Laying the Groundwork for Dishonest Elections

Election or Selection: Part I | Election or Selection: Part II | Election or Selection: Part III

Here we are, over halfway through the recent election season for the current gaggle of special elections. Californians are voting against Newsom's attempt to eliminate Republican representation in an already heavily Gerrymandered blue state. Other states are voting on similar issues, on replacements for congressional vacancies for state and national offices, on various legislative proposals, and a few other issues. The question is, can we trust the outcomes?

Centralization and mechanization of elections, Vulnerability of electronic voter databases, Legal foundation of election protections

Given all that has transpired in the last few years, and all that numerous investigations have revealed about our elections, that is a real question. To answer it, we need to look at three different topics: the centralization and mechanization of elections, vulnerability of electronic voter databases, and the legal foundation of election protections.

Much has been said recently about a need for paper ballots and voter ID. While both of these are good and important considerations, there are systems in place in most states that render both worthless. Read on to see why.

Most states have some form of paper ballots already. The problem is not lack of paper ballots, but rather the fact that they aren't counted. Virtually every state scans the paper ballots to create images of those ballots. It is the images, not the paper forms, that are used to determine the selections, and those images are highly vulnerable. Images are used because they are convenient. They can be electronically transmitted to central facilities for storage and counting. They can be easily and rapidly processed by computers, and support arguments for centralization and mechanization of elections as ways to reduce costs and improve time to get results.

Ballot images, though, are just electronic representations that are easily created, modified, and deleted. As with any other electronic image, such as your vacation pictures, that representation can easily be altered. Just as with a vacation picture, you can use an image editing program to add a hat to someone, eliminate unwanted objects in the picture, change a ballot selection ... did someone mention Photoshop?

Need to copy an image—a trivial task on most home computers. It is even easy to create an entirely new image, even a ballot image. All one needs is a bit of information on what that image should look like. Today, AI deepfakes are becoming common. Ballot image deepfakes are trivially easy. Need to have paper ballots to back up a created image? Just print a copy or two or two thousand.

Our election systems are protected, honest, and reliable....

Once in the system, a fake or altered ballot can be counted just like a legitimate ballot. With our secret ballot systems, there is no way to tell if a ballot was cast by a real person, or if it was manufactured. They all look the same.

Election officials will protest and claim that there are foolproof safeguards to prevent fraudulent ballots from being injected into the system, and protections against alterations of ballot selections on images. The tabulation systems that analyze the ballot images can be trusted to give accurate counts. truckloads of printed ballots delivered at midnight won't be accepted. Our election systems are protected, honest, and reliable, they will claim.

Except .... they aren't any of those things. Numerous researchers across the country, myself included, have dug into our election systems to see just how secure and honest they are. Investigators have demonstrated in courtroom settings that ballot selections can be altered while observers watch. Election systems have been and even are connected to the internet, allowing remote access to election files, including ballot images. How is it that many instances have been reported where more ballots were counted than there were voters?

Officials claim the records are safe and protected, but anyone with even a modest knowledge of computer security knows that virtually any system can be penetrated if it is worth the effort. Given that election results decide who will have access to national security information, to billions of dollars of finding, to all sorts of rules and regulations, one can argue that almost any level of effort is justified by those who would wish us harm. Think unrestricted warfare.

These intrusions are not theoretical. We have evidence of internet connections to critical election systems, despite the fact that such connections are illegal, and despite the use of protection software. We have evidence of tabulator logfiles, that show that tabulation results have been erased, and others inserted, that activity timestamps show impossible times for events. Tabulators are the machines that interpret the images to obtain the counts that decide the election outcomes. If those results are altered, the outcome of an election no longer reflects the will of the voters, but rather the will of those making the alterations.

The substitution of ballot images for paper ballots has, with the best of intentions, opened the door to fraud in ways never imagined before

This is just a small sample of the evidence many investigators have collected in recent years that demonstrates the dangers of centralized and mechanized election systems. The fact that it is images that are counted and not the actual marks on paper ballots is why I can say that paper ballots are essentially worthless so long as we use our current machines and systems.

What I have written above is just a tiny sample of what I and many other workers across the country have found. The substitution of ballot images for paper ballots has, with the best of intentions, opened the door to fraud in ways never imagined before. Image manipulation, an ability to print filled out ballots indistinguishable from real ones, coupled with lax security at many levels has changed our elections from a way for citizens to participate in their government, to a way for those who seek power over us to deceive us by making their choices appear to be our own.

Much has been said about the role of machines in our elections. They offered great promise of making elections less expensive, more accurate, and free from manipulations seen in elections a century prior. Instead, they have become tools of tyranny, enabling manipulation of elections on a scale beyond anything seen before. They have removed elections from public scrutiny and made them opaque, while at the same time enabling forms of election fraud unknown to prior generations of voters.

In the next part, we will look at yet another way that computer systems have destroyed the integrity of our elections. Computer databases holding voter registration information are a major component of our modern election systems. They make compiling and maintaining voter records simple and convenient for administrators. They also make life easy for those who would subvert our elections.

Look for Part II - The Naked Voter - Fact and Fiction in Our Voter Rolls

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