The recent Gateway Pundit story about the Michigan Attorney General reaching deep into the long abandoned molehill of political integrity to invert it into a mountain of righteous progressive outrage itself appears as if GP is looking to work it’s own molehill magic.
It’s been quite some time now that Michigan voting machines reputation was of them being of the free ranging variety. You probably remember Harri Hursti? …bought about 200 used voting machines without incident, but the one he purchased on eBay last month is now the subject of a state investigation, with Michigan officials determined to find out how the device ended up for sale online? Here’s the rest of the story…
BTW, NPR never says that Hursti purchased 200 Michigan voting machines but they didn’t say they weren’t all from Michigan, either. That’s the first thing a person has to remember when reading or listening to progressives; what they don’t say is often where the truth of the matter lies.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/08/1121682138/a-hacker-bought-a-voting-machine-on-ebay-michigan-officials-are-now-investigatin
…The U.S. Election Assistance Commission says voting machines should be meticulously inventoried and kept under lock and key “in a tamper-proof location, preferably within the election office.”
Even the State’s star witness finagled a bunch of them out of their ‘tamper-proof location’ as he proudly related back in 2018
http://web.archive.org/web/20180426080405/https://news.engin.umich.edu/2018/04/mock-election/
‘I hacked an election. So can the Russians.’
(I apologize for the interruption but…the Russians again? The (progressives really ought to move on from Hillary’s Russia, Russia, Russia anger, ya know? Yeah, it was said when the wounds were still raw but didn’t they drag out the lies about Russia the entire time they weren’t in control? Maybe now they’re worried about losing it again.JR)
by Nicole Casal Moore
April 9, 2018
Professor Alex Halderman and the New York Times staged a mock election to demonstrate voting machine vulnerability. | Short Read
A row of voting machines purchased on eBay lined Tishman Hall one winter morning. These were archetypes of the very same equipment used today in many states—Georgia, and parts of Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Students cast ballots for the “greatest university”—the University of Michigan or Ohio State.
Unbeknownst to the voters, the machines had been hacked by a likely culprit: J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and engineering who routinely uses hacking to demonstrate how vulnerable electronic voting actually is. He has turned a voting machine into a PacMan game and famously hacked a mock election in DC several years ago, changing votes to famous robots.
Halderman worked with the New York Times editorial department to produce the video: I hacked an election. So can the Russians. In it, he explains how he did it.
“After the chaos of the 2000 election, we were promised a modern and dependable way to vote,” Halderman says in the video. “I’m here to tell you that the electronic voting machines Americans got to solve the problem of voting integrity, they turned out to be an awful idea. That’s because people like me can hack them all too easily.
“Our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable to sabotage and even to cyberattacks that could change votes.”
Halderman has testified before Congress on the issue. He says that while it’s promising that the Senate Intelligence Committee has recently shown some understanding of the problem, states must act too.
advocates for back-up paper ballots that could make true audits possible. It’s a system that President Trump also supports.
“In a real election an official could quickly scan these paper ballots and shortly after have a human verify the results,” Halderman says in the video.
The State’s witness, Halderman, did make a list of suggestions mysteriously similar to The U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s
One might think with all the patronage jobs available that politicians would already have a reliable somebody to hold the keys to the electoral vault able to explain the rules they (the politicians) need to know and enforce.
Analysis of the Antrim County, Michigan November 2020 Election Incident
https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/sos/30lawens/Antrim.pdf?rev=fbfe881cdc0043a9bb80b783d1bb5fe9
On the basis of my investigation, I offer the following recommendations to improve the administration of future elections:
1. Michigan and other states should expand the use of risk-limiting audits (RLAs) so that they occur in all major contests. RLAs provide a last line of defense against error and fraud and provide an added basis for voter confidence
2. The Bureau of Elections should require counties to perform end-to-end preelection testing, in which memory cards from L&A testing are loaded into the EMS and the results report is check for accuracy. Such testing would have detected the mismatched election definitions in Antrim County.
3. The Bureau of Elections should revise L&A testing procedures to ensure that testing is repeated after any change to election definitions or ballot designs.
4. The Bureau of Elections should revise county canvassing procedures and training to ensure that reported results in all contests are accurately compared to the results on scanner poll tapes and any discrepancies fully explained.
5. States that do not require canvassers to compare results to poll tapes, as Michigan does, should introduce this form of validation, which provides an important safeguard against reporting errors.
6. The Bureau of Elections should revise procedures and training to clarify what steps must be taken if absentee voters return ballots that use outdated designs.
7. The Bureau of Elections should revise training materials to include discussion of lessons from the Antrim County incident, including the importance of reviewing results for obvious errors or omissions before making them public.
8. Antrim County should provide additional training for county and township staff concerning the correct operation of the Dominion voting system, including proper procedures for operating the EMS and polling place equipment.
9. Dominion should revise its documentation to more prominently warn that mismatched election definitions could lead to erroneous results.
10. Other voting system vendors should review their equipment to determine whether reporting errors could potentially occur under similar circumstances.
11. Dominion should enhance D-Suite to verify that the election definition on a memory card being loaded is compatible with the one used by the EMS.
12. Dominion should revise documentation and training to emphasize that routine EMS tasks should not be performed from privileged user accounts.
13. Dominion should ensure that customers receive and are instructed to apply all appropriate security updates affecting EMS software components.
14. Dominion should advise customers to enable disk encryption on EMS systems and to increase the retention period of the Windows security event log.
15. The Bureau of Elections should audit the physical security of county EMSes.
16. The Bureau of Elections should require election technology, including EMSes, to promptly receive all appropriate security updates. 49
17. Counties that transmit scanner results over the Internet or using wireless modems should discontinue these practices, as recommended by the Michigan Election Security Advisory Commission [25].
18. Jurisdictions should consider enabling the capability of their scanners to save ballot images. These could help resolve questions about the accuracy of results in future incidents, especially if the integrity of the paper trail is questioned.
19. Jurisdictions should retain electronic election records, such as memory cards and EMS data, for as long as physical records. These provide important evidence for investigating (or disproving) problems later discovered or alleged.
20. When future election incidents occur, even if they receive less public attention than the events in Antrim County, states should consider performing investigations like this one, to ensure that the problems are well understood and that any lessons are disseminated to help other jurisdictions avoid similar issues.
Related to #5: https://countthevote.info/what-is-a-poll-tape/
At https://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(r0lzxpnpymufog2myxgxs3ut))/mileg.aspx?page=getObject&objectName=mcl-Act-116-of-1954 I used their search box to learn about Michigans poll tape and this is what I got back…
(0 found)
Search Criteria: Full Text = “poll” AND “tape”; Object Name = mcl-Act-116-of-1954
When 20 out of 20 recommendations from the State’s expert witness’ include the word ‘should’ I would think the Democrat party would tread lightly with their accusations regarding electoral security when it appears it’s the politicians in office who are assigned the control of election security.
The progressives have been in control going on two years now and Michigan citizens might have believed that any problems connected to the election process would have been considered a priority among priorities and the Democrats in control would be publicizing the corrective actions being put in place to ensure the most basic right in a Constitutional Republic; an honest, trusted and sober election.
One more story about purchasing voting machines on eBay in 2016 this time…
https://www.wired.com/story/i-bought-used-voting-machines-on-ebay/
It’s so interesting I’m including it:
IN 2016, I bought two voting machines online for less than $100 apiece. I didn’t even have to search the dark web. I found them on eBay.
Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online.
WIRED OPINION
ABOUT
Brian Varner is a Symantec special projects researcher on the Cyber Security Services team, leading the company’s CyberWar Games and emerging technologies development. He previously worked at the National Security Agency as a tactical analyst.
If getting voting machines delivered to my door was shockingly easy, getting inside them proved to be simpler still. The tamper-proof screws didn’t work, all the computing equipment was still intact, and the hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the “Property Of” government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it.
My aim in purchasing voting machines was not to undermine our democracy. I’m a security researcher at Symantec who started buying the machines as part of an ongoing effort to identify their vulnerabilities and strengthen election security. In 2016, I was conducting preliminary research for our annual CyberWar Games, a company-wide competition where I design simulations for our employees to hack into. Since it was an election year, I decided to create a scenario incorporating the components of a modern election system. But if I were a malicious actor seeking to disrupt an election, this would be akin to a bank selling its old vault to an aspiring burglar.
I reverse-engineered the machines to understand how they could be manipulated. After removing the internal hard drive, I was able to access the file structure and operating system. Since the machines were not wiped after they were used in the 2012 presidential election, I got a great deal of insight into how the machines store the votes that were cast on them. Within hours, I was able to change the candidates’ names to be that of anyone I wanted. When the machine printed out the official record for the votes that were cast, it showed that the candidate’s name I invented had received the most votes on that particular machine.
This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
To be fair, there has been some progress since the last Presidential election, including the development of internal policies for inspecting the machines for evidence of tampering. But while state and local election systems have been conducting risk assessments, we’ve also seen an 11-year-old successfully hacking a simulated voting website at DefCon, for fun.
A recent in-depth report on voting machine vulnerabilities concluded that a perpetrator would need physical access to the voting machine to exploit it. I concur with that assessment. When I reverse-engineered voting machines in 2016, I noticed that they were using a smart card as a means of authenticating a user and allowing them to vote. There are many documented liabilities in certain types of smart cards that are used, from Satellite receiver cards to bank chip cards. By using a $15 palm-sized device, my team was able to exploit a smart chip card, allowing us to vote multiple times.
In most parts of the public and private sector, it would be unthinkable that such a sensitive process would be so insecure. Try to imagine a major bank leaving ATMs with known vulnerabilities in service nationwide, or a healthcare provider identifying a problem in how it stores patient data, then leaving it unpatched after public outcry. It just doesn’t fit with our understanding of cyber security in 2018.
Those industries are governed by regulations that outline how sensitive information and equipment must be handled. The same common-sense regulations don’t exist for election systems. PCI and HIPAA are great successes that have gone a long way in protecting personally identifiable information and patient health conditions. Somehow, there is no corollary for the security of voters, their information and, most importantly, the votes they cast.
Since these machines are for sale online, individuals, precincts, or adversaries could buy them, modify them, and put them back online for sale. Envision a scenario in which foreign actors purchased these voting machines. By reverse engineering the machine like I did to exploit its weaknesses, they could compromise a small number of ballot boxes in a particular precinct. That’s the greatest fear of election security researchers: not wholesale flipping of millions of votes, which would be easy to detect, but a small, public breach of security that would sow massive distrust throughout the entire election ecosystem. If anyone can prove that the electoral process can be subverted, even in a small way, repairing the public’s trust will be far costlier than implementing security measures.
I recognize that states are fiercely protective of their rights. But there’s an opportunity here to develop nationwide policies and security protocols that would govern how voting machines are secured. This could be accomplished with input from multiple sectors, in a process similar to the development of the NIST framework—now widely recognized as one of the most comprehensive cybersecurity frameworks in use.
Many of the rules we believe should be put into place are uncomplicated and inexpensive. For starters, we can institute lifecycle management of the components that make up the election system. By simply regulating and monitoring the sale of used voting machines more closely, we would create a huge barrier to bad actors.
The fact that information is stored unencrypted on hard drives simply makes no sense in the current threat environment. That they can be left on devices, unencrypted, that are then sold on the open market is malpractice.
Finally, we must educate our poll workers and voters to be aware of suspicious behavior. One vulnerability we uncovered in voting machines is the chip card used in electronic voting machines. This inexpensive card can be purchased for $15 and programmed with simple code that allows the user to vote multiple times. This is something that we believe could be avoided with well-trained, alert poll workers.
Time and effort are our main obstacles to better policies. When it comes to securing our elections, that’s a low bar. We must do better; the alternative is too scary to consider in our current environment. Through increased training, public policy, and a little common sense, we can greatly enhance the security and integrity of our electoral process.
WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.
At least the elected are getting around to fixing the roads and bridges after twenty or so years of campaigning on infrastructure promises.
You might be interested in this news…
https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/news/press-releases/2023/07/18/whitmer-signs-bipartisan-legislation-expanding-voting-rights
That means more change is a comin’ it just isn’t clear what it is. I thought you might see something pertinent I missed.
By the Bye, it’s buy Michigan week. Everything’s for sale.
The free range nature of the machines is becoming so widely recognized they are being referred to now as ‘tabulating devices’ by the press. You’ll might even hear the terms ‘tabulating devices’ or ‘tabulating machines’ frequently during the Trump show trial.
Here’s the Gateway Pundit story in case you missed it.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/breaking-michigan-democrat-ag-follows-lead-bidens-doj/
Far left Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Tuesday charged her former Republican foe Attorney Matthew DePerno for daring to look at a Dominion voting machine following the 2020 presidential election.
This is now against the law in Democrat-run Michigan.
Nessel previously appointed a special counsel to investigate her Republican opponent Deperno just weeks before the general election
Nessel has made threats against Matthew DePerno since last year before the midterm elections.
The Record-Eagle delivers the story chapter and verse.
Regardless, between both the GP and the Record-Eagle you still haven’t heard anything of significance that informs you of how our Constitution is constantly targeted by progressives. If you understood how insidious the progressive devotees are, you would wonder why Trump’s
attorney Alina Habba would choose that particular color to adorn herself with on the day of her clients arraignment.
Stand by; school is about to open.
