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Belligerent Savant » Sat Nov 03, 2018 3:54 pm wrote:As a registered independent (since the age of 18) I can't vote this Tuesday, in any event, due to the 'closed state' scam.
Things would be far more interesting if there were no 'closed' states.
Marionumber1 » Sat Nov 03, 2018 4:07 pm wrote:Belligerent Savant » Sat Nov 03, 2018 3:54 pm wrote:As a registered independent (since the age of 18) I can't vote this Tuesday, in any event, due to the 'closed state' scam.
Things would be far more interesting if there were no 'closed' states.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Being a closed state means that independents can't vote in primaries, but any registered voter can vote in a general election.
www.bloomberg.com
Private Equity Controls the Gatekeepers of American Democracy
Three companies dominate the U.S. voting-maching industry
Experts say some equipment remains vulnerable to hacking
By Anders Melin and Reade Pickert
November 3, 2018, 6:01 AM EDT
A Hart InterCivic voting machine in Texas. Photographer: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis Historical via Getty Images
Millions of Americans will cast votes in Tuesday’s midterm elections, some on machines that experts say use outdated software or are vulnerable to hacking. If there are glitches or some races are too close to call -- or evidence emerges of more meddling attempts by Russia -- voters may wake up on Wednesday and wonder: Can we trust the outcome?
Meet, then, the gatekeepers of American democracy: Three obscure, private equity-backed companies control an estimated $300 million U.S. voting-machine industry. Though most of their revenue comes from taxpayers, and they play an indispensable role in determining the balance of power in America, the companies largely function in secret.
Devices made by Election Systems & Software LLC, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic Inc. will process about nine of every ten ballots next week. Each of the companies is privately held and at least partially controlled by private equity firms.
Beyond that, little is known about how they operate or to whom they answer. They don’t disclose financial results and aren’t subject to federal regulation. While the companies say their technology is secure and up-to-date, security experts for years have raised concerns that older, sometimes poorly engineered, equipment can jeopardize the integrity of elections and, more importantly, erode public trust.
“We have more federal regulation of ballpoint pens and Magic Markers than our voting infrastructure,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program at New York University School of Law. “There’s no national system, and the result is that states are largely forced to buy from these companies.”
Read more on problems with Georgia’s voting machines.
The U.S. Constitution assigns responsibility for elections to the states, which often task counties or even towns to conduct elections and set equipment standards. As a result, voting-machine companies cater to a market of about 10,000 jurisdictions ranging in size from more than 4 million voters in Los Angeles County to fewer than 500 in some rural areas. As many as 19 vendors divided the market in the early 2000s, according to John R. Patrick, who wrote the 2016 book “Election Attitude: How Internet Voting Leads to a Stronger Democracy.”
Bush v Gore
That changed after the controversial victory of George W. Bush over Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act and doled out more than $3 billion to states to upgrade machines and train poll workers. Once the funds dried up, the industry began consolidating. Now, the three companies cover about 92 percent of voters, according to research by the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.
ES&S headquarters in Omaha.
Photographer: Nati Harnik/AP Photo
ES&S, the largest, was founded in 1979 and says it controls about 60 percent of the market. Private equity firm McCarthy Group invested in ES&S about a decade later and took a majority stake in 2011. Both are based in Omaha, Nebraska.
Dominion, founded in Canada, became one of the largest equipment makers in 2010 through a couple of acquisitions, including a subsidiary of Diebold Inc. Rival ES&S purchased the Diebold unit in 2009 but was forced to sell it following a Justice Department antitrust ruling. This year, Staple Street Capital, a New York-based middle-market private equity firm, and Dominion’s management team bought it out.
Bain Alumnus
Hart InterCivic, based in Austin, Texas, was formed about a century ago as a ballot-printing business. In 2011, Miami-based private equity firm HIG Capital, founded by alumni of Bain & Co. and Blackstone Group LP, made what it called a “strategic investment” in the company, without disclosing the size of its stake.
HIG was criticized in 2012 after reports revealed the firm and its principals, including managing director Jeff Bohl, who was also a Hart board member, had donated generously to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. At the time, Hart denied “any suggestions that the company might try to influence the outcome of election results.” Since 2012, the majority of HIG employees’ donations have gone to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
HIG and Staple Street didn’t respond to requests for comment. McCarthy declined to comment and referred questions to ES&S, whose spokeswoman, Teresa Paulsen, said in an email: “All ES&S equipment goes through extensive federal and state certification processes, and the company invests significantly in research and development to advance security.”
Read more on cybersecurity issues involved with electronic voting.
Criticism of poorly functioning equipment surfaced this week, with Texas voters complaining that Hart machines weren’t accurately recording their choices in the heated battle between Republican Senator Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke. The Texas Secretary of State’s office told the Texas Tribune this wasn’t a malfunction but the result of voters making selections before the machines’ screens had time to finish rendering. Hart said on its website that it “proudly stands behind” its voting systems. In a statement, Rolando Pablos, the secretary of state, cautioned against a “disturbing trend where misinformation” could discourage voters from casting ballots.
A nationwide overhaul of equipment isn’t likely to happen soon. States have spent most of the money Congress allocated in 2002. There’s also scant competition from outsiders. Technology giants like Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. have steered clear of the industry. And the Election Assistance Commission, the independent federal agency Congress created in the HAVA legislation to certify voting machines, lacks authority to force states to adopt its standards.
Fair and Open
It’s not that voters don’t care. Only about half believe the nation’s elections are “fair and open,” according to a July poll by Ipsos and the University of Virginia Center for Politics. But many aren’t familiar with the workings of the technology undergirding the system or tend to forget about the issue as soon as elections are over, said the Brennan Center’s Norden.
The market’s limited size can discourage voting-machine companies from investing in new systems, said Matthew Caulfield, one of the Penn report’s authors. Some accuse private equity firms of loading up portfolio companies with debt and slashing costs to increase margins. But because closely held ES&S, Dominion and Hart don’t disclose financial results, it’s not possible to tell what, if any, role their private-equity owners have played in financial decisions. The companies haven’t issued any debt, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
It’s unclear what allure voting-equipment makers have to private equity. But it’s an obvious signal that “these companies are either very profitable or have the potential to be very profitable,” Patrick said.
Wisconsin Voters Face Hurdles to Reach the Polls
voter ID, Wisconsin, ES&S, Scott Walker
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https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploa ... 00x470.jpg[/img]
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Brian Moore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0), Wikimedia (Public Domain), Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0), and Douglas W. Jones / Wikimedia (CC0 1.0).
Some Wisconsin voters may be in for an unpleasant surprise when they head to the polls on Tuesday — thanks to a 2016 state law requiring that voters present certain forms of photo identification in order to vote.
While the law was pushed by Republican lawmakers to address the specter of voting fraud, the effect has been to place a disproportionate burden on students and on minority and lower-income voters, according to Jay Heck, director of Common Cause Wisconsin. This ID law, he said, has “definitely had a suppressive effect on voter turnout,” and is a big step backwards for the state.
Student IDs for most of Wisconsin’s colleges and universities are not valid at the polls. That includes 10 of the 13 University of Wisconsin campuses, Heck said. Though schools can, and do, issue special IDs that students can use at the polls, this introduces another step into the process of voting, and one of which many students may be unaware.
The state law also presents obstacles to minority voters, particularly in urban areas, where a higher percentage of people don’t drive and may not have driver’s licenses, according to Eileen Newcomer, voter education coordinator for the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin.
And while Wisconsin offers free state IDs, available at state Department of Motor Vehicles offices, acquiring them can be a problem, especially for someone who doesn’t drive.
Related: Obtaining Voter ID — Piece of Cake or Disenfranchising Obstacle?
To make matters worse, DMV offices in Wisconsin also operate on such comically low budgets and pared-down schedules that they were mocked in a 2016 episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver:
“If you don’t have a car or you don’t drive, it can be very difficult to get to the DMV,” Newcomer said. “So there are some inherent barriers to that.”
This sets up a situation in which a voter who lacks proper ID tries to vote and is either issued a provisional ballot, which is the correct procedure, or is turned away from the polls. The latter is not supposed to happen, but it has occurred in previous elections and likely will happen again, Newcomer said. The League of Women Voters is working in conjunction with other organizations to raise awareness of the issue and to help people obtain the necessary ID.
Voting-rights advocates say that these restrictions, combined with partisan gerrymandering as well as limited hours for early voting, are responsible for declining voter turnout rates — which dropped significantly in 2016, following participation rates that were the second-highest in the country in the 2008 and 2012 elections.
Critics of the new restrictions point in particular to declining rates in Milwaukee, which dropped in the same election that saw Donald Trump win the state by 23,000 votes. A similar effect is expected in this election, potentially helping Republican candidates in close races, including Gov. Scott Walker.
Cybersecurity and Same-Day Registration
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Some election watchers are also concerned about cybersecurity. Karen McKim, director of Wisconsin Election Integrity, is generally pleased with the security of the voter registration rolls, which are handled entirely by the state with state-developed software. But she has little confidence in the security of the election itself, especially in regards to vote tabulation and auditing.
McKim said the tabulation of votes in Wisconsin is handled by private vendors hired by each of Wisconsin’s 78 counties. One tabulation system, the DS200, counts the votes for 60 to 70 percent of Wisconsin voters, and counties pay several vendors (i.e., ES&S, Dominion, Command Central, and Clear Ballot) to provide voting machines. But when it comes to the technical work regarding cybersecurity, the companies are in charge and not the county election boards, which have nominal responsibility.
Protecting Our Vote
Although the state registration rolls could conceivably be hacked, Wisconsin has another mechanism that acts as a check on this: Same-day registration. This policy is the best check against registration tampering, McKim said, because any discrepancies that crop up at the polls can be immediately corrected at the polls: Any potentially de-registered voter can simply re-register and still vote.
But hacking of voting machines or tampering with tabulation or auditing is much harder to prevent. Especially worrisome to McKim is the involvement of the vendor ES&S (the successor company to Diebold) which in 2011, she points out, was caught using remote-access software on voting machines — even after the company had assured election officials that the machines would never be connected to the internet. At least half of Wisconsin voters still use ES&S machines, said McKim.
Related: Voting Machine Company Admits Installing Vulnerable Remote-Access Software
State policy regarding election auditing and recounts, McKim said, are also problematic, since the state empowers county election clerks to decide whether to conduct routine audits after elections by checking the paper receipts against the computer tabulation. County election clerks can choose to do this, but they are not required to do so, and often don’t, despite the fact that automatically conducting these audits, McKim said, is the only sure way to guard against hacking in Wisconsin.
Recounts or Audits
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Voting-rights advocates are also concerned about the security of any recounts or audits that are triggered as a result of close elections. The reason is the 2016 disbanding of the state’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which was created in 2007 to serve as an independent watchdog for ethics complaints and election problems.
Since the disbanding of that board by Gov. Scott Walker and a Republican-controlled legislature, state election problems are now handled by an election board made up of six political appointees — three Republicans and three Democrats. Since four votes are required to pass any motion, a deadlocked vote essentially kills any complaints brought before the board.
This situation, Heck said, hardly inspires confidence in the event of a contested election.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/11/02/wisco ... the-polls/
Marionumber1 » Sat Nov 03, 2018 4:07 pm wrote:Belligerent Savant » Sat Nov 03, 2018 3:54 pm wrote:As a registered independent (since the age of 18) I can't vote this Tuesday, in any event, due to the 'closed state' scam.
Things would be far more interesting if there were no 'closed' states.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Being a closed state means that independents can't vote in primaries, but any registered voter can vote in a general election.
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