Electronic Vote Rigging in Kentucky

When the problems surrounding paperless electronic voting machines were raised, most people were unaware of the threat, surrounding issues, and since little publicity is accorded the matter, it is easily dismissed.

The recent Kentucky indictments provide some insight ---


Kentucky election indictments reveal dangers of paperless voting

By Christian Smith-Socaris
Progressive States Network

Political corruption and vote buying have been alleged in Clay County, Kentucky for decades. In an effort to counteract that tradition, the Department of Justice has indicted several public officials -- including a judge, the county clerk, the school superintendent and members of the elections board -- for alleged vote buying and election fraud.

According to the indictment, the defendants not only conspired to steal elections the old fashioned way but also exploited a vulnerability in their new ES&S iVotronic paperless voting machines.The defendants are alleged to have duped voters into leaving the voting booth after they had pressed the "vote" button, which doesn't actually cast the vote, but brings up a review screen where a voter confirms their selections. Once the voter had left the booth, corrupt election workers went in and changed their votes.

This case is significant for a couple reasons. The first is that the major defense used by voting machine vendors regarding the flaws in their products has been that none of the problems have ever resulted in a stolen election. If the DOJ is correct, several elections were likely stolen in Kentucky on electronic machines.

Second, the fact that using electronic voting machines is confusing enough that a many voter can be tricked into leaving the booth before they have actually cast their ballot is a critical vulnerability in these systems that has not previously been appreciated.

Christian Smith-Socaris is Election Reform Policy Specialist for the Progressive States Network. A version of this story originally appeared in the Network's Stateside Dispatch.

ISS



Is the E-Voting Honeymoon Over?
Electronic vote rigging in Kentucky.

Eight Clay County, Kentucky election officials were charged last week with conspiring to alter ballots cast on electronic voting machines in several recent elections. The story was first reported on a local TV station and was featured on the election integrity site BradBlog. According to the indictment [pdf], the conspiracy allegedly included, among other things, altering ballots cast on the county's ES&S iVotronic touchscreen voting machines.

So how could this have happened?

The iVotronic is a popular Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine. It displays the ballot on a computer screen and records voters' choices in internal memory. Voting officials and machine manufacturers cite the user interface as a major selling point for DRE machines -- it's already familiar to voters used to navigating touchscreen ATMs, computerized gas pumps, and so on, and thus should avoid problems like the infamous "butterfly ballot". Voters interact with the iVotronic primarily by touching the display screen itself. But there's an important exception: above the display is an illuminated red button labeled "VOTE" (see photo at right). Pressing the VOTE button is supposed to be the final step of a voter's session; it adds their selections to their candidates' totals and resets the machine for the next voter.

The Kentucky officials are accused of taking advantage of a somewhat confusing aspect of the way the iVotronic interface was implemented. In particular, the behavior (as described in the indictment) of the version of the iVotronic used in Clay County apparently differs a bit from the behavior described in ES&S's standard instruction sheet for voters [pdf - see page 2].

A flash-based iVotronic demo available from ES&S here shows the same procedure, with the VOTE button as the last step. But evidently there's another version of the iVotronic interface in which pressing the VOTE button is only the second to last step. In those machines, pressing VOTE invokes an extra "confirmation" screen. The vote is only actually finalized after a "confirm vote" box is touched on that screen. (A different flash demo that shows this behavior with the version of the iVotronic equipped with a printer is available from ES&S here). So the iVotronic VOTE button doesn't necessarily work the way a voter who read the standard instructions might expect it to.

The indictment describes a conspiracy to exploit this ambiguity in the iVotronic user interface by having pollworkers systematically (and incorrectly) tell voters that pressing the VOTE button is the last step. When a misled voter would leave the machine with the extra "confirm vote" screen still displayed, a pollworker would quietly "correct" the not-yet-finalized ballot before casting it. It's a pretty elegant attack, exploiting little more than a poorly designed, ambiguous user interface, printed instructions that conflict with actual machine behavior, and public unfamiliarity with equipment that most citizens use at most once or twice each year. And once done, it leaves behind little forensic evidence to expose the deed.

Current electronic voting systems have been widely -- and justifiably -- criticized for being insufficiently secure against vote tampering and other kinds of election fraud. I led the team at U. Penn that examined the ES&S iVotronic -- the same machine used in Kentucky -- as part of the Ohio EVEREST voting systems study in 2007. We found numerous exploitable security weaknesses in these machines, many of which would make it easy for a corrupt voter, pollworker, or election official to tamper with election results (see our report [pdf] for details). Other studies have reached similarly grim conclusions about most of the other e-voting products used in the US and elsewhere. But these results, alarming as they are, also raise a perplexing question: if the technology is so vulnerable, why have there been so few (if any) substantiated cases of these systems being attacked and manipulated in actual elections?

A plausible explanation is simply that the bad guys haven't yet caught up with the rich opportunities for mischief that these systems provide. It takes time for attackers to recognize and learn to exploit security weaknesses in new devices, and touchscreen voting machines have been in wide use for only a few years (most US counties purchased their current systems after 2002, with funding from the Help America Vote Act). For example, the computers connected to the Internet were for a long time largely vulnerable to network-based attack, but it took several years before viruses, worms, and botnets became serious threats in practice. In other words, new technologies sometimes enjoy an initial relatively crime-free "attack honeymoon" in which even very weak defenses seem to be sufficient. But eventually, the criminals arrive, and, once they climb the learning curve, the world becomes a much more hostile place very quickly.

We might ask, then, what the (alleged) Kentucky conspiracy tells us about the e-voting attack honeymoon. Are the bad guys catching up? On the one hand, we might be comforted by the relatively "low tech" nature of the attack -- no software modifications, altered electronic records, or buffer overflow exploits were involved, even though the machines are, in fact, quite vulnerable to such things. But a close examination of the timeline in the indictment suggests that even these "simple" user interface exploits might well portend more technically sophisticated attacks sooner, rather than later.

Count 9 of the Kentucky indictment alleges that the Clay County officials first discovered and conspired to exploit the iVotronic "confirm screen" ambiguity around June 2004. But Kentucky didn't get iVotronics until at the earliest late 2003; according to the state's 2003 HAVA Compliance Plan [pdf], no Kentucky county used the machines as of mid-2003. That means that the officials involved in the conspiracy managed to discover and work out the operational details of the attack soon after first getting the machines, and were able to use it to alter votes in the next election.

Yes, the technique is low-tech, but it's also very clever, and not at all obvious. The only way for them to have discovered it would have been to think hard and long about how the machines work, how voters would use them, and how they could subvert the process with the access they had. And that's just what they did. They found the leverage they needed quickly, succeeding at using their discovery to steal real votes, and apparently went for several years without getting caught. It seems reasonable to suspect that if a user interface ambiguity couldn't have been exploited, they would have looked for -- and perhaps found -- one of the many other exploitable weaknesses present in the ES&S system.

But that's not the worst news in this story. Even more unsettling is the fact that none of the published security analyses of the iVotronic -- including the one we did at Penn -- had noticed the user interface weakness. The first people to have discovered this flaw, it seems, didn't publish or report it. Instead, they kept it to themselves and used it to steal votes.

LINK

KENTUCKY: Kentucky Republicans taking steps to outright steal governor's election they just lost

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Kentucky Republicans taking steps to outright steal governor's election they just lost

Campaign Action On Tuesday night, Democrats celebrated as state attorney general Andy Beshear defeated incumbent Governor Matt Bevin. Though the results were quite close for an election with such a high turnout, the final numbers showed Beshear with an...

On Tuesday night, Democrats celebrated as Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear defeated incumbent Governor Matt Bevin. Though the results were quite close for an election with such a high turnout, the final numbers showed Beshear with an advantage of over 5,100 votes—an almost impossible amount to be reversed by a recount. But Republicans aren’t about to be thwarted by a little thing like the will of the voting public. Bevin has refused to concede the race, and Republicans in the state house are taking first steps to take control of the election, reverse the results, and return Bevin to the governor’s mansion no matter what the vote says.

As the Louisville Courier-Journal reports, the Republican president of the Kentucky Senate has already started looking into how they could contest the election and throw it to a vote in the GOP-dominated state House of Representatives. Under Kentucky state law, the elections are certified by a state board of elections. Once that happens, Bevins has 30 days in which he could ask for a re-canvas or a recount. However, he could also contest the election. In that case, it would be up to a vote of the House and Senate to decide the winner. And in both chambers, Republicans have a majority.

While candidates are allowed to contest elections, the last time this happened in Kentucky was in 1899. In that case, Democrat William Goebel, who ran on a working class, “friend to the common man,” anti-corporate platform had a contest that came down to a handful of votes against Republican “man of business” William Taylor. Taylor was first named governor, but after a near state-wide rebellion that required the legislature to meet in secret, Goebel was declared governor. Unfortunately, by that point a Republican had already shot Goebel. He was officially governor, on his death bed, for three days.

That’s the legacy that Kentucky Republicans are out to revive as they and Bevin scan the rules and look to throw the election into contention—quite possibly bypassing the idea of a recount so that it doesn’t inconveniently show them what they already know; that Beshear is the winner. So the plan being contemplated is not to do a recount, or even a re-canvass of voting machines. Bevin could just go straight to the state Congress, then stroll back to the mansion, smiling all the way.

Senate president Robert Stivers has already stated that this “legislature could decide the race” and Kentucky law states that contested elections “shall be determined by both Houses of the General Assembly, according to such regulations as may be established by law." Republicans are now reviewing the rules and regulations around those contests to see if there’s something that says they can’t simply seat the candidate of their choosing. And there may be nothing to stop them.

Stivers seems prepared to argue that Bevin is the real winner because 2% of the vote went to the Libertarian candidate. And if there had been no Libertarian candidate, “most of those votes … would have gone to Bevin.”

But there was a Libertarian candidate, and the state Libertarian Party made it clear how they felt about Bevin. “We split the vote, and we could not be more thrilled. If our friends in the major parties do not want this to happen again, they should think about supporting ranked choice voting. And supporting our issues.”

Or, as Republicans seem prepared to do, they could just steal the Libertarian votes, give them to Bevin, declare him the winner, and call it a day. And when they’re done, Trump will probably give them a tweet of congratulations. 

LINK

PAPER BALLOTS!
STOP GOP RIGGED ELECTIONS!

HACKABLE VOTING MACHINES need to go!

Americans need legitimate elections!

"...Mississippi is one of eight states that are expected to still use voting machines that involve no paper ballots during the 2020 election. New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Kansas will also likely still use the machines, which experts say are vulnerable to hacking and malfunctions.

"A significant number of voters may not have a paper record of their vote in 2020," the Brennan Center reported. "We estimate that as many as 12 percent of voters will vote on paperless equipment in November 2020."..."

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Viral Video of Mississippi Voting Machine Changing 

Man's Vote Prompts Calls for Paper Ballots and 

Election Security Reform

"These machines should not be used in a democracy."

Published on

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

 by

Common Dreams

Viral Video of Mississippi Voting Machine Changing Man's Vote Prompts Calls for Paper Ballots and Election Security Reform

"These machines should not be used in a democracy."

by

Julia Conley, staff writer

A viral video showing a voter in Mississippi attempting to cast a vote in the state's Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday had been retweeted more than 10,000 times by Wednesday morning, as voting rights advocates pointed to the video as evidence that a return to paper ballots would make U.S. elections far more secure.

The voter in the video was shown trying to click the box next to retired state Supreme Court Justice Bill Waller Jr.'s name on the touchscreen of an electronic voting machine, only to have an "X" appear next to Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves's name.

"It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for," the man said in the video.

The voter was one of more than a dozen people in Mississippi who reported machine glitches when they tried to vote. At least three machines in two counties were confirmed to be malfunctioning on Election Day, with unconfirmed reports in seven other counties.

The changed votes may not have been enough to swing the election in favor of Reeves, who was announced the winner after capturing 54 percent of the vote, compared with Wallers' 46 percent.

But the malfunctions were more than enough to cause deep concern among voting rights advocates about inaction, especially by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), on ensuring election security.

In July, critics on Twitter dubbed McConnell "Moscow Mitch" after he blocked the Senate from considering a bill which would invest in boosting election security and called such efforts "highly partisan."

The reports of the machine malfunctions in Mississippi come two weeks after the Brennan Center for Justice released a study advising that U.S. election officials "should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible."

On Monday, the National Election Defense Coalition, Electronic Privacy Information Center, R Street Institute, and Public Citizen called on Congress to hold hearings about election security and the use of electronic voting machines, noting that in addition to the possibility of technical glitches, "voting system vendors have operated with little oversight and no regulation for decades."

"Given the gravity and urgency of this issue, we write to you to urge the committees to hold a hearing on election system security featuring sworn testimony from officers of the voting system vendors to shed more light on their practices which directly impact the security of the nation," wrote the groups.

Mississippi is one of eight states that are expected to still use voting machines that involve no paper ballots during the 2020 election. New Jersey, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Kansas will also likely still use the machines, which experts say are vulnerable to hacking and malfunctions.

"A significant number of voters may not have a paper record of their vote in 2020," the Brennan Center reported. "We estimate that as many as 12 percent of voters will vote on paperless equipment in November 2020."

LINK

MUST READ! RSN: Joshua Holland, The Nation's Truth Nazi, Needs to Calm Dow

Joshua Holland of The Nation. (photo: The Nation)

Joshua Holland, The Nation's Truth Nazi, Needs to Calm Down

By Bob Fitrakis, Reader Supported News

19 May 16

ear Mr. Holland: After studying and assessing your work this semester, it is with deep regret that I have to inform you that you failed Political Science Statistics 101.

As you know, you have characterized us as “conspiracy theorists” because in our Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, Harvey Wasserman and I have suggested that exit polls matter. You have also publicly denounced our colleague Richard Charnin, who has two separate Master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics, for his analysis of this year’s primary exit poll results versus election results.

Since you show so little interest in statistical analysis, let me briefly go over what you should know:

First of all, exit polls are the accepted international standard for indications of election fraud and vote tampering. Here I refer you to Eric Bjornlund and Glenn Cowan’s 2011 pamphlet, Vote Count Verification: a User’s Guide for Funders, Implementers and Stakeholders. Their work, done under the auspices of Democracy International for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), outlines how exit polling is used to ensure free and fair elections.

“U.S.-funded organizations have sponsored exit polls as part of democracy assistance programs in Macedonia (2005), Afghanistan (2004), Ukraine (2004), Azerbaijan (2005), the West Bank and Gaza Strip (2005), Lebanon (2005), Kazakhstan (2005), Kenya (2005, 2007), and Bangladesh (2009), among other places,” the pamphlet states.

When election results do not match exit poll results, we should not simply accept these results. What Charnin does, which he has been doing for many years, is study improbable election results that fall statistically outside the “margin of error” (MoE).

For example, Ohio primary exit polls indicated that Clinton would win 51.4% to Sanders’ 47.6%. She was expected to win by 3.8%. The actual vote indicated she won 56.5% to 43%. Clinton won the election by 13.8% which was 10 percentage points more than the exit polls indicated.

Statistics tell us that the correct Ohio MoE was 3.12% based on N=1670 respondents. There is a 0.1% probability that the 5.1% exit poll discrepancy from the recorded vote was due to chance. Therefore there is a 99.9% probability that the official Ohio primary results were improbable.

These results should trigger further investigative analysis.

Take a look at Charnin’s statistics in this post for Democratic primary MoE and probability calculations.

Please tell me, Mr. Holland, where Charnin’s wrong – and show your math.

If these results happened in the Ukraine in 2004, the U.S. State Department would be denouncing the election as fraudulent and demanding an investigation or a revote. By the way, this did happen in 2004. You may recall the Orange Revolution when Ukrainian people took to the streets to protest the fraudulent election. Unlike Mr. Holland and some of his peers, Ukrainians care about stolen elections.

Why is this important? Obviously, if you don’t understand or accept exit polling and can’t analyze poll results versus election results, you won’t recognize election tampering. And that’s what those who would tamper with elections are counting on.

What you have failed to do is study and attend classes where we went over the basic acronym HISMISTER, which provides basic guidelines to determine if a poll is valid.

H = Historical intervention. Did an unexpected historical event affect the results? In an exit poll, voters are asked how they voted as they leave the polls. There is generally no time for a historical intervention to happen between casting a vote and telling the pollsters outside the polling site how you voted.

I = Instrumentation. Were the correct instruments used? If the pollsters asked who people voted for in the presidential race, we assume they were using the correct survey instrument. However, if the voting machines did not record the correct votes, that could cause a discrepancy in the corresponding election results. See “R” below.

S = Sample. Was the sample of voters polled randomized and representative of the demographics of the state? The problem with your work is that you never offer any example for why the exit polls are wrong. You have never taken issue with the pollster’s sample.

Also, while you denounce Charnin’s analysis, you never point out how or why his math is wrong based on standard statistical probability.

M = Measurement. Were the same identifiers studied in the comparison? In this case, the pollsters asked voters who they voted for in the presidential race and those numbers were compared to presidential election results. This would not appear to be a problem.

I = Implementation. Were the procedures used to collect, organize and analyze the data done correctly? If the exit pollsters went to the right precincts and used the correct sample based on the right demographics, we assume the implementation was correct.

S = Survey. Did the survey, or poll, reflect the correct methodology? There has been no challenge to the exit pollsters’ methodology.

T = Technique. Was the poll conducted in an unbiased professional manner? Generally polls are conducted by well-paid professional pollsters.

E = Errors. Are there unexplained unintentional human errors? For example, a poll worker or election official incorrectly enters voting data.

R = Recording. If applicable, did the instruments record the information correctly? When voting machines and central tabulators record different information than what voters are telling exit pollsters, then we must check to make sure our instruments recorded the vote correctly. And we must check to make sure that no one tampered with or rigged the recorded numbers.

On this section, I must give you a zero. There is a more likely than not probability that either faulty instrumentation or election tampering played a role in the improbable official election results. The United States fails basic standards of transparency because there’s no way to verify the actual vote total. Your blind faith in nontransparent voting equipment that is manufactured and programmed by private, partisan, for-profit corporations using secret proprietary software is inexcusable.

Here’s the correct answer: “We can’t verify the vote because seven states – Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia use Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, i.e., computer voting without paper trails. In 18 other states, DREs are used with paper trails – generally a small piece of paper not designed to be recounted. In virtually all other states, private tabulators secretly record the vote.

I was an international election observer for El Salvador’s 1994 presidential election. Had the ARENA Party said that the votes would be counted on machines built by their friends in private industry and tabulated on computers belonging to major donors of their party, my report would have been simple to write: The election is assumed to be fraudulent due to non-transparency and lack of auditing accountability.

Corporate for-profit media – CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, etc. – claim that the official vote count must always be right. As a journalist you should be skeptical of these claims. What these media gatekeepers are telling us are that the universal laws of statistics apply everywhere in the world except in the United States. They would have us believe that when Clinton repeatedly beat Sanders by implausible numbers we are expected to lack an understanding of basic statistics and accept the improbable. They tell us not to pay attention to the technicians behind the curtain secretly programming the DREs and central vote tabulators.

With a legal suit looming that demanded both adjusted and unadjusted exit polls be made public after the California primary, we just learned that Edison Research has canceled exit polls for all the remaining primaries. Edison has a monopoly on all exit polling for the mainstream media consortium.

We have now lost what Bjornlund and Cowan call “… an effective method for projecting election results.”

---

Professor Bob Fitrakis is co-author, with Harvey Wasserman, of the newly-published Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D., and has taught Political Science for 35 years. He was an international election observer in El Salvador’s 1994 presidential election. He co-wrote and edited the International Election Observer report to the United Nations.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36957-focus-joshua-holland-the-nations-truth-nazi-needs-to-calm-down

Flaming Water. Poisoned Water

Flaming drinking-water well in Kentucky illuminates Big Coal's abuses

The flaming drinking water well at a home in eastern Kentucky's Pike County first came to public attention back in May, thanks to a report by a local TV station.

WKYT visited the home of Calvin and Denise Howard on Big Branch Road, where the Howards reported that the water, which runs orange and black, burned their skin when they bathed. They also said that Excel Mining, the operator of a nearby coal mine, had offered to install a water filtration system -- but only if the residents signed a liability waiver.

The Howards refused the company's offer -- and when WKYT checked back in July, the flames that had been just about to the top of the well were shooting out at least a foot and a half.

Since then, the Howards have filed a lawsuit [pdf] over the contamination. In addition, environmental advocates have gotten involved, arranging for the delivery this week of clean water to 13 area families amid inaction by the company and state environmental regulators.

"In all my 20 years of working on water quality problems, I have never seen a drinking water well catch on fire and burn continuously for days on end," says Donna Lisenby of Appalachian Voices, who with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth has arranged for the delivery of bottled water from Nestle and Keeper Springs Natural Spring Water, a company founded by environmental advocate Bobby Kennedy Jr. that gives 100 percent of its profits to clean-water causes.

According to the lawsuit, the trouble for the Howards began back in late January when they started hearing explosions beneath their home. About the same time, their well water turned gray and took on an offensive odor. Around May 1, the well exploded into flames, destroying the well house. It's burned continuously ever since.

Earlier this month, Ted Withrow, a former regulator with the Kentucky Division of Water who now works with the grassroots citizens group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and KFTC activist Sue Tallichet visited the community, where residents confirmed the water contamination. Residents also reported mysterious health problems they feared could be connected to the poisoned water, including a teenage girl's hair falling out and a boy vomiting blood.

The Kentucky Department of Mining Reclamation has investigated the burning well and confirmed that it "is creating an environmental and public safety hazard." At that point, the company began providing bottled water to the Howards, but other impacted families did not get any assistance. The Howards have been advised to evacuate their trailer home but can't afford to do so. The lawsuit seeks compensation for their replacement housing and their water.

"Based on my direct, firsthand experience with contamination of water by coal operations, I am deeply worried about the safety of the drinking water of these families," says KFTC's Withrow.

An 'ineffective, choregraphed sham'

The water contamination along Big Branch Road illustrates a larger problem facing Kentucky: the coal mining industry's abuse of communities and regulators' failure to protect them from harm.

The Pike County situation is unfolding against a backdrop of coal company lawlessness and regulatory inaction in Kentucky. Back in June, an alliance of environmental groups including Appalachian Voices and KFTC sent notice-to-sue letters to two mining companies after discovering they had exceeded their pollution permit limits more than 4,000 times in the first quarter of this year alone.

The companies targeted by that action are International Coal Group, which is owned by Arch Coal of St. Louis, one of the world's largest coal companies, and Frasure Creek Mining, a subsidiary of West Virginia's Trinity Coal, which is owned by India's Essar Group. They are the largest producers of mountaintop-removal-mined coal in Kentucky.

The watchdogs notified the same companies last October of their intent to sue over more than 20,000 violations of the Clean Water Act, including falsification of pollution monitoring reports. But Kentucky's Energy and Environment Cabinet stepped in at the last minute and fined the companies a total of just $660,000 -- less than 1 percent of the maximum fine that could be imposed under the law. Environmental advocates denounced the state's action as an "ineffective, choreographed sham."

Excel Mining, the mine operator implicated in the burning-well situation, is owned by Oklahoma-based Alliance Resource Partners, among the largest coal producers in the eastern United States. Alliance reported record profits in 2010, with a 67.1 percent jump in net income over the previous year to $321 million.

The company landed in the spotlight last year when a roof collapsed at its Dotiki Mine in Hopkins County, Ky., killing two miners. News reports after the incident revealed that inspectors from the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or shut down equipment because of safety violations between January 2009 and the time of the collapse, according to Sourcewatch. Reporters found that the company received a total of 649 citations in 2009 alone.

In addition, Alliance was involved in a 2009 controversy over the firing of the director of Kentucky's Division of Mine Permits. Ron Mills' termination came after he refused to issue about a half-dozen mine permits -- most requested by Alliance -- because they failed to comply with federal and state laws. Mills' denials were ultimately overruled by higher state officials.

Joe Craft, the president of Alliance Resource Partners, is a major political powerhouse. He has contributed over $150,000 at the federal level over the past decade, including $10,000 to the Republican Party of Kentucky; $17,500 to the Kentucky State Democratic Central Committee; $4,600 to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R); and $2,300 each to Barack Obama (D) and Mitt Romney (R), according to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org database. The company's political action committee has also invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in politicians' campaigns -- $193,665 in the 2010 election cycle alone.

Craft and others affiliated with the company as well as Alliance's PAC are also major donors at the state level, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics' FollowtheMoney.org database. Alliance Coal employees were among the biggest campaign donors in Kentucky's primary election this year, together with their spouses contributing a total of $60,000 to three candidates, WBKO reported last month.

And in 2009, Craft organized a group of donors to pay for a new $7 million "Wildcat Coal Lodge" to house the University of Kentucky's basketball players on campus -- a move that sparked considerable controversy and led noted writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry to pull his personal papers from the school's archive. While the university's sports teams are known as the Wildcats, "wildcat coal" also refers to coal that's mined illegally.

Meanwhile, residents along Big Branch Road are hoping to connect to a clean municipal water source -- but price is a concern. Pike County officials have said it could cost as much as $150,000 to connect them to their existing water lines. The families have said they would pay to connect to closer lines in nearby Martin County, but that could take at least three months.

Election Fraud - Don't believe the VOTES!

Some links may be outdated....but ya get to watch the unfolding Election Fraud....


The actual computer voting machines were introduced on a grand scale in New Hampshire’s 1988 primary. The godfather was George H.W. Bush, then the vice president. As former boss of the CIA, Bush was thoroughly familiar with the methods of changing election outcomes. The Agency had been doing it for decades in client states throughout the world.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35069-focusnew-hampshire-the-birthplace-of-electronic-election-theft

https://www.laprogressive.com/gop-is-stealing-elections/#sthash.qXQYkwrg.19liiol7.dpbs

http://www.salon.com/2015/02/25/americas_election_nightmare_how_voter_id_gerrymandering_fundraising_made_us_a_laughingstock/

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/15/the_great_american_voting_scam_how_political_insiders_are_gaining_the_power_to_steal_our_elections/

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/27/votinghack/

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/22135-the-koch-brothers-dark-money-man

http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/shorewood-man-charged-with-13-counts-of-voter-fraud-b99297733z1-264322221.html

http://middlebororeview.blogspot.com/2008/10/election-fraud-republican-style-3.html

http://middlebororeview.blogspot.com/2015/10/republican-voter-fraud-and-robert-d.html

Even in Massachusetts:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2012/10/17/selectman-pleads-not-guilty-election-fraud/peYGK4BRWXqY4za6Ift2EL/story.html?utm_source=Morning+10%2F18&utm_campaign=ML+afternoon+1&utm_medium=email

Palast reported in 2000 that more than 90,000 such voters were stripped from the voter rolls in Florida using a computer program that falsely tagged black citizens as ex-felons, ineligible to vote. All were innocent. The stripping was done primarily by Jeb Bush, then Governor of Florida. His brother George W’s alleged margin of “victory” was less than 600 votes.

In Ohio 2004, we reported at www.freepress.org that Republican election officials stripped more than 300,000 primarily urban, non-white citizens from the voter rolls. Bush’s alleged margin of “victory” was less than 119,000 votes.

In addition to electronic stripping, official turnout at the polls is gutted by using Jim Crow demands for photo and other ID, discrimination aimed primarily at citizens of color.

FLIP:

The ultimate back-up for corporate election theft is electronic flipping.

The bottom line here is that some 80% of the votes in 2016 will be cast or counted on electronic voting machines owned by private corporations.

CONSIDER THIS A WARNING LABEL: If the Sanders campaign fails to aggressively push for truly universal registration and a verifiable vote count, this thrilling attempt to restore American democracy might prove futile, heartbreaking, and infuriating.

---

Mimi Kennedy, Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are election protection activists. Bob & Harvey’s The “Strip & Flip” Selection Of 2016: Six Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft is atwww.freepress.org along with the FreePress plan for monitoring the 2016 elections.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34977-focus-after-iowa--can-bernie-win-a-qstrip-a-flipq-selection

RSN: After Iowa ... Can Bernie Win a "Strip & Flip" Selection?

It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold's machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor's race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.
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Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004.
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The primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House Administration Committee. Ney had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from Diebold to lobby for its touch-screen machines. 

Georgia Pits and Republican Election Fraud Clarified

Electronic Vote Rigging in Kentucky

Election Fraud, Republican Style #3

Chinese parts, hidden ownership, growing scrutiny: Inside America's biggest maker of voting machines

https://www.nbcnews.com/…/chinese-parts-hidden-ownership-gr…

Scrutiny of the U.S. election system, spurred by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has put Election Systems & Software in the political spotlight.

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Chinese parts, hidden ownership, growing scrutiny: 

Inside America’s biggest voting machine maker

Scrutiny of the U.S. election system, spurred by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has put Election Systems & Software in the political spotlight.

Dec. 19, 2019, 6:30 AM EST

By Ben Popken, Cynthia McFadden and Kevin Monahan

OMAHA, Neb. — Just off a bustling interstate near the border between Nebraska and Iowa, a 2,800-square-foot American flag flies over the squat office park that is home to Election Systems & Software LLC.

The nondescript name and building match the relative anonymity of the company, more commonly known as ES&S, which has operated in obscurity for years despite its central role in U.S. elections. Nearly half of all Americans who vote in the 2020 election will use one of its devices.

That’s starting to change. A new level of scrutiny of the election system, spurred by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has put ES&S in the political spotlight. The source of the nation’s voting machines has become an urgent issue because of real fears that hackers, whether foreign or domestic, might tamper with the mechanics of the voting system.

That has led to calls for ES&S and its competitors, Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and Austin, Texas-based Hart Intercivic, to reveal details about their ownership and the origins of the parts, some of which come from China, that make up their machines.

But ES&S still faces questions about the company’s supply chain and the identities of its investors, although it has said it is entirely owned by Americans. And the results of its government penetration tests, in which authorized hackers try to break in so vulnerabilities can be identified and fixed, have yet to be revealed.

The secrecy of ES&S and its competitors has pushed politicians to seek information on security, oversight, finances and ownership. This month, a group of Democratic politicians sent the private equity firms that own the major election vendors a letter asking them to disclose a range of such information, including ownership, finances and research investments.

"The voting machine lobby, led by the biggest company, ES&S, believes they are above the law,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee who co-signed the letter. “They have not had anybody hold them accountable even on the most basic matters.”

ES&S Chief Executive Tom Burt dismissed criticism as inevitable and impossible to answer, but he called for greater oversight of the national election process.

“There are going to be people who have opinions from now until eternity about the security of the equipment, the bias of those companies who are producing the equipment, the bias of the election administrators who are conducting the election,” Burt said in an interview. “I can’t do anything to affect those people’s opinions.”

“What the American people need is a system that can be audited, and then those audits have to happen and be demonstrated to the American public,” Burt said. “That's what will cut through the noise.”

Supply chain questions

ES&S invited NBC News journalists into its headquarters, the first time it has done so for a national news organization. The walls were decorated with images of the Constitution and inspirational messages about quality control. In glass-walled rooms etched with the company’s patents, technicians tested machines under tight security.

Burt, a native Nebraskan, has called for federal regulations that would require voting machine companies to address some of the key questions posed to ES&S. In June, he wrote an op-ed asking Congress for more regulation, which would include requirements for paper backups of individual votes, mandatory post-election audits and more resources for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to speed improvements.

CEO Tom Burt talks with Cynthia McFadden of NBC News.Scott Morgan / for NBC News

NBC News examined publicly available online shipping records for ES&S for the past five years and found that many parts, including electronics and tablets, were made in China and the Philippines, raising concerns about technology theft or sabotage.

During the tour, Burt said the overseas facilities are “very secure.” He said the final assembly of voting machines takes place in the U.S.

Chinese manufacturers can be forced to cooperate with requests from Chinese intelligence officials to share any information about the technology and therefore pose a risk for U.S. companies, NBC News analyst Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director of the FBI for counterintelligence, said. That could include intellectual property, such as source code, materials or blueprints. There is also the concern of machines shipped with undetected vulnerabilities or backdoors that could allow tampering.

In a letter to NBC News, ES&S said it takes “great care” with its foreign supply chain, including conducting risk assessments and making on-site visits to suppliers to make sure that components “are trusted, tested and free of malware.” It said that all of its facilities adhere to international standards, that it manufactures in compliance with all federal guidelines and that it follows cybersecurity best practices.

The company says that its overseas manufacturing site has been successfully audited by the Election Assistance Commission and that the company conducts on-site visits of its suppliers “to ensure that components are trusted, tested and free of malware.”

“Some components (such as surface mount capacitors, resistors, inductors and fixed logic devices) may be sourced from China-based manufacturers,” the letter said, referring to basic circuitry components.

ES&S said it conducts quality assurance tests on the machines.

Ownership questions

Questions about who owns the major voting machine manufacturers have followed the industry for years.

The issue took on greater urgency after the FBI disclosed in July 2018 that a Russian oligarch had invested in a Maryland election services firm. Officials in Maryland and North Carolina have started questioning voting machine makers about potential foreign ownership.

Because it is privately owned, ES&S is not legally obligated to reveal its ownership or any other details about its finances, although Burt did confirm that the company generated about $100 million in sales last year.

A developer and principle architect work on software.Scott Morgan / for NBC News

But in response to questions this year from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, ES&S disclosed which investors own more than 5 percent of the company. They include Burt, Chief Financial Officer Tom O’Brien and the Omaha-based private equity firm McCarthy Group, which owns a controlling interest. The letter identified two passive investors, Nancy McCarthy and Kenneth Stinson, who own stakes of more than 5 percent in McCarthy Group.

ES&S said McCarthy Group’s bylaws prevented it from revealing other individual investors, but it affirmed that they are all U.S. citizens or trusts or corporations owned by Americans. The company offered to pay for an independent auditor to verify that all the investors are Americans. NBC News declined, as citizenship itself wouldn’t answer other potential questions, including political affiliations or other conflicts of interest.

McCarthy Group did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.

Testing questions

Virtually no laws govern the cybersecurity aspects of voting machine technologies. But ES&S points to its voluntary efforts to improve voting machine security, most notably a new program with the Energy Department’s Idaho National Labs, the same federal facility that tests the power grid and nuclear power generators. ES&S machines underwent eight weeks of vulnerability testing and penetration by government hackers.

Chris Wlaschin, head of systems security for ES&S, said at a Homeland Security cybersecurity summit in Washington in September that the company’s machines are not prone to a remote attack over the internet. But he added that someone with enough time and access could make a machine “inoperative or unusable.”

Although Wlaschin said the company would release an executive summary of the government testing, the company recently said it has nothing for “external release.” It said recommendations from the tests would be incorporated into “future voting system releases.”

Wyden said he was concerned by the company’s foreign parts supply and was working on legislation to limit it.

“What you have found is particularly important because of the China connection,” he said.

Senior Vice President of Government Relations Kathy Rogers and Vice President of Systems Security Chris Wlaschin.Scott Morgan / for NBC News

Wyden is also eager to see the Idaho National Lab findings.

“They’re claiming that the Department of Homeland Security has been working with them. I’m going to ask for this information on the basis of your report within 10 days,” he said.

Eddie Perez, global director of technology development for the Open Source Election Technology Institute, a nonprofit election technology research group with which NBC News has partnered since 2016, said the lack of oversight is problematic.

“The way people vote is managed by a couple of entities that people don’t know a lot about, and that creates risks for the country,” he said.

When it comes down to the essentials, voting machine makers “behave based on the level of regulation they have,” Perez said.

“They have to check the boxes,” he added. “But once they’ve done that, they focus on selling their product.”

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AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE IN THE LEFT HAND CORNER IS A SEARCH FEATURE. THERE ARE TOO MANY ARTICLES POSTED ABOUT ELECTION HACKING, ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES...GREG PALAST, HARVEY WASSERMAN AND OTHERS HAVE ADDRESSED HACKED ELECTIONS FOR MORE THAN A DECADE. BELOW IS JUST A SAMPLE. 

Election Fraud, Republican Style #3

There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. CommonDreams

The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. Wikipedia
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

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