Efforts, Wider Than Previously Known, Draw Little Scrutiny


The piece is about minor technical election trouble in a district irrelevant to the presidential election outcome. Contradicting the headline it notes in paragraph five:

There are plenty of other reasons for such breakdowns — local officials blamed human error and software malfunctions — and no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it.

All of the reported troubles are simple computer hiccups that would not have occurred in a more reasonable election system build on paper and pencil balloting. All the computer troubles have various innocent causes. The officials handling these systems deny that any "Russian hacking" was involved. Moreover, there was no chance that these troubles in one district would have effected the general election. There was thereby no motive for anyone to hack these systems:

"Despite the disruptions, a record number of votes were cast in Durham, following a pattern there of overwhelming support for Democratic presidential candidates, this time Hillary Clinton."

The NYT headline is an outrageous lie. It promotes as causal fact completely unproven interference and troubles for which, as the article notes, plenty of other reason might exist. It is politically irresponsible. Only two out of ten people read beyond the headlines. Even fewer will read down to paragraph five and recognize that the headline lies. All others will have been willfully misled by the editors of the New York Times.

This scheme is the gist of ALL reporting about the alleged "Russian hacking" of the U.S. presidential election. There exists zero evidence that Russia was involved in anything related to it. No evidence -none at all- links the publishing of DNC papers or of Clinton counselor Podesta's emails to Russia. Thousands of other circumstances, people or political entities might have had their hands in the issue. There is zero evidence that Russia was involved at all.

The whole "Russian hacking" issue is a series of big lies designed and promulgated by Democratic partisans (specifically Brennan and Clapper who were then at the head of U.S. intelligence services) to:

- cover up for Hillary Clinton's and the DNC's failure in the election and to
- build up Russia as a public enemy to justify unnecessary military spending and other imperial racketeering.

The New York Times, and other media, present these lies as facts while not providing any evidence for them. In many cases they hide behind "intelligence reports" without noting suspiciously mealymouthed caveats in those subjective "assessments" of obviously partisan authors. Hard facts contradicting their conclusions are simply ignored and not reported at all.

Posted by b on September 1, 2017 at 11:26 PM |

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/no ... dline.html
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:02 pm

I doubt you read the NYT article, Morty. No matter. MOA is a bit biased and more aligned to your thinking than mine. I did get a chuckle reading this, though:
The whole "Russian hacking" issue is a series of big lies designed and promulgated by Democratic partisans (specifically Brennan and Clapper who were then at the head of U.S. intelligence services) to:

- cover up for Hillary Clinton's and the DNC's failure in the election and to
- build up Russia as a public enemy to justify unnecessary military spending and other imperial racketeering.

The New York Times, and other media, present these lies as facts while not providing any evidence for them. In many cases they hide behind "intelligence reports" without noting suspiciously mealymouthed caveats in those subjective "assessments" of obviously partisan authors. Hard facts contradicting their conclusions are simply ignored and not reported at all.


And then I though, "Oh, the irony!"

'cause I didn't notice any references to these allegations anywhere in MOA's particular brand of propaganda:
- cover up for Hillary Clinton's and the DNC's failure in the election and to
- build up Russia as a public enemy to justify unnecessary military spending and other imperial racketeering.


So I guess MOA feels it's proof enough if he just claims, "Because I said so!"

At least the NYT's up-front and admit they've no proof. But let's not put me in a position of having to defend the NYT. Yes, Hillary, the scary lady War Machine. Why's Donald increased military spending, Morty? And why is he sending additional thousands of troops into Afghanistan? Let's face it, this presidency is in shambles, which is exactly what was expected by those of us who've long known Trump's history as a sham scam artist running one sham scam after another for years on end. And it's all coming apart. Donald's stepped on too many sensitive toes. And soon, Schneiderman's gonna bust him for racketeering, but I don't know if it's gonna be the imperial kind, more like the 'wannabe' kind, I'd think.
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:24 pm

August 29, 2017 2:19 PM

Cyber experts were blocked in their push to patch voting systems in 2016

Cybersecurity experts on a federally-supervised team, fearing a Russian attack, scrambled last summer to draft guidelines for state and local election officials to patch the most obvious vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting systems. Their recommendations were blocked, and still aren’t out. Rogelio V. Solis AP
BY GREG GORDON
ggordon@mcclatchydc.com

They knew Russian operatives might try to tamper with the nation’s electronic voting systems. Many people inside the U.S. government and the Obama White House knew.

In the summer of 2016, a cluster of volunteers on a federally supervised cybersecurity team crafting 2018 election guidelines felt compelled to do something sooner. Chatting online, they scrambled to draw up ways for state and local officials to patch the most obvious cyber vulnerabilities before Election Day 2016.

Matthew Masterson, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, says election officials at every level must adjust to the “new paradigm” in which actors for nation states pose threats to the security of America’s vote.

Their five-page list of recommendations focused on two gaping holes in the U.S. election system. It warned that internet voting by at least some citizens in 32 states was not secure and should be avoided. And, critically, it advised how to guard voting and ballot-counting machines that the experts knew could be penetrated even when disconnected from the internet.

But the list was stopped in its tracks. A year later, even as U.S. intelligence agencies warn that Russian operatives have their eyes on 2018 and beyond, America’s more than 7,000 election jurisdictions nationwide still do not have access to those guidelines for shielding the voting process.

The recommendations were derailed amid an awkward, often unspoken power struggle between, on one end, federal agencies, which have more resources to combat cyber threats; and on the other, states and localities, which hold primary constitutional authority over elections.

The states vigorously defend their territory, though they can be naive about cyber risks. Many have insisted their systems are secure.

For their part, federal officials have hesitated to encroach on that turf with the election just around the corner.

Both sides showed a “lack of seriousness” about voting security issues that spells trouble for protecting the nation’s jumble of election machinery against increasingly sophisticated threats, warned Neal McBurnett, a Boulder, Colorado, consultant who helped develop the guidelines.

State and federal authorities aren’t moving fast enough “in coming up with ways to harden our targets and look at the problem with clear eyes," he said.

THE STATES AREN’T HIRING ENOUGH SKILLED TECHNICAL PEOPLE AND HAVEN’T HAD THEIR FEET HELD TO THE FIRE. THEY PERPETUATE THE EXISTING SYSTEM, WHICH DOESN’T REALLY TAKE SECURITY VERY SERIOUSLY.
Federal official involved in voting issues who was not authorized to speak for the record.

Signs point to Russia

Cybersecurity experts often blame state and local officials for the lack of action.

That includes leaders of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), which has concerns about undermining public confidence in voting systems. The leaders have insisted computer-driven equipment is secure when it’s not hooked to the internet – which is wrong. And most NASS members represent states that permit internet voting, mainly by military and overseas voters – another vulnerability.

As for the feds, among the most vital things they can do is share intelligence about cyber threats and provide national cybersecurity expertise that no state can be expected to produce. That’s where the U.S. government appears to have failed in 2016.

As the working group met last summer, the FBI had already begun sending out “flash alerts” to election officials nationwide about attempted penetrations of statewide electronic voter registration databases. Homeland Security officials gave similar warnings. In Illinois, they and FBI agents examined the illegal download of records from 200,000 voters.

Attempted intrusions were discovered in Arizona and at least 19 other states.

Federal officials linked the attempted Arizona hack to Russia, and cyber experts publicly blamed the Kremlin for a major hack of the Democratic National Committee that exposed, with the help of transparency site WikiLeaks, embarrassing internal emails.

C-SPAN
The hacks of voter registration databases had demonstrated that voting jurisdictions, many operating with equipment more than a decade old, had few defenses against these cyber perils. The tiny Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which plays a key role in delivering federal funding and election guidance to state and local agencies, and Homeland Security had responded to those hacks by issuing new guidelines for protecting registration data, as well as systems for reporting vote totals on election night.

But they did little to safeguard the voting equipment itself.

In the online cybersecurity working group, several experts prepared guidelines for a formal committee led by the EAC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which provides cyber expertise to federal agencies.

On Aug. 7, 2016, David Wagner, a University of California computer science professor who had a lead role on the working group, wrote in an email: “I’d like to push to see if we can get out something very soon, to provide as a resource for election officials preparing for elections this November. That means we need to move quickly.”

Email chains and other records show that, with NIST fully in the loop, the group hurried to prepare the guidelines with the assumption they would be circulated before the election.

But three weeks later, on Aug. 30, NIST pulled the plug. No distribution would be formally considered in 2016 because it was too close to the election, NIST official Andrew Regenscheid told Susan Greenhalgh, a watchdog at the nonprofit Verified Voting who shepherded completion of the recommendations in the working group. Greenhalgh, who said she was stunned, confirmed the decision a couple of days later in a phone call with the head of NIST’s voting unit.

“I told them I thought they were making a big mistake,” Greenhalgh said.

From that moment until Election Day, Russia completed what one computer security expert privately described as a “cyber Pearl Harbor.”

Meanwhile, many states and counties nationwide opted to allow federal reviews of their cyber hookups in the fall of 2016. They revealed widespread vulnerabilities. In South Carolina alone, National Guard cyber specialists found at least “high” risks in all 46 counties evaluated, 20 of which had issues identified as critical, according to public records obtained by University of South Carolina computer scientist Duncan Buell and Frank Heindl, a Charleston activist.

Too many routes

Any number of routes can lead to disaster, including denial.

Last April, Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s Democratic Secretary of State and then the president of NASS, testified that the vast majority of U.S. voting systems “are not cyber” because they’re not connected to the internet.

“The 2016 cycle demonstrated we’re not really cyber at all, except for our voter registration databases, which have nothing to do with the actual tallying of votes,” she said.

Other NASS officials have echoed that erroneous belief.

The lead item in the working group’s shelved guidelines confronted such claims, seeking to demolish perceptions that a system must be “continually connected to the internet to expose it to (an) online actor or that the system must be connected to the internet at the time the votes are being counted for the attack to be successful.”

If a vote-counting system is on an internal network in which any component is hooked to the internet, it creates “an exploitable” situation for hackers, the guidelines say, urging states and counties to map their networks to be sure they are fully offline and to take other precautions to avoid infection.

NASS didn’t provide detailed responses to McClatchy’s questions. Executive Director Leslie Reynolds said in a statement that the organization has worked closely with the EAC and Homeland Security over the last year “to share security information with the states as soon as it is available.”

James Scott, co-founder of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, and others note that the CIA has been credited with hacking the Iranian nuclear weapons system while it was off the internet in 2010 by circulating malware-tainted thumb drives, at least one of which eventually was plugged into the system. The so-called Stuxnet virus caused centrifuges used to enrich uranium gas to fail, stalling the weapons program.

A chemical engineer’s recent account described how part of a large European petrochemical company was crippled by a virus that migrated onto its internal network through coffee machines connected to the internet.

If hackers gain access to a machine, they can plant malware that does its dirty work and then “auto deletes,” leaving behind no noticeable trace.

Absent witnesses or a confession, election officials could uncover vote rigging only if the affected jurisdiction required backup paper copies of electronic ballots so that post-election auditors could verify each candidate’s totals.

EAC Chairman Matthew Masterson, who acknowledges that attempted cyberattacks on election systems are “persistent and sophisticated,” says about 25 percent of the votes cast in the 2016 election lacked paper backups.

ALL OF US IN THE ELECTION COMMUNITY NEED TO RECOGNIZE THE NEW PARADIGM, THE NEW THREAT ENVIRONMENT THAT THAT WE’RE IN, WHEN WE TALK ABOUT NATION STATE ACTORS. WE ALL NEED TO WORK TOGETHER TO COORDINATE A RESPONSE.
Chairman Matthew Masterson of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission

A decade ago, when Congress tried to enact the most obvious solution to that problem – a law requiring all electronic voting machines to have a “verifiable paper trail” – state and local officials largely opposed it.

Beyond the voting machines themselves, other dangers lurk: Scott, of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, said his group warned NASS last year that bad actors were likely to try to infect vote-tallying equipment through vendors.

“We told them and we told them,” he said. “We showed them two schematics of exactly where the attacks would come from” months before the election.

Scott said, for example, that hackers could embed malware in a routine software upgrade before it was distributed to client agencies, which could then find its way into a central vote-tallying machine and instruct it to switch votes until one candidate led by a specified margin.

The National Security Agency last year detected a Russian attack on Florida-based VR Systems, which makes software to manage huge state voter registration databases. In VR’s files, the hackers found an email list of election agencies across the country and sent out Trojan Horse-type emails to try to lure election officials into providing access to their databases.

Just this month, it was disclosed that personal data for 1.8 million Chicago voters stored on a cloud computing server, including some driver’s license numbers, was left exposed on the internet by the nation’s largest voting systems vendor, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software. ES&S said it secured the files as soon as it was alerted to the mishandling of Chicago Elections Board data on Aug. 12.

Jon Hendren, Upguard’s strategy director, told USA Today that the breach included encrypted passwords for ES&S employee accounts. He said that in the worst case, “they could be completely infiltrated right now.”

THE BIGGEST CENTER OF ATTENTION NEEDS TO BE THE SECRETARIES OF STATE. THEY’RE THE ONES THAT MANAGE THE ELECTIONS. AT THE END OF THE DAY, THEY’RE THE ONES THAT NEED TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE.
James Scott, co-founder, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

Cyber sneak attack

Officials at the two federal agencies who oversaw the cyber working group say there was nothing surprising or untoward about their holding back the group’s recommendations.

The working group’s guidelines were meant for consideration for 2018, not 2016, said Mary Brady, head of NIST’s voting unit.

“These weren’t official recommendations,” she said. “[W]e did not try to block any efforts.”

Instead, when the EAC-NIST committee met in September 2016, Brady, EAC Chairman Masterson and Wagner advised members it was too late to employ the cyber volunteers’ recommendations for an election 53 days away.

Masterson also said in an interview that the group’s guidelines were “largely captured in guidance we’ve provided elsewhere.” But best practices posted for state and local officials on EAC’s and Homeland Security’s websites do not contain the working group’s central recommendations.

Some state and local officials wanted the guidelines out. On learning at the September meeting that they wouldn’t be circulated, Robert Giles, head of New Jersey’s Division of Elections, asked what would be needed “to bring the (Department of) Homeland Security and the FBI and whoever else we need to bring in, in a very short time period?”

Before ending his term as Homeland Security secretary last January, Jeh Johnson sought to give impetus to the new security concern by designating the nation’s voting equipment as “Critical Infrastructure,” making it a top priority to protect those systems – but only when requested to do so by states and localities.

A month later, NASS took its own formal action. It passed a resolution calling on newly inaugurated President Trump to rescind the declaration, saying that “the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has no authority to interfere with elections, even in the name of national security.”

BEN WIEDER AND KEVIN HALL CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... rylink=cpy
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Morty » Sun Sep 03, 2017 12:17 am

Iamwhomiam wrote: Why's Donald increased military spending, Morty? And why is he sending additional thousands of troops into Afghanistan? Let's face it, this presidency is in shambles, which is exactly what was expected by those of us who've long known Trump's history as a sham scam artist running one sham scam after another for years on end.


Increased spending, Afghanistan increase, is because the US is a military state which answers to no one. Not even Donald could change that (although he did manage to drag CIA money out of Syria, if we are to believe those reports).

At least the NYT's up-front and admit they've no proof.


That's what I was trying to put up for discussion. We're in agreement on this one.

(And I didn't read the article, and won't at this stage, because I've got better things to do with my time than read lengthy, duplicitously titled NYT propaganda pieces.)
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sun Sep 03, 2017 1:17 am

So then you agree, MOA is BS propaganda 'cause his bulleted points are targeting Clinton as the threat wherein reality those points would apply to any personage running for or holding that office, regardless of party, including Trump.

Yeah, Morty, why read? Such a foolish thing to do.
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 03, 2017 2:36 am

Iamwhomiam » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:17 pm wrote:So then you agree, MOA is BS propaganda 'cause his bulleted points are targeting Clinton as the threat wherein reality those points would apply to any personage running for or holding that office, regardless of party, including Trump.

Yeah, Morty, why read? Such a foolish thing to do.

Just give me something that's not tailored for public relations [my new theme I guess]. Myself, I find it useful to read propaganda pieces—until they become too predictable. It's fine to read whatever, but in general today, the nature of every source needs to be considered, acknowledged and discussed.


BTW, Bev Harris was on the "Coast to Coast AM" radio show (with Noory, meh) and she was great as always. She's delightful, the interview was peppered with her laughter as she explained the, well, laughable technical absurdities of U.S. voting systems.

Exit poll discrepancies, once considered solid evidence of vote theft, continue since the first national digital election theft in 2001. Today in the U.S. they're just shrugged off, but it makes sense to me that the vulnerabilities are being exploited regularly, by Americans, to alter outcomes (as "needed"). That could explain the MSM's curious inattention to this problem. Maybe it's not quite a "no-go" area of reporting, just frowned upon. If there exists a nationwide, organized operation to manipulate digital voting systems, that's gotta be a serious business and exposing it would carry significant risks.

I know, seems a little crazy! But I can't think of one reason why various partisans with access to the machines wouldn't abuse them. Put it this way:

If you could press a button that would make your favorite candidate president—would you do it?

This is your chance to make a better world. Don't blow it.

Convinced that Trump is America's last chance? Good God, man, press the button! No one will know; the changed votes are spread out, just enough to win. And remember, you're doing it for the good of the country and the world.

If I could press a button and make Bernie Sanders win the U.S. presidential election, I can't say for sure, but—I'd probably do it.

I think I would do it. :shock:
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby identity » Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:31 am

Elvis » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:36 pm wrote: [snip] I can't say for sure, but— :shock2: I'd probably do it. :shock2:

:shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: I think I would do it. :shock: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2:
We should never forget Galileo being put before the Inquisition.
It would be even worse if we allowed scientific orthodoxy to become the Inquisition.

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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Elvis » Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:02 pm

identity » Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:31 am wrote:
Elvis » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:36 pm wrote: [snip] I can't say for sure, but— :shock2: I'd probably do it. :shock2:

:shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: I think I would do it. :shock: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2: :shock2:


I know!!! See? That's why these voting machine systems need to be taken much more seriously, top to bottom, from their software to mundane things like the places where they're stored. You can't trust people, I'm tellin' ya!
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby Morty » Sun Sep 03, 2017 7:24 pm

Many say Bernie would have beaten Trump in a free and fair election, so you might only have been restoring proper order to the world if you pushed the button for Bernie. I was going to say I wouldn't have pushed the button for anyone (Hillary, never; Trump, too much risk of unknown; Bernie, too much business as usual on international/war front), but upon reflection, I totally would have pressed the button for Bernie. They would have sprung another recession on yo asses if he got in though.
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:29 pm

https://apnews.com/877ee1015f1c43f1965f ... suit-filed

APNewsBreak: Georgia election server wiped after suit filed

By FRANK BAJAK

A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe.

The lawsuit, filed on July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.

WIPED OUT

It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased.

The Kennesaw election center answers to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a Republican who is running for governor in 2018 and is the main defendant in the suit. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said Wednesday that “we did not have anything to do with this decision,” adding that the office also had no advance warning of the move.

The center’s director, Michael Barnes, referred questions to the university’s press office, which declined comment.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, who are mostly Georgia voters, want to scrap the state’s 15-year-old vote-management system — particularly its 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting machines, hackable devices that don’t use paper ballots or keep hardcopy proof of voter intent. The plaintiffs were counting on an independent security review of the Kennesaw server, which held electronic poll book and other elections staging data for counties, to demonstrate the system’s unreliability.

Wiping the server clean “forestalls any forensic investigation at all,” said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist who has closely followed the case. “People who have nothing to hide don’t behave this way.”

STATE SECURITY

The server data could have revealed whether Georgia’s most recent elections were compromised by malicious hackers. The plaintiffs contend that the results of both last November’s election and a special June 20 congressional runoff— won by Kemp’s predecessor, Karen Handel — cannot be trusted.

Possible Russian interference in U.S. politics, including attempts to penetrate voting systems, has been an acute national preoccupation since the Obama administration first sounded the alarm more than a year ago.

Kemp and his GOP allies insist Georgia’s elections system is secure. But Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a plaintiff, believes the server data was erased precisely because the system isn’t secure.

“I don’t think you could find a voting systems expert who would think the deletion of the server data was anything less than insidious and highly suspicious,” she said.

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T

It could still be possible to recover relevant information from the server.

The FBI is known to have made an exact data image of the server in March when it investigated the security hole. The Oct. 18 email that disclosed the server wipe said the state attorney general’s office was “reaching out to the FBI to determine whether they still have the image.”

On Wednesday, it notified the court of its intent to subpoena the FBI seeking the image, according to a court document obtained by the AP that was Thursday emailed to lawyers in the case.

Atlanta FBI spokesman Stephen Emmett, responding to AP questions on Wednesday, would not say whether that image still exists. Nor would he say whether agents examined it to determine whether the server’s files might have been altered by unauthorized users.

Other backups also appear to be gone. In the same email to plaintiffs’ attorneys, assistant state attorney general Cristina Correia wrote that two backup servers were also wiped clean on Aug. 9, just as the lawsuit moved to federal court.

FAILING TO SERVICE THE SERVER

A 180-page collection of Kennesaw State emails, obtained Friday by the Coalition for Good Governments via an open records search, details the destruction of the data on all three servers and a partial and ultimately ineffective effort by Kennesaw State systems engineers to fix the main server’s security hole.

As a result of the failed effort, sensitive data on Georgia’s 6.7 million voters — including social security numbers, party affiliation and birthdates — as well as passwords used by county officials to access elections management files remained exposed for months.

The problem was first discovered by Atlanta security researcher Logan Lamb, who happened across it while doing online research in August 2016. He informed the election center’s director at the time, noting in an email that “there is a strong possibility your site is already compromised.”

Based on his review of the emails, Lamb believes that electronic polling books could have been altered in Georgia’s biggest counties to add or drop voters or to scramble their data. Malicious hackers could have altered the templates of the memory cards used in voting machines to skew results.

An attacker could even have potentially modified “ballot-building” files to corrupt the outcome, said Lamb, who works at Atlanta-based security firm Bastille Networks.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The tale of the wayward election server is striking, but to voting experts it’s only part of a much larger problem.

The Department of Homeland Security says 21 states had elections systems scanned or penetrated by Russia-backed hackers last year, though there is no evidence they altered voting outcomes.

But computer security experts say it’s possible Russians or other malicious actors have sown undetected booby traps in the highly decentralized U.S. voting landscape. In June, a leaked National Security Agency memo showed that 122 elections officials in various states were targeted with phishing emails crafted by Russian agents intent on stealing their passwords.

That revelation helped persuade Lamb to go public in the first place.

---

EDITOR’S NOTE: This version deletes mention of ballot definitions residing on the wiped server. It’s not clear from the available evidence whether they existed on that particular machine.
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Re: Computerized Election Theft

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 27, 2017 10:47 am

Jim Crow has moved north

VOTING RIGHTS 2016: WHAT'S AT STAKE

Voting rights are under attack nationwide as states pass voter suppression laws. These laws lead to significant burdens for eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Since 2008, states across the country have passed measures to make it harder for Americans—particularly black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities—to exercise their fundamental right to cast a ballot. These measures include cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and purges of voter rolls.

The ACLU is engaged in advocacy and litigation across the country to get rid of these harmful voter suppression measures
https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-righ ... uppression


Wisconsin’s voter ID law is one of the harshest in the country and requires voters to produce one of a few specified forms of photo identification in order to vote. This restriction imposes a substantial burden on the right to vote by requiring photo identification that many voters do not have, and that many voters cannot easily obtain, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. In addition, the Wisconsin voter ID law violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits the use of voting practices that have a negative impact on racial and language minorities. The law has a disproportionate impact on black and Latino voters, who are twice as likely to lack photo ID accepted for voting in Wisconsin compared to white voters.

On December 13, 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin challenging Wisconsin's voter ID law. On April 29, 2014, the district court ruled that the law was unconstitutional and in violation of the Voting Rights Act, and
struck down Wisconsin’s voter ID law in its entirety. On October 6, the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed that ruling, but the ACLU successfully blocked the law from taking effect for both the November 2014 midterms and the April 2015 primary.

The ACLU subsequently asked the federal district court to allow certain people who have difficulty obtaining identification to vote by affidavit. On October 19, 2015, the district court denied our request, but on April 12, 2016, the appeals court revived the ACLU's challenge to the voter ID law, directing the district court to consider the claims of voters who have trouble obtaining identification under Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law.

UPDATE: On July 19, 2016, the federal district court ruled that voters who have trouble obtaining identification under Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law can vote by affidavit. The state has appealed that decision to the Seventh Circuit.


Voter Suppression May Have Won Wisconsin for Trump
By
Ed Kilgore

African-American turnout was down in Wisconsin and other states in 2016. Was it caused by lack of enthusiasm, or deliberately created hurdles to voting? Photo: Michael B. Thomas /AFP/Getty Images
Close elections almost by definition conjure up countless explanations of what might have changed the result. As the fine voting-rights journalist Ari Berman notes, one of the more shocking and significant developments on November 8, 2016, was Donald Trump’s win in Wisconsin, a state that had not gone Republican in a presidential election since the 49-state Reagan landslide of 1984. Explanations were all over the place:

Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”
Virtually no one, says Berman, talked about voter suppression, even though Scott Walker’s hyperpolarized state had enacted and fought successfully to preserve one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws, expected and designed to reduce minority turnout.

Yet there is evidence, both anecdotal and academic, that voter suppression efforts had a lot to do with a sharp reduction in minority and student voting in Wisconsin.

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.
Trump carried the state by less than 23,000 votes.

Wisconsin’s voter ID law was designed to create complex hoops prospective voters had to jump through to secure an ID, particularly for those without driver’s licenses, and also for college students attending schools that did not issue the kind of IDs the law demanded. Berman found abundant evidence that election personnel in the state went beyond the letter of the law to discourage compliance. And voter ID was just part of the arsenal of voter suppression techniques at the GOP’s disposal:

The voter ID law was one of 33 election changes passed in Wisconsin after Walker took office [in 2011], and it dovetailed with his signature push to dismantle unions, taking away his opponents’ most effective organizing tool. Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per county, hampering voters in large urban areas and sprawling rural ones. It also added new residency requirements for voter registration, eliminated staffers who led statewide registration drives, and made it harder to count absentee ballots.
It all added up, and for Republicans, it paid off handsomely in 2016.

One lesson of the Wisconsin saga is that control of the federal courts matters a great deal in vindicating voting rights and political representation; this is, after all, the state where a GOP gerrymander of the legislature was so overtly partisan that the U.S. Supreme Court may find it unconstitutional. In 2014 a district court judge struck down Wisconsin’s voter ID law on grounds that it disproportionately affected African-Americans and could not be justified by evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the conservative-dominated Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling just in time for the 2016 elections.

Ultimately it will require either a change of heart among Republicans, many of whom used to support voting rights, or a significant shift in partisan control of state governments, to reduce the relentless pressure for voter suppression. A Republican president who seems wedded to the more absurd right-wing theories of voter fraud is not setting a very good example, as his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, headed by infamous vote suppressor Kris Kobach, has illustrated. But such initiatives from the top are meeting an eager demand from the GOP grassroots:

Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” says Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s campaign, who filed a half-dozen voting rights lawsuits in the months before the 2016 election.
If you think of voting rights as a wonky “process” issue that’s less important than health care or the environment or avoiding war with North Korea, think again. It’s entirely possible we wouldn’t be dealing with a President Trump at all if voting rights were regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship that should be strongly and universally encouraged.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... trump.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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