Full details, sources, footnotes and the interview with the elusive Joe Bolton are also at this web site, which has a discussion area (must log in to discuss; anyone can read): http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/54541.html.
Bev writes:
THE POLITICAL TERRAIN
A surprisingly large percentage of our national vote comes from rural locations, even in states like New York and California. In Kentucky, 109 out of 120 counties are rural; overall, 60 percent of Kentucky's votes come in from rural election administrations.
In swing states, small rural voting pockets can tip the state's electoral votes. The moonshine elections territories have been known to influence presidential races -- in 1960, the moonshine sections of West Virginia helped deliver John F. Kennedy's nomination. According to witnesses, the total paid to buy the election was over two million dollars.
In close elections, a single rural location can flip control of the U.S. Congress.
The public pocketbook and the public safety is at stake -- several of these jurisdictions have an unfortunate history of electing people who dip into the public till, along with law enforcement officers who commit felonies.In Kentucky, one newspaper calls this the "colorful political landscape."
Kentucky is a swing state where 87 out of 120 counties had a majority of Democratic registered voters, yet 106 out of 120 counties voted for Bush in 2000; 108 voted for Bush in 2004. It wasn't low turnout -- in fact, turnout has been going up. It was Kentucky politics: Registered Democrats went into the voting booth, Republican votes came out. (Details at links above)
In Nov. 2007, Kentucky voters will get to choose between two pearls for governor: Steve Beshear (D), who wants to change the state constitution to allow gambling, or Ernie Fletcher (R), who has been embroiled in a criminal controversy involving attempts to build a patronage army.
Perhaps the most vulnerable races of all in Kentucky are the gravy train positions: Sheriff, Judge Executive (similar to a supercommissioner or being chief of the county supervisors), and the county clerk position. Even the jailer position has good opportunities for personal remuneration if one is unscrupulous, due to poorly controlled "jail canteen accounts."
Kentucky elections are mostly rural affairs, with the exception of Louisville, Covington, Lexington and Frankfort.
THE HUNT FOR JOE BOLTON
We discovered that a man named Joe Bolton has inside access to nearly 200,000 votes, most of them in the most troubled areas, locations that have a history of vote fraud, family-run government, drug-dealing sheriffs, what-have you.
I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Whether or not you choose to trust Joe -- when we eventually located him we found him to be friendly and forthcoming, but then again, what does that mean? -- at any rate, procedures that give one guy access to voting machines that count nearly 200,000 votes with no oversight whatsoever do not secure and protect voting rights.
Computerized election systems are based on the strange assumption that voters should trust the government and its contractors to count votes in secret. As voting rights attorney Paul Lehto likes to point out, you can no more secure a computer against an insider than you can secure your laptop from yourself.
Most of the voting public is unaware that people like Joe Bolton and his staff of subcontractors had unsupervised pre-election access to DRE voting machine software that tallied votes in 2,894 counties covering 161,111 voting precincts in the 2006 mid-term election last November.
During your interview with Bolton you asked what he and his subcontractor do to prepare the Election Systems & Software iVotronic DRE voting machines for each election. Bolton answered, "Well, you know, all I do is I make sure that they're working as the PEBs come in. ES&S, they do the programming and stuff, all I do is I, me and my men, go out and check and make sure that the ballot is the proper ballot for that particular precinct and everything is working, set 'em up, wait for Election Day... I'll look at the candidates and make sure the PEB is working before I ship it to the clerks.
Every electronic voting system, whether optical scan or DRE, includes a key custom component that typically undergoes minimal testing and no independent audit by election officials. This custom component is directly responsible for recording and tallying votes and for determining the outcome of the election. This component is the election definition data, also called "ballot definition software."
Ballot definition software is constructed for each voting precinct for each specific election. The ballot definition software contains all the details about that election. The DRE or optical scanner uses the ballot definitions to determine how selections on the touch-screen or paper ballot are interpeted and recorded in the vote database, which contains the election results. The tally software uses the ballot definitions as a "key" when it interprets the content of the vote database and calculates the final tallies. Last November there were 1,142 counties using DRE voting machines and 1,752 counties using optical scanners. This tabulates to 2,894 counties and 161,111 voting precincts that depend on ballot definition software written in weeks and days just before the election last November.
Some counties have hundreds of ballot styles, and each one must be programmed correctly since human error at this point could be magnified by the number of voters on each errant ballot style. (Remeber the 18,000 missing iVotronic machine votes in Florida's 13th congressional district?) The process of creating the ballot definition and vote tallying software is so complex that many counties contract the work to voting machine vendors and local temporary contract programmers, who then load the ballot definition software to PC memory cards of various types depending on machine manufacturer. ES&S have two portable memory cards; one is a “compact flash” (CF) memory card of the type used in many digital cameras to store pictures and the ES&S Personal Electronic Ballot (PEB) memory module. Diebold machines use standard personal computer PCMCIA data storage cards.
The process that Bolton describes is that ES&S develops ballot definition software for each of the precinct voting places across 23 Kentucky counties. In fact, ES&S does not maintain a staff of programmers large enough to write all the ballot definition software for all the voting precincts of all its county election administration customers across the U.S.. ES&S, therefore, must contract out the programming of ballot definition and vote tallying software for its customers. ES&S then sends ballot definition software stored on PEB memory modules to 23 Kentucky county election offices who turn the PEBs over to Bolton and his subcontractors. The subcontractors then fan out to each of the 23 Kentucky counties where they plug a PEB into each and every iVotronic DRE voting machine and execute election administrator functions to transfer the ballot definition and vote tallying onto each DRE machine's removable “compact flash” (CF) memory card.
Local election officials are not computer scientists; indeed, many have trouble even maintaining the Windows PC on their desk. They can neither adequately assess the competence and veracity of local temporary contractor programmers hired to work on voting machines nor review and assess new software destined to be installed on their eVoting machines. In actuality, local election officials cannot verify that a contractor programmer's work is bug free or that they did not nefariously write a few extra lines of software code that activates only on election day to flip votes or rig vote totals on a central tabulator and then self delete at the end of the election day.
DRE and optical scan ballot counting machine physical access security procedures and security seals can never guard against incorrectly written ballot definition software. Furthermore, since the ballot definition software as well as the application control software that controls the ballot definition software has been deemed a trade secret of the vendor, there is no way for election officials to know precisely whether or not the definition software is functioning correctly. While testing may reveal errors, testing can never ensure that software is free of error either inadvertent or malicious. The more that software is used in the administration of an election, the more election officials hand control of the election over to unchecked computer programmers.
When asked during your interview, " If a person did what you do, and they were not honest, how would anyone know? Bolton answered after a thoughtful pause, " The answer to that question I really, I don't know. Honestly. I really don't, you know. I don't know how to answer that for you. I really don't."
It would be so easy for a political partisan to entice or plant a few willing temporary contractor programmers in key election jurisdictions to stuff the software ballot box as they perform their legitimate programming duties. Even just a few motivated partisan programmers each working independently could easily throw an election into even deeper chaos than happen in Palm Beach County FL in November 2000 with rigged punch card ballots.
I exist in Kentucky the land crook and Lairs. Our Governor , broke the before he was elected. the hatch act. Millions of dollars are going to private colleges. When leaves office he goes right jail. The democatic Candidate wants legalize gambling . kentucky is losing momey to Indiana an Ill. that could be going to schools, health care, and to fight drug drug dealing. Senator Mc Connell stands to lose his seat along with Republians in 2008 that are tied to Bush. So the best they know how to win is to rig an election
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Gareece (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 46 comments)
on Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 5:19:30 PM
