VoterGA Supporters,
We monitored three county elections offices during the May
20, 2014 primary last night. As some of you know from my previous reports, many
counties now upload their results to a site named Clarity Elections, which is a
product of Tampa based, SOE Software, a subsidiary of the Spanish owned conglomerate,
SCYTL. The URL web address indicates the actual web page location for the site
which is disguised or branded to look like a Georgia
Secretary of State (SOS) web page. Note that the browser
address bar identifies the source location as Clarity Elections, which is not
part of the Georgia SOS web site as shown below:
COUNTY UPLOAD VULNERABILITIES:
The county uploads typically take place at least three times
during the evening. They are done with a direct connection from the county
server to SOE Software in smaller counties. Larger counties tend to use a flash
drive to transfer results from the county server to a communications server for
upload to SOE. The flash drive is repeatedly loaded with results from the county
server, transferred to a communications server for upload, electronically
cleared by SOE Software and then re-inserted into the county server to repeat
the next upload process. As you can also see by a careful reading of Secretary
Kemp's response, there is no audit procedure that could help detect and prevent
a remote hack from SOE into the county servers during these uploads. Tampering
with county election results could occur either through the direct connection
or by updating the flash drive with malicious software when it is cleared by
SOE prior to re-insertion into the county servers. None of the counties we
observed could identify adequate protection against these types of remote
intrusions. Furthermore, there is no procedure or law for counties to publish
or verify results prior to uploading and most do not despite SOS claims to the
contrary. Two of the three counties we observed did not verify results prior to
uploading. The third claimed that there
was a process but refused to allow any candidate or citizen to observe the
Election Night activities. It is interesting to note that this county, which
continues to perform Election Night procedures in secrecy, is also a county
that has incurred some of the most significant electronic vote count problems
that have ever occurred in Georgia.
VOTING MACHINE VULNERABILITIES:
For the reasons above we recommended that candidates gather
at least some of their results from the printed tapes of each machine tape in
each precinct.
These machine tapes are typically posted inside a glass door
or window at the precinct and are visible from the outside. An observer who
arrives at the precinct before 7pm can also watch the accumulation process
provided that the observer does not touch any equipment or media. This takes about an hour and either approach
allows a candidate or concerned citizen to verify precinct reported vote totals
against the precinct totals reported by their respective counties. However,
this does not assure that the voting machines counted the votes correctly since
they have no way to be independently audited. Contrary to SOS claims, no form
of pre-election testing can guarantee that the voting machines will count
accurately on Election Day. The many VoterGA supporters who have seen my
presentation know that there are several ways to program the machines to count
differently on Election Day than during testing. The only way to ensure voting
machine accuracy is thorough precinct level Election Night auditing and that is
impossible with the current equipment.
Source: Garland Favorito, Voterga.org 404 664-4044 forwarded
by Victoria Baer email, May 21, 2014 From: Garland Favorito [mailto:garlandf@msn.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 6:56 PM Subject: County Election Proceedure Vulnerabilities
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