Now in the middle of our efforts to get hand counts, there are new security threats. New York just adopted early voting, with all the additional opportunities for fraudulent access to voting machines left in public buildings unoccupied for hours a day.
To make matters worse, election commissioners want to buy expensive new hackable voting machines to help them with early voting. The private, for-profit vendors have been wining and dining the County Boards of Elections, convincing them of the merits of the Dominion Imagecast Evolution ("ICE") and the ESS Expressvote XL, both of which have design flaws allowing votes to be changed.
JB: Tell us more, Allegra. It's so discouraging. Almost every time there's a change of any sort, it's a step in the wrong direction, in terms of transparent and verifiable elections. Am I overreacting?
AD: You're not overreacting. I attended the Election Verification Network conference in Washington DC a month ago and heard Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) attack the secretive, for-profit companies that supply almost all of our voting machines.
Senator Wyden said, "The maintenance of our constitutional rights should not depend on the sketchy ethics of these well-connected corporations that stonewall the Congress, lie to public officials, and have repeatedly gouged taxpayers, in my view, selling all of this stuff."
JB: Good for Senator Wyden! I read about the boss of the NYC Board of Elections and his very clear and disturbing conflict of interest. What's up with that?
AD: Sen. Wyden also attacked the voting machine vendors who "flied and wined and dined election officials".
New York City's executive director of the Board of Elections is a prime example. Executive Director Michael Ryan was wined and dined and flown around the country by ES&S as a member of their "National Customer Advisory Board," including trips to Las Vegas and Ft Lauderdale.
When this blatant conflict of interest came to light, he resigned the ES&S position. That didn't stop him from promoting their voting machines. In March, he wrote the New York State Board of Elections asking for permission to purchase the expensive and controversial ESS ExpressVote XL, even though it was not yet certified by the New York State Board of Elections.
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