Editor note: This was written well before the 2020 election controversy and showed that trouble was and still is brewing.
The documentary “Hacking Democracy” (2006) follows activists Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne, who later become the director and associate director of nonprofit election watchdog group Black Box Voting, as they attempt to discover the extent to which it would be possible to alter results on the electronic voting machines of Diebold Election Systems, Inc.
The yahoo moment for me was near the end, when a Florida voting official who had been calling these activists “conspiracy theorists” and essentially insisted there was “nothing to see here, move along,” sobbed with emotion as she finally realized she had been duped by the Crime Syndicate. Despite such revelations, it has been business as usual for those who make voting-machine purchasing decisions. They’ve essentially made voting a futile exercise.
Andy Stephenson, a member of Black Box Voting from July–December 2004, assisted with comparisons of audit documents in Volusia County and obtained a secret videotape of Harris interviewing a voting machine testing lab. Wynne captured live video of Harris finding voting machine records in a Volusia County trash bag, and captured video of Cuyahoga County elections workers admitting that the initial 3% recount ballots had not been randomly selected during the 2004 presidential election.
Harris and Wynne then embarked on a series of five voting machine hack tests with Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson and Harri Hursti in 2005 and 2006. During the course of the documentary, multiple methods of tampering with the votes are shown.
The first is through editing the database file that contains the voting totals. This file is a standard Microsoft Access database, and can be opened by normal means outside of the encompassing voting program without a password. Some jurisdictions have disabled Microsoft Access, making it more difficult to alter the database, but this protection was shown to be bypassed by Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson through a Visual Basic program which searched for a string of text and edited the file through external means. However, alterations of the results in either of these fashions would be caught if a vigilant elections official compared the results with voting machine tapes.
Another technique was demonstrated through hacking the actual computer code used in the Diebold Accu-Vote memory cards. This method was discovered by Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti and is known as “the Hursti Hack.” In this hack, Hursti rigged the Diebold optical scan voting system to make the wrong candidate win by adding negative (minus) votes to one race. This resulted in that race having votes literally subtracted from its vote total.
These methods were tested by the Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, on the actual Diebold optical-scan voting system used by Tallahassee, Fla., in all their prior elections.
This method demonstrated, contrary to a previous Diebold statement, that a person attempting to rig the votes of a precinct would need access to only the memory card, not the optical scan voting system or tabulation software. This method, when cross-checked between the optical scan voting system and tabulation software, falsely appears to be legitimate, and further produces a false zero-vote printout to verify that the memory card has no votes inside it before voting begins. Following this historic hack, Ion Sancho stated: “If I had not known what was behind this, I would have certified this election as a true count of a vote.”
It’s noteworthy that after a flurry of bad press, Diebold spun off its elections products into subsidiary Premier Election Solutions, which in 2009 sold to its competitor Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a subsidiary of McCarthy Group, LLC (aka McCarthy Capital, a merchant bank). In 2014, the private group — not subject to government or investor oversight — boasted voting machines in 42 U.S. states.
“Hacking Democracy,” presented by HBO:
“Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
Joseph P. Kennedy on the election of John F. Kennedy.
All the important elections are very close and one big reason is so that the “Media” can jack up their profits and charge more for advertising. Another reason is that it is just a part of the strategy of tension.
Biden vs. Trump, that will be an election for the history books, just like Clinton vs. Trump. That is what the media will tell you. But in reality it is all fake, as fake as any professional sports match where the syndicate decides who the winner will be.
It is this syndicate that also owns the media and who could sway almost any election any direction the want. Especially after social media came along. Apparently this is why all these satanic corporations are boycotting Facebook. They claim that it is because of “hate speech”. Media insiders claim that it is because they want to “boycott” Trump advertising. I would say that this is merely more masonic checkerboarding.
The reality here is that pajama clad America can be manipulated anyway the syndicate wants given time to predictively program the people with things like false flags and fake virus pandemics. These days they really don’t need to control the voting mechanism, they have plenty of other tools in their tool box. That doesn’t mean they won’t anyway…
” I would say that this is merely more masonic checkerboarding.”
Ooh, that’s good. Very nice and concise. I may have to poach that retort for further distribution.
I used to make it a point to vote, even in off cycle election years. That is, until the whole Diebold thing during King George the W’s reign, after which point it was obvious in most precincts they wouldn’t even be bothering to count votes, just using pre-programmed results. I hadn’t considered the simple alteration to the tabulating formulae to subtly shift a candidate’s positioning rather than a predetermined hard number result. The Hacking Democracy documentary does a good job of exposing this.
I do not waste my day voting any longer. In other words, I no longer pull levers to do sets of curls on Tuesdays in November. My workout reserves Tuesdays for legs with upper body recovering from Monday’s workout. It has turned out to be a liberating experience to detach fully from our year long national debate over Coke or Pepsi every four years.
The more I thought of it, the more I realized that the Constitution already had built-in fail-safe, just in case one of us profane folk were to actually win the popular vote. And that would of course be the Electoral College.
For it is the Electoral College’s vote that officially decides who wins the Presidential election. Each state’s electors cast their votes, which we faithfully presume is cast in accordance with the desire expressed in the popular vote count. Obviously that does not mean that they have to vote that way, and I can assure you there are many factors which might “influence” them on that choice.
Voting is really just a waste of energy anyway. In fact, it is probably just another psychological set-up to traumatize us and weave in a double bind, where we feel guilty for the sinister and cruel results that proceed after just about every election.
-Stephen
The public is told what to think by Big Media. During the run up to the Presidential election, Big Media will do (one sentence) man on the street interviews. Does “the system” care what the man on the street thinks? Hell no!
Going to your neighbor and creating a grass roots organizing is a thing of the past, due to massive demographic changes foisted upon the USA. (Divide and conquer is a real thing).
Don’t know if this is common, but I have never (not once) caught sight of my US Representative (nor) either of my US Senators in public.
The one incident where I felt compelled to contact both Senators, I found their staffers were nice but useless. (A Federal agency’s records were hacked and millions of records including mine were stolen because of it. The Agency sent me (and millions of others) a notification letter). This was big news, National News lead story on multiple days. I called Senator X and one of his older staffer was so perplexed, and uninformed about what had happened that she just hung up on me, while I was trying to dumb it down for her. After that, I gave up asking questions.
Pro-Tip,….. If you press your US Senator or US Representative too hard, you will find the I.R.S. has “randomly” selected you to have your tax returns for the prior 10 years to be audited,
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal” Emma Goldman.
I remember when this controversy emerged in the early 2000s, pushed almost exclusively by the Left following the Georg W. Bush victories. Then it faded away presumably because Obama won and was reelected.
I don’t recall any efforts to formally examine the algorithms and their implementation, provide recommendations for improvement and implement them. All I know that happened is that there were several mergers and acquisitions and the company thought to be in the pocket of republican cronies is now in the hands of a Canadian corporation with sympathies for the democrats.
My eyes were opened in 1988. I was precinct captain for the Republicans, but myself and some others agreed we would not vote for the demon Bush, we would vote for Howard Phillips. And I did.
The time came after the polls closed that they would open up the machine to see the vote totals for the precinct in all races. These were the punchcard machines. When the machine was opened there was a zero next to Phillips. Zero votes.
Like I said, that is when my eyes were opened. It is all rigged beforehand.
The best: open source voting machines with no connection to the internet. The media cartels broken into a thousand pieces. Plus:
The acceptable: today’s opto scan machines that keep the scanned ballots for recounts and audits. Audits should be randomized and frequent. Exit polling should be encouraged and localized.
What else?