The Georgia Special Election Was Hacked
I've been waiting for this and Counterpunch has the goods:
The results from Georgia’s sixth district congressional race are odd.
Jon Ossoff, the Democratic newcomer who ran against Republican former Secretary of State Karen Handel, won the absentee vote 64% to 36%. That vote was conducted on paper ballots that were mailed in and scanned on optical scanners. Ossoff also won the early voting 51% to 49%. Those results closely mirror recent polls that had him ahead by 1-3 points. In the highest of those polls, he was ahead by 7% with 5% undecided and a 4% margin of error.
And then this happened:
On Election Day, Handel pulled out a whopping 16 percent lead, for a crushing 58% to 42% division of the day’s votes
One plausible explanation for the results could be Black Box Voting shenannigans:
Unlike the absentee voters who filled out paper ballots, Election Day voters in Georgia used touchscreen machines that have no verifiable paper trail. These specific machines, the Accuvote TS, are susceptible to hacking, and in fact were hacked on national television in 2006 by computer scientists from Princeton.
Come on now. It couldn't be that bad could it?
Many of the problems with Diebold’s touchscreen machines have been part of the public record for years. In 2003, Wired published a shocking whistleblower expose from Rob Behler, a Diebold computer technician who had a special nickname for the Diebold touchscreen machines. "JS equipment is what we were calling it at the time," said Behler. "Junk shit.”
Some people might suggest Black Box voting problems are a feature, not a bug:
If Georgia’s elected officials truly wanted secure and accurate elections, they could have had them by now. Karen Handel was elected Secretary of State on a platform of comprehensive election reform she was in a position to implement. So if the situation around the voting equipment is not improving, it may be because some of Georgia’s elected officials prefer it in a state of vulnerability.
There's a lot more substance and background at Counterpunch. Check it out:http://www.alternet.org/activism/unanswered-questions-over-voting-machin...
Comments
I still recall people being banned for this
at TOP because it was CT. CT my ass.
I self censored over there for years by not posting about these machines because I wanted to maintain my membership. Luckily at the time I could post at Booman Tribune about this issue.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
The Democratic Party Doesn't Care
So why should TOP? The silence of the M$M and the Democratic leadership is astounding.
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
Kos sits on the knee of the DNC
with a hand up his butt. I marvel at my stupidity for spending 10 long years there. My only regret is that all of the exiles scattered in so many different directions.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
I wouldn't beat yourself up for that
10 years ago the site was much different than it is now. There were so many excellent writers then and they covered all types of important topics.
Once the good writers left or were hassled enough so that it wasn't worth it, that's when it started to change for the worse.
NYCeve wrote on the health care debate, Jessylin Radich wrote about Snowden and all the other writers that I have forgotten their names.
After the ides of March decree, more left and can be found writing on other sites.
I'd like to see people from way of the bern, kossacks for sanders and other sites make their way here.
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
Diebold was once fined in CA because machines in LA were
sending information to somebody (Diebold, iirc) before the polls closed. They were eventually banned here.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
If our election processes are hackable
which pretty much everyone agrees that they are, why is everyone getting upset about Russians hacking into hackable systems? Isn't that highly predictable? I haven't had any confidence in our systems since Ohio during Bush vs. Kerry.
Once again, this can be chalked up to just one more issue that Democrats didn't give a shit about and devoted no time, energy or money to.
We need paper ballots, counted in public over a period of time - i.e. whatever time it takes to count each and every vote - whether it's from election day or advance voting or delayed results from ex-pats and veterans who live in other countries. We don't need to know the results same day. It's better to have the correct results later than an approximation earlier based on sampling and/or hacked results.
" “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” FDR "
Canada Counts Paper Ballots
and Germany banned electronic voting machines:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/11459-what-voting-can-look-like
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
Here in Washinton State I get my paper ballot
in the mail, and I believe Oregon does the same procedure.
People in each State must fight for the paper ballot because that change will NOT come from the federal govt. .
@aliasalias Yes, we do the same
Yes, we do the same in Oregon. Moved here from Michigan 5 or so years ago. Love the system and believe the whole country should vote like this.
election results
Or even hackable results!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
That's the bluff I'd love to call.
If they're so damn certain those dirty Russians hacked our election, lets work to change the way we vote so it can't be hacked.
Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.
Exactly!
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
What was $hillary's quote again, about the Palestinian
Elections? Something about just changing the results if we don't like them....
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I can tell you why the Democrats don't care:
Hillary won on paper ballots (supposedly) only 51-49, when the primaries were mostly in states where she was strong (early primaries in the south) but 64-36 when there was no paper trail. A "different" pattern occurred in CA, where Hillary won on election night (I think) 54-46, but Bernie was winning the aborted recount with a 75-25 lead in mail-in and provisional ballots. (CA used touch screens)
Note that though CA's touch screens gave you an accurate printout, there is no guarantee that what was printed out was what the machine reported, and most people threw away the printouts.
On to Biden since 1973
It seems evident to me that election fraud is a feature
All the same things you mentioned occurred to me. Beyond that, I happen to know what it's like to design high security electronic system.... very high. One of the things you worry about is internal attack. In the case of voting systems, you'd have to be asking, "What if the SOS was corrupt? How will I stop that?" There are ways to do so. None of those ways are implemented in any electronic voting system I have seen.
There's another theoretical data security problem though that troubles me more. In general, the rule with security is that you need to make it more expensive to break in than the value of the prize. When you do e-voting you tend to centralize the prize so that it becomes big enough to be worth hacking. At that point, nothing is going to stop a well funded group like the NSA or any of their counterparts foreign or domestic.
The endearing thing about paper ballots is that they are counted manually in a highly distributed operation. So sure, you can "hack" a precinct. It's been well reported many times. But you have to do that one precinct at a time. Every time you do, you increase your chances of exposure because inevitably, more people are involved. The system has it's own checks and balances built in.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
Grag Palast on the Real News
Also, if you haven't seen this report before: long and informative. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571db55ee707ebff30822be1/t/578d64...
Edit: the jump to time function doesn't seem to work. Start at 9:40
Compensated Spokes Model for Big Poor.
There sure as heck was voter suppression
Handel was Georgia's Secretary of State and made heavy use of Crosscheck, which was created by the fraudster, Kris Kobach, who is Kansas's Secretary Of State and head of Trump's Commission on Election Integrity, which is fraudulently using Crosscheck to remove non-Republican inclined voters from the voter rolls, using the excuse of cracking down on "voter fraud". Suprise, surprise, the people counting the vote in Georgia won. It does not bode well for the 2018 elections, even if we are able to get non-corporate, non-sellout candidates on the ballot.
Beware the bullshit factories.
I believe this because Counterpunch...
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
I wrote this parody in 2004, after John Kerry “lost” Ohio
Ken Blackwell was the Republican Secretary of State, in charge of managing elections in Ohio.
That's not fair, lotlizard. I'm trying to nap before my gig but
you've got me howling at this...
Brilliant.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
What did the exit polls reveal?
With all the national media attention focused on that race, there must have been exit polling. So what do those show? Did enough Republicans turn out and vote for Handel on election day to support the outcome?
Handel ads in the days leading up to the election were
guaranteed to bring an angry, howling Republican mob to the polls. The ads said that Ossoff 's money came from San Francisco and that he would side with Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. They said he padded his resume and was therefore "a liar."
The ads countered Ossoff's ad showing an MD who'd survived breast cancer criticizing Handel's vote against Planned Parenthood with ads showing military veterans criticizing Ossoff's claimes of Middle East experience. If the vote is legitimate, those ads would explain Handel's eleventh hour victory.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"