New Voting Machines On Display For Voter Comments In Allegheny County (PGH PA)

[yortsed snacilbuper]

All the new machines produce a paper ballot to verify your vote and seemingly can’t be hacked by Russians or anyone else.

“I don’t think they’re very hackable because they are not directly connected to the internet,” noted Nancy Naragon on Franklin Park, a long-time leader in the Greater Pittsburgh League of Women Voters

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/new-voting-machines-on-display-for-voter-comments-in-allegheny-county/ar-AACoG9P?ocid=spartanntp

[Dennis Donovan]

1. I just hope the servers they connect to are secure...

...it's "who" counts the votes that matter.

[Blues Heron]

2. They're unsinkable!!

[Brother Buzz]

3. I installed a new voting machine at City Hall and the rejected it

[SoCalDem]

4. It's not so much the VOTING..

It's WHO gets to vote
and
Who COUNTS the votes.

[unc70]

5. Do they count the paper ballots produced?

What is the supposed advantage of using this device versus marking directly on paper ballots, maybe ones that can be scanned, but ones that can be counted by hand?

[hunter]

6. People don't trust self driving cars, but they trust these voting machines.

I don't get it.

People who steal elections ALWAYS rob, maim, poison, and kill people, profiting from the suffering of others.

[Takket]

7. give it to half a dozen 17 year old hackers and if they can't change the code, i'll be impressed lol

[not_the_one]

12. American hackers don't give a shit

if they did, they would have already provided some solutions, or proof of the hacking that has occurred.

It is strange how much IS (allegedly) being done by Russian, Chinese, Iranian hackers....

[Efilroft Sul]

8. I supervise elections in my hometown. I'm going to go examine them tomorrow at CCAC South.

If I find anything of particular note, I'll post here when I get back.

[blue neen]

10. Yes, thank you. Please let us know.

We're supposed to get new ones in Westmoreland, too.

[diva77]

13. These are VERY BAD if they are BMDs -- Ballot Marking Devices; they are 100% UNVERIFIABLE & HACKABLE

The vendors try to make you believe that they're good cuz there's paper involved. NOT TRUE!!! The ballot is NOT handmarked, and there is no way to know the voter's intent and whether the vote will be counted as cast. Here is a picture of what the bar code producing BMDs spit out:



analysis of the problems here:
https://bradblog.com/?p=12910

'Facts and Voters Be Damned': New, Hackable, Unverifiable Voting Systems Coming for 2020: 'BradCast' 3/4/2019

The fight to block brand new, unverifiable (and, of course, hackable) voting systems continues as election officials in a number of jurisdictions (including some key Democratic-leaning ones) are rushing to implement them despite unambiguous warnings from experts and as the national media (after years of our own warnings) have finally begun to take notice.
SNIP
Politico's Eric Geller ran a feature article summarizing some of the many warnings (see here https://bradblog.com/Docs/ExpertsLettertoSAFECommission_GA_BMDs_010719.pdf and here https://bradblog.com/Docs/OSETInstitute_HB316-BMDsNotVerifiable_021919.pdf for example) from cybersecurity and voting systems experts inveighing against new, touchscreen computer Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) now being adopted or considered by jurisdictions around the country, including Georgia, Delaware, Philadelphia and elsewhere (including counties in Texas, Ohio and even here in L.A. County, the nation's largest voting jurisdiction.)

Officials are now rushing to adopt the new systems in advance of the 2020 Presidential elections. That, despite the mountain of evidence demonstrating that BMD systems cannot be reliably audited https://bradblog.com/Docs/PhilipStark_GALetter021919_BMDAuditWorthless.pdf after elections and will result in elections as faith-based and hackable-without-probability-of-detection as those on many of the older touchscreen systems they will be replacing. The boondoggle is set to be a bonanza for the private voting machine vendors, however, which stand to make hundreds of millions by forcing all voters at the polls to use unnecessary electronic systems, rather than much cheaper, verifiable, hand-marked paper ballot systems tallied by optical-scan computers or counted by hand.

Nowhere has the fight against these dangerous new systems been more contentious than in Georgia, where the state House has already voted, mostly along party lines, to move to the systems and as lawmakers in the state Senate are now on the brink of adopting the same bill, HR-316, as well. The measure would grant at least $150 million for the purchase of electronic touchscreen systems that produce an unverifiable, bar-coded (not human-readable), computer-marked "paper ballot" summary card which is no more verifiable than their 17-year old, oft-failed, easily-manipulated paperless touchscreen voting systems.
SNIP

DON'T DRINK THE KOOL-AID!!!!!!!!!!

K&R for exposure

[Efilroft Sul]

14. Just got back from evaluating the vendors' offerings for Allegheny County (Pittsburgh).

Last edited Thu Jun 6, 2019, 09:23 AM - Edit history (1)

Four vendors are vying to replace the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines used by Allegheny County for more than 15 years. The major takeaway I had with these machines is that none of them provide a printout verifying a voter’s election choices.

With some vendors’ voting machines, the printout is either ordinary text that the voter can read (like an ATM statement), but the scanner ignores. Or the printout features a bar code or QR code that the voter can’t read, but the scanner can read whatever vote choices are embedded in it. The thing is, there is no guarantee the bar code or QR code printout has the same information as the plain text printout or the electronic ballot cast by the voter on the machine.

Oddly enough, the voting process with three of four vendors’ machines starts with a hand-marked paper ballot, which by itself provides better voter verification and is far less expensive to deploy. These vendors and their products include:

• Hart intercivic Verity Duo
• Dominion Voting Intercast
• Clear Ballot ClearCast

The Verity Duo scans the paper ballot, but it ran awfully slow when I took it for a demo. That will be a detriment trying to process voters on heavy turnout days, and, not to be cruel, I think many senior citizens in my district will become frustrated trying to feed their ballots into the Duo’s scanner (and probably everyone else’s scanner, for that matter).

The Dominion Voting Intercast is a hulking Darth Vader, more printer than voting machine, that comes with too many bells and whistles for its viewing screen and scanner. And according to the Open Source Election Technology Institute (OSET), it cannot print an elector-verifiable paper ballot.

The Clear Ballot ClearCast is the most primitive of all options in that it’s a glorified scanner for paper ballots. That said, I spoke with a software engineer from the company who claimed he and his coworkers could change the ClearCast software code so a printout could include the plain text AND bar code for dual verification purposes. Did they have that capability on display today? No. But I think the county should inquire further about this matter and verify such claim.

Finally, ES&S came loaded for bear with multiple machines to fit any budget. While the demonstrators knew the machines well, and the evolution from the iVotronic to the next generation was easy for me to understand (and probably would be for my district's voters), all models would receive the hairy eyeball from OSET, especially the ExpressVote XL, which garnered a lot of attention from interested voters, at least during my time on site. Voters were in awe of its smooth interface like Mac users checking out the latest iMac at the Apple Store. OSET has the same concerns with ExpressVote as it does with Dominion Voting's Intercast. Given that it’s the high-end machine, the same issues exist on downstream models.

The vendors will continue taking their wares around the county for the next week or so for voters to examine. While I was comparing models, I learned that Allegheny County is NOT going to purchase and deploy new voting machines for this November's general election. Instead, the winning machines will debut during next spring's primaries, which could be a disaster for local election boards and voters unfamiliar with the new equipment.

EDIT: After sleeping on this matter, the deployment schedule is actually a good thing for democracy, as it gives people more time to say no to the vendors' offerings and demand paper ballots.

[diva77]

15. Thanks for the report -- and as expected. Vendors smothering elections officials with their

talking points and vote-stealing wares. What a travesty!! The over the top extent they go to to steal votes and funnel $billions with their overly complex voting systems and all the trappings -- software/hardware engineers, insurance for contractors, subcontractors, sub-sub contractors, sub-sub-sub contractors and their employees, insurance for the machines, maintenance warranty (even tho' they never maintain them or inspect them), moveable parts replacements, memory cards, new wifi capabilities so you can pre-program your vote for election day or voting center, creating voting centers, e-pollbooks that can be manipulated, central tabulators and voting machines that can be manipulated and hacked, lobbyists, wining and dining of elections officials, mail in ballots, ballot harvesting...etc etc etc etc And on top of that, we get wing-nuts installed in offices...

when the GOLD STANDARD FOR TRANSPARENT, ACCURATE ELECTIONS IS STILL:

Hand-counted-paper-ballots at the precinct level with public oversight. Period.

This is what we need to fight for.

----------
I recommend going to your Board of Supes for your county and presenting the testimony and info. from Bradblog to ward off this bigger than ever vote-corrupting juggernaut headed our way. Also, contact your SOS and let him/her know, and your local county elections officials.

[Efilroft Sul]

16. I will be contacting the county board of elections and SOS next week.

I'd be writing them today, but it's a travel day and I'll be gone through Sunday.

Another takeaway I had from yesterday's demonstrations, besides voter verification, is that these machines have too many moving parts at the vote tallying stage (scanner) and that their cases/covers don't seem to provide adequate protection for machines while they are in transit from downtown Pittsburgh to wherever they're being deployed. I can envision a lot of breakdowns and subsequent freak-outs by poll workers, election rovers, tech support, and voters.

Hand-counted paper ballots: Everything old should be new again.

[diva77]

18. Excellent point about the breach in chain-of-custody of the machines when they leave the warehouse.

In many places in CA (at least in the past), machines were taken home by pollworkers prior to election day. Gee, nothing could go wrong with that, could it?!!

Thank you in advance for contacting your county bd of elections & SOS. Our bd of supes limits the amount of time (I think it's now 2 min) for citizens to speak at meetings, and usually you have to wait 'til the end. If you can have a group of people coordinated to attend so that they each take on a different talking point, your message to them will be that much stronger.

[FakeNoose]

9. The vulnerability is in the software updates

I'm not saying these new machines are vulnerable, because I don't know. But we need to realize that the previous generations of voting machines have been hacked when the software is updated. The demo machine won't show it, because it happens when nobody is looking.

[fierywoman]

11. Wouldn't it be possible for the machine to spit out what the voter

voted for on a piece of paper and then turn the vote any which way it chose?

[RoadMan]

17. If there isn't connectivity

does the machine have ethernet or wifi if they needed to connect?

Does it have a USB port?