Will voting machines decide the election?

[FaxModem1]

So, a friend sent me this:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/14-4

Published on Sunday, October 14, 2012 by Common Dreams
Will E-Voting Machines Owned by His Buddies Give Mitt Romney the White House?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Electronic voting machines owned by Mitt Romney's business buddies and set to count the votes in Cincinnati could decide the 2012 election.

The narrative is already being hyped by the corporate media. As Kelly O'Donnell reported for NBC's Today Show on Monday, October 8, Ohio's Hamilton County is "ground zero" for deciding who holds the White House come January, 2013.

O'Donnell pointed out that no candidate has won the White House without carrying Ohio since John Kennedy did it in 1960. No Republican has ever won the White House without Ohio's electoral votes.

As we document in the e-book Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election? (www.freepress.org) George W. Bush got a second term in 2004 thanks to the manipulation of the electronic vote count by Ohio's then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell served as the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney while simultaneously administering the election.

The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to electronically flip a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory in the dead of election night. ES&S, Diebold and Triad were all owned or operated by Republican partisans. The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 am election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. Blackwell gave Connell's Ohio-based GovTech the contract to count Ohio's votes, which was done on servers housed in the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Thus the Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Connell died in a mysterious plane crash in December, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided (disclosure: we were attorney and plaintiff in that suit).

Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes---and thus the presidency---to his friend George W. Bush. That it was done in part on electronic voting machines and software O'Dell happened to own (Diebold has since changed hands twice) remains a cautionary red flag for those who believe merely winning the popular vote will give Barack Obama a second term.

This November, much of the Ohio electorate will cast its ballots on machines again owned by close cronies of the Republican presidential candidate. In Cincinnati and elsewhere around the state, the e-voting apparati are owned by Hart Intercivic. Hart's machines are infamous for mechanical failures, "glitches," counting errors and other timely problems now thoroughly identified with the way Republicans steal elections. As in 2004, Ohio's governor is now a Republican. This time it's the very right-wing John Kasich, himself a multi-millionaire courtesy of a stint at Lehman Brothers selling state bonds, and the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, on whose Fox Network Kasich served as a late night bloviator. Murdoch wrote Kasich a game-changing $1 million check just prior to his winning the statehouse, an electoral victory shrouded in electronic intrigue. The exit polls in that election indicated that his opponent, incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland, had actually won the popular vote.

Ohio's very Republican Secretary of State is John Husted, currently suing in the US Supreme Court to prevent the public from voting on the weekend prior to election day. As did Blackwell and Governor Robert Taft in 2004, Husted and Kasich will control Ohio's electronic vote count on election night free of meaningful public checks or balances

Hart Intercivic, on whose machines the key votes will be cast in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, was taken over last year by H.I.G. Capital. Prominent partners and directors on the H.I.G. board hail from Bain Company or Bain Capital, both connected to Mitt Romney. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. H.I.G. Directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers, as is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve.

US courts have consistently ruled that the software in electronic voting machines is proprietary to the manufacturer, even though individual election boards may own the actual machines. Thus there will be no vote count transparency on election night in Ohio. The tally will be conducted by Hart Intercivic and controlled by Husted and Kasich, with no public recourse or accountability. As federal testimony from the deceased Michael Connell made clear in 2008, electronically flipping an election is relatively cheap and easy to do, especially if you or your compatriots programmed the machines.

So as the corporate media swarm through Ohio, reporting breathlessly from "ground zero" in Cincinnati, don't hold your own breath waiting for them to also clarify that the voting machines in what may once again be America's decisive swing state are owned, programmed and tabulated by some of the Romney campaign's closest associates.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election?, an e-book.

So, do you think it's possible, and/or that the GOP will do it this election? Or is this conspiracy theory crap?

[Stark]

While voting machines are normal, trustworthy things that can be easily designed to provide secure and accurate vote management, America has an amazing history of constantly fucking it up.

[Sea Skimmer]

Funny, Obama won in Cincinnati in 2008 and the entire state of Ohio. I guess the vast unstoppable right wing conspiracy simply took the year off?

The 'mysterious' plane crash that killed Michael Connell also happened to involve him personally flying a smallaircraft, in heavy clouds and heavy icing condition, and with persistent problems holding a course in said weather. The FAA ruled it a case of pilot disorientation. So I guess they are also trying to imply that the right wing conspiracy has weather control?

Real issues exist with electronic voting machines, hysterical articles like this don't help them get addressed in a credible manner.

[TimothyC]

Or that ballots in the state of Ohio are continuously watched by two people - one republican and one democrat. All the time.

Or maybe 2008 doesn't count because then, in the words of candidate Obama "It helps that we have democrats in charge of the machines." This was in reference to then Secretary of State Brunner, who refused to hand over miss-match data to the county boards of elections to identify any invalid voter registrations.

Or maybe it's BS because in my experience the electronic voting machines generate a paper trail inside the machine that you get to see and reject if it is incorrect.

In short, Ohio is rather corrupt on a lot of levels, but trying to blame one side without admitting the other is just as dirty is just wrong. The only reason there is more public dirt on the Republicans is that Republicans have tended to win the various state level offices over the past two decades.

[Irbis]

Funny, Obama won in Cincinnati in 2008 and the entire state of Ohio. I guess the vast unstoppable right wing conspiracy simply took the year off?

Seeing Obama won by more than hundred Elector votes then, it would be pointless to try anyway.

Am I the only one who thinks (if that statement is true) that the software being proprietary to the manufacturer instead of being owned by state with source code open for transparency is just wrong?

[Kane Starkiller]

If the application is extensively tested and returns correct outputs for given inputs there is no reason why you'd need to know the internal coding.

[Hamstray]

If the application is extensively tested and returns correct outputs for given inputs there is no reason why you'd need to know the internal coding.

how extensively tested? it might still pass the tests and then behave differently on voting day. Proper testing may involve reverse engineering the machines in which case having them open source in the first place would spare you the hassle. Also the testing process needs to be resistant to manipulation. commissioning one contractor to engineer the things and another to test them is most likely not going to cut it.

[Irbis]

If the application is extensively tested and returns correct outputs for given inputs there is no reason why you'd need to know the internal coding.

Simply - because bug free software doesn't exist. Even if we assume there are no surprises sewn into the code by, say, disgruntled employee or someone with stark political beliefs, it's possible someone will find a way to interfere with internal works to not record votes or record only proper ones. People find holes in software developed for far larger money by proper software houses, not just subcontracted cell working with custom platform.

If governments started demand open source (at least for them) office software for low state positions, I fail to see why something far more important should be excluded.

[Mr Bean]

Funny, Obama won in Cincinnati in 2008 and the entire state of Ohio. I guess the vast unstoppable right wing conspiracy simply took the year off?

Seeing Obama won by more than hundred Elector votes then, it would be pointless to try anyway.

You don't set up electron fraud the day of, and it was not thought the election would be as wide as it was if you were a hypothetical villains Republican using Republican polls and watching Fox News. Up until the night of the election anyone setting out to steal an election (our hypothetical villain) would believe there was an excellent chance McCain could win Ohio.

Unless you presume they did not bother trying to rig the election not because they don't exist but because they had time travel thus knowing how big Obama's win would be did not bother trying to rig Ohio.
In retrospect it seems silly to try and steal the election by rigging Ohio voting. But at the time it would have made perfect sense if these people actually existed.

Also on the second subject, there should be a law, if you don't show us your source code... we don't buy from you. We have it in other sectors of our goverment why not voting machines.

[D.Turtle]

Simply - because bug free software doesn't exist. Even if we assume there are no surprises sewn into the code by, say, disgruntled employee or someone with stark political beliefs, it's possible someone will find a way to interfere with internal works to not record votes or record only proper ones. People find holes in software developed for far larger money by proper software houses, not just subcontracted cell working with custom platform.

Any large scale deployment of such a method would quite quickly become apparent through statistical tests. Unless the margin is really, really tiny (which, granted, happens) I don't think its possible to manipulate the vote count in a way as to drastically alter the outcome. Especially because AFAIK the machines aren't able to communicate with each other, which makes it difficult to coordinate them with each other.

[Mr Bean]

Any large scale deployment of such a method would quite quickly become apparent through statistical tests. Unless the margin is really, really tiny (which, granted, happens) I don't think its possible to manipulate the vote count in a way as to drastically alter the outcome. Especially because AFAIK the machines aren't able to communicate with each other, which makes it difficult to coordinate them with each other.

FYI D. Turtle the methods put forward to rig elections are less +2 votes for the Republican than dropping votes for the democrat. After all if a contested area suffers a 5% drop in Democratic turn out it's not as easily detectable since turn out always is a wild card factor and since majority rules a hypothetical cabal could simply suppress turnout in Republican areas as well since winning 50.1% is still a win if ten people vote or ten thousand.

As well once in office the administration that gamed the system is well within it's ability to quash those investigations or simply appoint prosecutors who are of an acceptable ideological bent.

Besides which real voter suppression is typically much more blatant see Ohio this year.

[D.Turtle]

Besides which real voter suppression is typically much more blatant see Ohio this year.

Yes, this is why I think having angst about the voting machines is useless. There are much more easy, effective, and above all legal ways to influence the vote result.

[SirNitram]

Will I start to believe the selfsame machines that recorded 4,258 v 260 votes in a precinct with only 638 voters in 2004? No. Simple question, get a simple answer. (AP citing that ridiculous outcome Here)

[Bright]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12204-do ... our-e-vote

Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that's partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House?

Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House.

They are especially crucial in Ohio, without which no Republican candidate has ever won the White House. In 2004, in the dead of election night, an electronic swing of more than 300,000 votes switched Ohio from the John Kerry column to George W. Bush, giving him a second term. A virtual statistical impossibility, the 6-plus% shift occurred between 12:20 and 2am election night as votes were being tallied by a GOP-controlled information technology firm on servers in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In defiance of a federal injunction, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties destroyed all election records, making a recount impossible. Ohio's governor and secretary of state in 2004 were both Republicans, as are the governors and secretaries of state in nine key swing states this year.

As we have previously reported, H.I.G. Capital has on its board of directors at least three close associates of the Romney family. H.I.G. Capital directors John P. Bolduk and Douglas Berman are major Romney fundraisers. So is former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve. H.I.G. employees have contributed at least $338,000 to Romney's campaign. Fully a third of H.I.G.'s leadership previously worked at Romney's old Bain firm.

But new research now shows that the association doesn't stop with mere friendship and business associations. Mitt Romney, his wife Ann Romney, and their son Tagg Romney are also invested in H.I.G. Capital, as is Mitt's brother G. Scott Romney.

The investment comes in part through the privately held family equity firm called Solamere, which bears the name of the posh Utah ski community where the Romney family retreats to slide down the slopes.

Unlike other private equity firms, Solamere does not invest in companies directly. Instead, Solamere invests in other private equity funds, like H.I.G. Capital. Solamere calls them partners. These partners, like H.I.G., then invest in various enterprises, like Hart Intercivic, the nation's third-largest voting machine manufacturer.

As reported by Lee Fang of The Nation, Solamere was founded by Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick, Papa Romney's campaign finance chair. Ann Romney and Mitt's brother G. Scott Romney are also invested. Mitt himself threw in $10 million "seed money" to get the fund going, and spoke personally to its first full investors conference. Solamere's public web presence has been reduced to a front page only, so a complete list of it's partners can not be found. But reportage by the New York Times, Boston Globe, Esquire and the Nation have slowly given us a partial picture of which funds are being funded by Solamere. Some $232 million has been raised so far, according to SEC filings and industry publications.

In addition to Romney's finance chair Spencer Zwick, Solamere has also provided the campaign with its finance director, Richard Morley, and a western regional finance coordinator, Kaitlin O'Reilly. O'Reilly is listed as an executive assistant at Solamere, and also at SJZ LLC, which was founded by her boss Spencer Zwick. The SJZ LLC campaign finance consulting firm has billed Mitt's campaign over $2 million this election cycle as well as doing another $9,687,582 in billing to various Congressional Campaigns. The host of the private fundraiser at which Romney made his infamous "47%" speech was Marc J. Leder, co-CEO of Sun Capital, another "partner" of the Solamere fund.

As in virtually every close presidential race, Ohio may well hold the key to the Electoral College decision as to who will become the nation's next chief executive. The presence of Hart Intercivic machines in Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, means there is a high likelihood the votes that will decide the presidency will be cast on them. Major media like CBS have begun reporting that Cincinnati could be "ground zero" in this year's election.

But these Hart machines are deeply flawed and widely know to be open to a troubling variety of attacks and breakdowns. There is no legal or other means to definitively monitor and re-check a tally compiled on Hart or other electronic voting machines. Ohio's current governor and secretary of state are both Republicans.

Does this mean the Romney investment in Hart Intercivic through H.I.G. Capital and Solamere will yield it not only financial profits but the White House itself?

Tune in during the deep night of November 7, when the electronic votes in swing state Ohio are once again opaquely reported to the nation and the world, without meaningful public scrutiny or legal recourse.

It's happening again.

[Bright]

Oh for fuck's sake, how could I not see the topic right down the page? And how come my search didn't find it, for that matter...

Just delete this. And shoot me before I die of embarrassment.

[General Brock]

The electoral college decides the election; its possible in theory that if the machines are noticeably off, enough electors might ignore them to give a fair result.

[NecronLord]

Oh for fuck's sake, how could I not see the topic right down the page? And how come my search didn't find it, for that matter...

Just delete this. And shoot me before I die of embarrassment.

*Puts gun away *

Not when I can merge instead.

[NecronLord]

I am not sure how much trust I have in the investigative abilities of truth-out.org though, Bright.

[Stormin]

Forbes is running the story too. Still haven't seen it on any major networks yet though.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2 ... s-concern/

Romney Family Investment Ties To Voting Machine Company That Could Decide The Election Causing Concern


58 comments, 39 called-out
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(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
It’s 3:00 a.m. on November 7, 2012.
With the painfully close presidential election now down to who wins the battleground state of Ohio, no network dares to call the race and risk repeating the mistakes of 2000 when a few networks jumped the gun on picking a winner.
As the magic boards used by the networks go ‘up close and personal’ on every county in the Buckeye State, word begins to circulate that there might be a snafu with some electronic voting machines in a number of Cincinnati based precincts. There have already been complaints that broken machines were not being quickly replaced in precincts that tend to lean Democratic and now, word is coming in that there may be some software issues.
The network political departments get busy and, in short order, discover that the machines used in Hamilton County, Ohio—the county home of Cincinnati— are supplied by Hart Intercivic, a national provider of voting systems in use in a wide variety of counties scattered throughout the states of Texas, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Colorado and Ohio.
A quick Internet search reveals that there may be reason for concern.
A test conducted in 2007 by the Ohio Secretary of State revealed that five of the electronic voting systems the state was looking to use in the upcoming 2008 presidential election had failed badly, each easily susceptible to chicanery that could alter the results of an election.
As reported in the New York Times, “At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.”
We learn that one of the companies whose machines had failed was none other than Hart Intercivic.
With television time to fill and no ability to declare a winner so that the long night’s broadcast can be brought to a close, the staffs keep digging for relevant information to keep the attention of their viewers—and that is when it gets very real.
It turns out that Hart Intercivic is owned, in large part, by H.I.G. Capital—a large investment fund with billions of dollars under management—that was founded by a fellow named Tony Tamer. While is is unclear just how much H.I.G. owns of Hart Intercivic, we do learn that H.I.G. employees hold at least two of the five Hart Intercivic board seats.
(continued on next page)

[General Zod]

Sounds legit.

Tagg Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, has purchased electronic voting machines that will be used in the 2012 elections in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Colorado.

"Late last month, Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis at FreePress.org broke the story of the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital investment team involved in H.I.G. Capital which, in July of 2011, completed a "strategic investment" to take over a fair share of the Austin-based e-voting machine company Hart Intercivic," according to independent journalist Brad Friedman.

But Friedman is not the only one to discover the connection between the Romney family, Bain Capital, and ownership of voting machines.

Truth out reports:

"Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, and his brother, wife and son, have a straight-line financial interest in the voting machines that could decide this fall's election. These machines cannot be monitored by the public. But they will help decide who "owns" the White House."

Both The Nation and New York Times confirm the connection between the Romney family, Solamere and the Bain Capital investment in the voting machine company, Hart Intercivic, whose board of directors serve H.I.G. Capital.

"Mitt Romney, his wife Ann Romney, and their son Tagg Romney are also invested in H.I.G. Capital, as is Mitt's brother G. Scott Romney.

The investment comes in part through the privately held family equity firm called Solamere, which bears the name of the posh Utah ski community where the Romney family retreats to slide down the slopes." Truth out added.

There are also political connections between Solamere and the Romney's. "Matt Blunt, the former Missouri governor who backed Mr. Romney in 2008, is a senior adviser to Solamere, as is Mitt Romney’s brother, Scott, a lawyer," according to the New York Times.

Voter ID and voter fraud have been top issues in the 2012 race, as have claims of Republican voter suppression. Mr. Romney's campaign has also been the subject of controversy over misleading ads, false claims, sketchy math on his tax plan, and overall vagueness on women's rights and other hot button issues.

Raising further questions of legitimacy in the Romney campaign is an audio recording recently made public, where Mitt Romney is heard asking independent business owners to apply pressure to their employees to influence their votes. What has also been made public are the emails those employers have sent to their employees with an implied threat that if they don't vote for Romney they may lose their jobs.

What it all says is that Mitt Romney, with the help of his family and Bain Capital connections, is more than willing to try to take the White House through illegitimate and highly unethical, if not specifically illegal means.

With each passing day, the character and campaign methods of Mitt Romney cast an ever-darker shadow over free and fair American elections.

Yet there is an irony in the Romney campaign that cannot be ignored. For all the noise the right-wing has made in questioning the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, there have been so many questionable efforts made to help put Romney in the White House, if he wins, there should be great dispute over whether his election could ever be called genuinely illegitimate.

The nagging question is why, if Mr. Romney truly has the qualities that American voters want in their president, does he have to go to such great and questionable lengths to try to win the election.

But obviously the real voter fraud threat is brown people from Mexico trying to cast their paper ballots!

[Rogue 9]

Simply - because bug free software doesn't exist. Even if we assume there are no surprises sewn into the code by, say, disgruntled employee or someone with stark political beliefs, it's possible someone will find a way to interfere with internal works to not record votes or record only proper ones. People find holes in software developed for far larger money by proper software houses, not just subcontracted cell working with custom platform.

Any large scale deployment of such a method would quite quickly become apparent through statistical tests.

Like this one? (PDF)

The authors of the paper clearly have a conclusion in mind, but I'm checking to see if their statistical analysis pans out anyway. At first brush, it certainly does look suspicious.

[D.Turtle]

Like this one? (PDF)

The authors of the paper clearly have a conclusion in mind, but I'm checking to see if their statistical analysis pans out anyway. At first brush, it certainly does look suspicious.

Problems with that analysis:
They have no idea what the median is (Figure 7).
Using the cumulative vote totals erases a huge part of the variance in the results.

They repeatedly claim that the nice smooth line they receive can only be explained by election fraud. However, the method they choose (CUMULATIVE vote totals) can only lead to smooth lines once a certain number of votes has been counted, as each individual precinct is too small in order to achieve huge shifts in the vote percentages.

Basically, if the first few percent of votes have a different result than the total vote (probably explained by the urban/rural divide - which they noticeably did not plot in their ridiculous debunking of alternative explanations part, even though it is IMO the most obvious explanation that comes to mind), then you will get such a nice line as they receive.

A simply scatter plot of vote totals in each precinct compared to size of precinct would be a thousand times more informative.

Something like this (that scatter plot compares voter turnout and vote results on a precinct level).

Short version: Expected result from looking at cumulative totals.

[Rogue 9]

The urban/rural divide doesn't explain everything, though. First, urban precincts would be expected to vote more heavily Democratic as a rule, not less. Second, they graph precincts in individual counties too, not just entire states, and large cities normally occupy an entire county or more, at least in the eastern parts of the country. (Western states tend to have much larger counties in terms of land area, especially in the desert states of the southwest.) The main reason I said it looked suspicious at first glance is because the effect isn't present in Democratic primaries (presuming the data isn't fabricated). They do address the effect of very small precincts on the percentages at the lower end of the graph on page 15.

I fully expected there to be problems with it; the tone of the writing reeks of Truther-style bullshit weasel language. But I'd rather know why they're wrong rather than simply dismiss it for unprofessional style. Thanks.

[D.Turtle]

The urban/rural divide doesn't explain everything, though. First, urban precincts would be expected to vote more heavily Democratic as a rule, not less. Second, they graph precincts in individual counties too, not just entire states, and large cities normally occupy an entire county or more, at least in the eastern parts of the country. (Western states tend to have much larger counties in terms of land area, especially in the desert states of the southwest.) The main reason I said it looked suspicious at first glance is because the effect isn't present in Democratic primaries (presuming the data isn't fabricated). They do address the effect of very small precincts on the percentages at the lower end of the graph on page 15.

First, they claim a lot of thinks - looking at the shit they've written I don't particularly trust those claims. They post a few (maybe cherry-picked) examples and claim it holds true everywhere (for Republicans).

Their explanation on Page 15 is complete bullshit and shows that they have no fucking clue what they are doing. Those first 5-10 percent of the vote decide what the entire chart looks like.

Here is something I quickly threw up in order to show their idiocy:

Now, lets change the first few percent of the vote counted:

And again:


The first few votes largely decide what the entire thing looks like.
Link to the doc I made that with

Oh and another thing I just thought of: Lets take the first chart again, and vary the votes a bit:

A gets random votes between 100 and 175, B gets random votes between 0 and 75 per "precinct".

You don't see much of that variance in the chart because of the stupid (or probably deliberate) choice of looking at the cumulative vote count, which you can actually see here:

[Rogue 9]

Then you're right, of course. Statistical analysis has never been my strong point; I smelled bullshit but didn't know enough to pinpoint where it was. My thanks.