Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections [2018 article]

In 2002, Georgia became the first state to deploy paperless unauditable touchscreen direct record electronic (“DRE”) voting machines statewide. Although the state is in the process of replacing those machines, officials have selected controversial new touchscreen voting machines — Ballot Marking Devices (“BMDs”) intended for use by all voters — as a primary voting system rather than unhackable hand marked paper ballots. Experts warn that, unlike hand marked paper ballots, the new machines cannot provide the basis for meaningful manual audits.

Numerous security lapses have also tainted recent elections in the state, providing the impetus for a pending federal lawsuit that seeks to move the state to hand marked paper ballots as a primary voting system, with BMDs deployed only for those voters who are unable to hand mark their ballots and who choose to use them despite the extra security risk.

The article below discusses the Georgia 6th District special election of 2017, which led to this historic litigation, as well as the corruption that has plagued Georgia’s elections from 2002 through the present. . .

. . .During the same election, Brian Kemp — Georgia’s current Secretary of State — defeated Doug Haines, a liberal incumbent in a left-leaning state House seat that had been held by Democrats for more than four decades. Kemp won by only 486 votes, an exceedingly small vote margin that likely would have triggered a recount but for the paperless machines. . .

A concerned national election integrity advocate, Marilyn Marks, filed a lawsuit to compel Kemp to use hand marked paper ballots (counted on optical scanners) in the race. But Georgia Secretary of State Kemp swiftly defeated it on a procedural technicality (sovereign immunity), declaring that the machines are “safe and accurate.”

Kemp assured voters that Georgia’s voting machines could not be hacked because they aren’t connected to the internet. But he omitted to mention that all voting machines, including those in Georgia, must receive programming before each election from centralized election management systems that can and often do connect to the internet.

Kemp also omitted to mention that Georgia uses a single flash drive to upload its election results from a central tabulator to an online Election Night Reporting System and then reinserts the same flash drive into the same central tabulator for the next round of results. Thus, if the flash drive becomes infected with malware from the online reporting system, it could spread the malware to the central tabulator and change the results from each polling place as they are uploaded. . .

The public outcry was substantial, but Kemp managed to tamp it down by conducting a pilot study of ES&S’s new voting system called the “ExpressVote,” which both he and the media characterized as a “paper ballot system.”. . .

It remains to be seen whether Handel’s reelection bid — and Kemp’s race for governor — will be conducted on the same unverifiable touchscreen voting machines that she and Kemp staunchly defended during their respective tenures as Secretary of State. If the Georgia paper ballot suit succeeds, the 2018 midterm elections will be the first verifiable elections to be conducted in Georgia since 2002.

If it fails, Georgia may have to buckle up for a generation of unverifiable barcode voting courtesy of ES&S and Kathy Rogers.

If you live outside of Georgia, you should be concerned too, as counties everywhere are flocking to the ExpressVote. The only difference is that, unlike Georgia, there is no lawsuit trying to stop the train wreck. . .

very lengthy, from the Prog Left, but lots worth reading, re Voting Works(Soros) and their Arlo so-called RLA (risk-limiting audit), chosen by Krebs/CISA/DHS.
Rosenfeld expected more Biden votes would be found, which might put off some of you, but lots of detail I didn’t know.
some excerpts:

22 Nov: Voting Booth: Georgia’s Hand Count of 2020 Ballots was No Risk-Limiting Audit, Says Audit Creator
by Steven Rosenfeld
(Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others)

Risk-limiting audits, of which there are several varieties, were invented by Philip Stark (PS), a University of California Berkeley statistician...
Steven Rosenfeld: You have some concerns about Georgia’s audit...

PS. The way that Gabe [Sterling, the state’s elections operations manager] is being incredibly misleading about all of this is saying, ‘Look how great it was that we audited and we uncovered the fact that some batches of ballots were never scanned, and some memory cards [from ballot scanners with vote totals] were never uploaded and what not. All of that has nothing to do with the risk-limiting audit. That is all a precursor to starting a risk-limiting audit.

SR: You’re saying that the lapses they found should have been found and fixed earlier.

PS: Yes. Those are all ballot accounting measures. They’re standard canvass activities. They’re reconciliation measures like checking the number of poll book signatures against the number of ballots, so that you have a separate physical count of the number of ballots against the reported tallies from the voting machines. That is all stuff you have to do before you start the audit.
If you don’t have control over how many ballots there are, you would never notice if there were 100,000 ballots missing from the machine totals. Right? So, one fundamental flaw in what Georgia is doing is they’re relying on the voting system to tell them how many ballots there are, rather than relying on other procedures and cross checks to tell them how many ballots there are. Because some ballots were never scanned and some memory cards were never uploaded, the voting system doesn’t know about those ballots, and a random sampling based RLA would not have had any chance of selecting those ballots. The sample needs to be drawn from a comprehensive list of ballots, not just the ballots the voting system happens to have a record of...

PS: It’s clear that Georgia’s process has been anything but transparent. Observers have been kept away from the ability to actually verify the counts. Even observers with party credentials couldn’t verify that what’s being input to ARLO [the vendor’s counting software] accurately reflects those counts, or [examine] the inner workings of ARLO—which has had a number of changes in the course of this. ARLO was never designed for this kind of thing. They [Georgia] would have been better off using Google Sheets. They could have let the rest of the world watch in real time, with a read-only version to see as they enter the data. They could have given separate logins to everyone in the county election offices who were entering data, so that they can trace the edit history of any cell in the [overall vote counting] spreadsheet. Instead, they’ve got people sharing logins. They’ve got an opaque system that nobody can watch...
Georgia’s canvas [ballot-accounting] procedures aren’t providing the foundation needed for a risk-limiting audit...

PS: The other thing that Gabe kept saying is this [audit] is uncovering human errors in the count, not machine errors. We know that the scanner settings on the Dominion scanners erase voter marks [because lightly marked ballots are not read]. We know the majority vote-by-mail voters were Biden voters. I would expect their hand count to pick up [missed] votes and to get more votes for Biden than for Trump. And we’re not seeing any of that. There’s no reason to presume that it’s the people who are wrong and it’s the machines that are right...

So rather than an audit, recount, and re-canvass, it [the presidential re-tally] seems to have been their first canvass, because it’s the first time they looked to make sure that they actually had all their ballots accounted for. If they’re going to just keep counting until you get the same answer the machine did, that’s obviously biased procedure. That’s nowhere close to a risk-limiting audit.
https://votingbooth.media/georgias-hand-count-of-2020-ballots-was-no-risk-limiting-audit-says-audit-creator/

I voted absentee in Georgia. I had to apply for it and then get the okay if everything was correct on my form. This is not the first year I’ve voted absentee. To get it the first time, i had to give my driver’s license number, my SS, an email, address, my phone number. and my signature. Without that signature in the proper place, my vote would not have been counted. that’s what it said on the instructions that came with the ballot. They were late getting the absentee ones in the mail and so I checked on my status... they had all my information all right.. and they said my status was current and got the ballot in the mail in time to vote and send it back to them in the mail.

The ballot was large..foldover twice size... I did what was expected of me, a voter. and isn’t it wonderful we have that right... and then those who want to control the world.. tried to throw all our votes out.

The first time I voted, I pushed my firstborn in a stroller in the snow, to a house where I voted in the garage...no machines, no nothing but a piece of paper...checked my choice, folded it and put it in the slot where it fell into something behind the slot...

and then they improved the system.. !

We need to go back to (a) no electronic voting, (b) no mass “mail in voting”, with 99% of people voting themselves at the polling places, and very strict legal insistence (in every state) on total transparency and multi-party observation of all vote counting.

Voting absentee should require (a) a request for an absentee ballot and (b) legal statement on the ballot that the person must check off certifying the reason/cause for why they MUST vote by absentee ballot. All reasons must demonstrate clearly the impossibility of going to the poll ON ELECTION day.

No EARLY voting at the polls - everyone gets every day up to election day to decide how they will vote). Even absentee ballots have until election day to be mailed.

No state or county government should use any “outside” system to collect the votes from the voting districts and precincts. Those numbers should be in documents signed by the authorities at the polling places and hand delivered up the line to higher authorities. NOTHING should be reported or available to the media until the the reporting county & or state authorities have 100% of the data.

i have yet to figure out or be told, the reason Gov Kemp gave that Senate seat to loeffler instead of Doug Collins,

It made no sense then, and it akes no sense now. That Senate seat was as important then as it is now ..and Collns is a minister and Collins works well with Trump and is the best in the House.

For honesty and integrity, Collins is over 100%
Loefflet sold her stocks the night before they would have fallen... her husband works for the stock market.

At a time like this, loeffler has no political experience. and usually that is good... right now we need people like Collins.

I have received in the mail, loeffler’s bad mouthing Colllins in her ads.. I have received none from Collins.

Collins is the real thing.... loeffler is as fake as a $3 bill.

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