I happened across a $3 copy of a former Ohio Sec of State's book, Democrat Jennifer Brunner. As a Secretary of State, she's forgotten more than I know about voting integrity especially given her level of interest.
It's intriguing because she was an outsider in a Republican-dominated state (and any time one party dominates, corruption ensues). So I thought here was a fresh pair of eyes on the problem of voter fraud. And sure enough, she was a valiant fighter for the cause back in '06-'07.
And it also speaks to the enormous amount of time, energy, help, and luck you need to look at our voting systems. And this is with an energetic Secretary of State who appears to have honestly wanted election integrity.
Reading her chapter on "Project Everest" - so named because of the daunting task of trying to understand the byzantine process - made me a lot more sympathetic to the AZ audit folks who, unlike Brunner, had neither the voting companies, the university help, corporate, and media folks on their side. And she barely made it happen! Surely Lindell and Byrne and the rest will need a miracle.
It certainly makes me realize there's no option other than to go back to paper ballots, as unlikely as that might be.
Excerpts:
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On the campaign trail for Secretary of State, I heard question after question from people I talked with about the reliability of the state’s new voting systems, especially the electronic, touch screen voting systems. I promised what I dubbed a “top-to-bottom” review of Ohio’s voting systems if elected. I was able to fulfill that promise in Project EVEREST, a “top-to-bottom review of Ohio’s voting systems” that was called by a University of Massachusetts TechReport “the most comprehensive to date” in the nation.
For more than thirty years, voting system technology was fairly static, so an initial investment in a punch card or lever system was a decent investment that lasted for some years without needing replacement...
The longevity of the punch card and clunky, mechanical lever systems allowed counties to enjoy a fairly peaceful coexistence with state and federal requirements, as long as those requirements remained fairly static.
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In the minds of many, the lines blur between the punch card voting before 2006 and touchscreen voting from 2006 forward. Regardless, voting machine technology remains substandard to what we use everyday in banking and for travel.
The name EVEREST was a brainchild moniker of a staffer named David Klein, who worked extensively on the study, especially on documentation of the results. The name, EVEREST, stood for “Evaluation and Validation of Election Related Equipment, Standards and Testing.” Harnessing the help we needed to perform this study and keeping it on track many times made me think that finishing this project ever, let alone on time, was like climbing Mt. Everest. Project EVEREST’s purpose was to review each type of certified voting systems in Ohio, (systems also used throughout the U.S.). Four major tasks were accomplished in testing each voting system: security assessment, configuration management...In lay terms, we wanted to see if the machines could be tampered with or "hacked" if they were being used properly by the state's boards of elections, if they performed with integrity and if the correct operational controls were in place to ensure their integrity.
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We designed the study to accomplish what I called “parallel, independent testing” by corporate and academic scientists, which allowed different parties to test Ohio’s (and the nation’s) voting systems using multiple methods. I knew I was taking a risk that each type of testing entity (corporate versus academic) could reach different conclusions, but science is science, and they came to the same conclusion.
The overall conclusion made in Project EVEREST was this: "The findings of the various scientists engaged by Project EVEREST are disturbing. These findings do not lend themselves to sustained or increased confidence in Ohio’s voting systems. The findings appearing in the reports necessitate that Ohio’s voting process be modified to eliminate as many known risks to voting integrity as possible while keeping voting accessible to Ohio’s voters. These changes must be thoughtfully planned with the assistance of the Ohio General Assembly, Governor Strickland and Ohio’s election officials. As they are implemented, these changes must be made widely known to the public to facilitate orderly and cost efficient implementation."
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It has been said that elections belong to the people. Excessive dependence on any voting machine company to operate the state’s elections, when that company’s voting system is subject to trade secret or propriety information claims, results in a loss of transparency that should exist to assure election officials and the public…
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The information available to the scientists who performed the assessments of this study is some of the most comprehensive information available to date for any such study...Our study involved a review of each system’s source code. Existing voting machine contracts provided the Secretary of State contractual access to these escrowed “brain architecture schemas” known as source codes. But getting timely access to them for each voting system was another story. I knew that being denied this critical access was just a temporary restraining order away in a lawsuit filed by jittery manufacturers, seeking to protect their investments and reputations...It was a delicate balance to work with the manufacturers, yet get what we needed to perform the study.
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The Controlling Board process was fraught with politics, with local election officials quietly lobbying against us with legislators, many of whom were only too happy to object to what we were doing. In this process, the media was a boon to approval. We had kept the media well apprised of Project EVEREST’s progress, which was painstakingly but necessarily slow. No legislator dared vocally or visibly be against testing voting systems to prove Ohio elections were fair or to improve public trust in their integrity.
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Allowing myself to get a bit bruised and battered in the public process actually helped garner the understanding of the media and improved our chances of approval at the next hearing. We achieved approval, still needing to return to the bargaining table to cement final details with the researchers as subcontractors.
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The most difficult part of the negotiations was resolving the differences that arose from and between the various parties of interest regarding confidentiality. Voting machine manufacturers wanted to protect their “trade secrets.”
I had agreed to the advance review by the companies because I believed this was necessary as a means to obtain their cooperation. They were providing us the source codes to which we were entitled and all necessary equipment and documentation needed for the study to have the necessary credibility and integrity. As part of our agreement, representatives of the manufacturers had even conducted training sessions to help our researchers know how the voting systems were to be set up and operated. This turned out to be important to preventing delay in the research process. For the manufacturers, it ensured that all tests on the machines were under proper conditions of use.
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I told him flatly I would wait one day after it was released to them and then make the report public. I told him the contract, when read carefully, allowed me to do that. He tried first to say that the contract did not permit me to do that. That argument didn’t work.
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As cooperative as the manufacturers had been, I also knew that extremely negative findings could result in cold and calculated business decisions to protect good will and other assets with a court order to prevent me from releasing the study’s findings.
Finally, he said, “But, Jennifer, you’re going to get sued for releasing this report before three days.”
“But I may get sued anyway to stop me from releasing it if I wait,” I countered.
“But that isn’t the understanding the voting machine companies had,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what they understood. It’s what’s in the contract, “ I countered.
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Having participated at every stage of the study, I could speak like a teacher, covering the study’s major conclusions and giving specific illustrations of the types of tests that showed the flaws and vulnerabilities of the systems that had been thrust upon the states by a combination of a Congress that never wanted a Presidential election decided by a Supreme Court again and the lust of the “market” for the sale of voting machines for low-margin profits at massive volumes. But the inexperience of Congress in the ways of election administration that have been and continue to be primarily and stubbornly local lent itself to hasty testing funded in part by manufacturers that missed things like 1980’s versions of software that was augmented and modified in multiple computer languages, causing instability at best and sometimes outright failure to perform.
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Added to that were the practices of local governments, some better than others, that were often unprepared to take and account for federal money and make decisions about technology, let alone successfully implement it. Most boards had little to no previous exposure to this new voting technology....In many cases there had only been enough funding to buy the machines, not even extension cords, and certainly not to develop consistent training on the programming, maintenance and use of the machines.
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When I took office, I had held to the belief that, even though I am a Democrat, and Republicans controlled the legislature, there was enough common ground. I believed that both parties would want to work together to ensure reliable election results and a smooth election. The hotter the heat in the election kitchen became, the more that idea went up in smoke. By November 2008, the relationship between the two major political parties on election administration was more like bare-knuckled combat. It never ceased to amaze me that year that in their zeal to confound the reforms I was trying to make, some Republicans were willing to risk everything, even the efficacy of the election process as it would affect their own candidates.
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When Ken Blackwell was still Ohio Secretary of State, Matt had openly criticized him, even though the two of them are Republican. Matt had taken a $10,000 check for the local Republican Party that represented the interest of the Diebold company during the HAVA-required voting machine procurement process several years earlier. He had been disciplined for it by the Franklin County Board of Elections, but he was neither prosecuted nor fired for facilitating the transaction. This same executive had informed me that the Dispatch believed that Matt had redeemed himself by speaking out against Ken Blackwell, who had engaged in at least one self-imposed news blackout with the Dispatch.
Progress Ohio, Ohio’s premier Democratic progressive nonprofit organization, headed by Brian Rothenberg, had made a public records request of Matt’s emails from his board of elections email account.
My “birthday present” in these emails was to feel like a patient who had been limping around for weeks who finally saw an x-ray of her broken leg and finally knew why she had been limping. Matt Damschroder’s emails were replete with conversations with staff at the [Columbus] Dispatch ranging from the reporter assigned to cover me to the editor to the associate publisher. In it were a myriad of emails from various other Republican local election officials from other counties in the state, often copied to personnel at the state Republican party. Then the two most astounding things jumped out at me in my perusal of Matt’s emails: his invitation to the reporter assigned to cover me to come to his house for dinner—and the reporter’s acceptance of the invitation.
When I was in Washington, DC attending the National Association of Secretaries of State’s conference, I called the editor of the Dispatch, Ben Marrison, at a session break. I told him I didn’t want the Dispatch reporter assigned to me covering me any more. I told Ben that I did not think the reporter could be fair and objective if he was having dinner at the home of Matt Damschroder (one of the reporter’s best sources who was at the same time one of our office’s biggest critics). Ben seemed shocked—I’m not sure at whether I actually called him and made the request, or at the allegation I lodged, or both.
With Patrick Gallaway and Jeff Ortega on one side of the long conference room table, with me at the end of the table and with the three representatives from the Dispatch on the other side, I listened as Ben Marrison flatly told me that at his paper there was a bright line between news and editorial content and that they were and could be fair with me. I argued, citing examples to back up my contentions. Nothing much was accomplished. I couldn’t tell them what to do, only how I viewed what they did. After that time it seemed to be just brief periods when this newspaper would let up from its sharp criticisms and sometimes editorialize in my favor.
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Elsewhere on the web I saw this from back in 2019 when question election fraud was still widely approved. This is the most common sense thing you can't say other than a man is male and females are female:
At the polling sites, human errors can occur when the electronic computerized pollbooks, voting machines and tabulators are set up. Computers can be damaged. They can be subject to electromagnetic interference during their operation. They can be incorrectly calibrated. Their input sensing function or reading ability can be distorted. They can experience random unintentional data corruption or electricity spikes. Problems can happen during software updates. New software patches are sometimes applied that can cause malfunction. How the machine records a voter’s choice can be incorrectly programmed into the machines.”
And these issues don’t include the obvious. With the most powerful office in the world at stake, insiders who have the right to secretly program our computerized voting machines could decide to manipulate the votes. Unauthorized programmers or hackers – in the United States – can do the same.
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