Black Box Voting's Scary Facts About North Carolina's Voting Systems

[McCamy Taylor]

Since we only ever hear about E-voting vulnerability or weird shit in states that Clinton is expected to win, I decided to see what Black Box voting (the source for the story about voter registration purges in Indiana) had to say about the potential for fraud and error in tomorrow's contest in North Carolina which Obama is expected to win.

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/73/73756.html

North Carolina uses optical scans (and, in some locations, touch-screen machines with flimsy little receipts that whir by so fast you can't see what's on them to verify them...) They have a spot check, which is good, and they have fantastic public records laws, which give citizens access to more controls than most other locations.

But the optical scan systems made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) are problematic, and the iVotronic touch-screens made by ES&S are a real mess.

Now, you may want to have confidence that your vote counts, but in our current system that would be misplaced confidence and it's not going to be well-placed confidence until we get some fundamental changes in place, which is not going to happen before November.

We will have live action going on here at Black Box Voting as the May primaries roll in, and you will get a LOT of valuable information from that.

The ES&S systems, like those used in North Carolina, were found by the EVEREST Report (commissioned by the State of Ohio) to be at high risk for fraud.

According to the EVEREST Report, when testing the ES&S voting system, they found:

- Failure to protect election data and software – "The firmware and configuration of the ES&S precinct hardware can be easily tampered with in the field. Virtually every piece of critical data at a precinct – including precinct vote tallies, equipment configuration and equipment firmware – can be compromised through exposed interfaces, without knowledge of passwords and without the use of any specialized proprietary hardware."

North Carolina also uses the Unity System, which has the same basic functions as the "GEMS" program in the Hacking Democracy film.

For more information on the specific defects, Google "EVEREST report", academic -- it's the 334-page Academic Report, Election Systems & Software section, that has the details.

There are no "good states" and no "bad states" when it comes to elections. All states have corrupt election systems thanks to corrupt federal inmate Ney and his HAVA Act which I call "Hack America's Vote Act". Those who highlight problems in the voting system in this country only in states where Clinton is expected to win or has won make the issue seem like a false one--i.e. they reduce it to a campaign tactic designed to discredit a political opponent's primary victories that no one is meant to take seriously. They make people who hear about such problems ask themselves Is this a real charge of election theft or is this just another campaign tactic?

Election integrity is too important to cry wolf over. I have no doubt that something is up in Indiana when they rejected that many voters, but it is probably aimed at the general election and not at the Democratic Primary---which everyone assumed would have been decided long before Indiana got to vote. Luckily, the long primary will alert people trying to the vote that they were disenfranchised and they will be able to correct the problem before the general, something they would not have been able to do had they skipped the primary and waited until November to show up at the polls. Indiana is a "red" state so this is probably a GOP dirty trick designed to keep it red this fall. The masterminds behind this attempt to disenfranchise voters have been foiled by the ongoing Democratic primary--another unexpected benefit of the contest. The next few months in Indiana should be interesting.