Bellaire, Mich. – A northern Michigan county that was sued over its counting of the fall election will count paper ballots by hand in the May 4 primary.

From ballot stuffing and intimidating voters, to buying votes, suppressing turnout and manipulating returns, "Deliver the Vote" is an intensive examination into the hidden interiors of American politics that casts a provocative new light on how power in America is often obtained.

Has the New York State Board of Elections been informed about this vulnerability during the on-going certification process for the ES&S Expressvote XL in New York?

Allegra Dengler

NYTimes: "Efforts by Russian hackers to gain access to state and local networks were unrelated to efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential vote.”

Today, 56 years after Bloody Sunday, President Biden signed an executive order “to promote voting access and allow all eligible Americans to participate in our democracy.” He called on Congress to pass the For the People Act, making it easier to vote, and to restore the Voting Rights Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act after the man who went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia, bearing the scars of March 7, 1965, until he died on July 17, 2020.

"‘Voting rights is preservative of all other rights, and we have to do everything we can to preserve the voices of the people in our democracy,’ said Senator Raphael Warnock, Georgia Democrat.”

Comment: It’s not the candidate that lost here, but the 2400 voters whose applications were not processed, and all the voters who will never know if their ballots were accurately counted by the scanners.

Allegra Dengler

Syracuse: "“I hope some higher authority comes in and investigates what I think is a massive disenfranchisement of voters in the district,” Brindisi told syracuse.com in his first interview since conceding the election….“I hope the state investigates because there were clear violations of state and federal election laws,” Brindisi said. “The most fundamental right of Americans is the right to vote, and they were denied that by the incompetence of the Oneida County Board of Elections….Brindisi said he’s confident that he would have prevailed in the election if his request had been granted for a full, manual hand count of all ballots….DelConte denied that request. Brindisi’s last option would have been to ask the House of Representatives to intervene and conduct a recount under the Federal Contested Elections Act.”

Adversaries of democracy are trying to compromise our elections. In 2016, Russian intelligence agents gained access to local election board networks. These attacks have continued. We must fortify our systems.
Many election jurisdictions have purchased voting systems with wireless modems under false representations from the vendors who claimed that the modems don't connect to the internet. This is untrue. These modems directly connect election systems to the internet, exposing election infrastructure to cyber-attacks.

UTICA: "DelConte ruled against a Brindisi request for a hand recount of all ballots in the race, lifting a temporary restraining order on certifying the results with his Friday decision. Under a new state law, the margin in the race would have triggered an automatic recount, but the election predated the law’s Jan. 1 effective date. “

COMMENT: Again, voters will never know who actually got the most votes in this race because again a judge ruled against any 100% hand count. The court refused a hand count despite the ineptitude of the Oneida Board of Elections in an "election and counting process riddled with errors, with inconsistencies and systematic violations of state and federal election laws” (Brindisi) . Fortunately, this is the last time this will happen in a close election, since a new law requires an automatic hand count in close elections like this. Thanks to all who advocated for that law, it’s a very important first step. There’s more work to do, though, since there are races that fall outside that margin that will not get 100% hand counts. And if the new Expressvote XL is certified (possibly as early as tomorrow Feb 10), the hand counters will not be looking at ballots the voters marked themselves, but computer generated tapes with barcodes. It’s time to get the voting machines out of the way and let the people mark their own ballots and count all the votes by hand. Allegra Dengler

Time: "It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples. “There’s an impulse for some to say voters decided and democracy won. But it’s a mistake to think that this election cycle was a show of strength for democracy. It shows how vulnerable demo”

COMMENT: Thanks to all on this list that did their part to protect democracy this perilous election season. Whether you contributed to efforts like Fair Fight Action, made phone calls to inform voters of their rights and urge them to vote, went to rallies or just waited patiently for all the votes to be counted, your being there for democracy made a difference. "“It’s astounding how close we came, how fragile all this really is,” says Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director. “It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff–if you don’t look down, you don’t fall. Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down.”"

The only way to have elections that can’t be hacked is to do what most advanced democracies and some US counties do. Count the hand marked paper ballots by hand on election night in the poll site. Until decision-makers wake up to how vulnerable our elections are, making incremental progress to ban hybrid voting machines and implement good audits is necessary. But in light of emerging cyberthreats, now is the time to remove the hackable technology from between the voter’s ballot and the vote count. Allegra Dengler

Email the four U.S. Election Assistance Commissioners and tell them to restore the full ban on wireless in voting machines in the new voting system guidelines.

WAPO: As Trump spreads falsehoods, one voting machine company cynically attacks its honest critics.

"But although the conspiracy theories are nonsense, that doesn’t mean there’s anything unreasonable about mistrusting voting machines, about which experts have been sounding the alarm for years.,,,

"As the nation recoils from the smear job that Trump loyalists have unleashed on Dominion Voting, one of Dominion’s competitors, the industry-leading, private-equity-owned ES&S, has seized on the moment to threaten members of SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group, with a lawsuit for spreading “false, defamatory and disparaging” information about one of its machines, the ExpressVote XL. These claims — factual observations, really — include that the machine “can add, delete, or change the votes on individual ballots” and that it is a “bad voting machine.”

"Because SMART Elections is a collective of committed, individual activists — who translate academic research and relay it to state regulators — ES&S threatened to hold the members of the group “personally and individually liable”: ominous threats coming from any large company, but one that might especially worry activists, given ES&S’s history of litigiousness. (ES&S, a company that makes billions by charging the public millions to count its votes, is such a habitual litigant that sometimes it seems like the voting machines are a sideline for the lawsuits.)”

“...Monopolists with defective products have a reliable way to address those defects: shoot the messenger. By choosing to bully its critics in the midst of Dominion’s legal wranglings with Trumpland’s wildest conspiracists, ES&S obscures that its machines are shoddy while painting itself as a brave fighter against Giuliani’s war on electoral integrity.”

New York State Board of Elections is considering joining this "troubling trend” and certifying the ESS Expressvote XL discussed in this article. Let Governor Cuomo know you do not want the ESS Expressvote XL certified for New York.
The bottom line A Trusted System “Canada, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, among others, all use paper ballots and hand counting.”
What we are threatened with: Problems with ES&S Machines...Wrong Machine Votes...Experts Issue Warning...Kentucky Uses ExpressVote...Foreign Snooping...Vendors over Voters?

Congress: With victories in Georgia's Senate runoffs, congressional Democrats now have the opportunity to pass the most important set of voting and election reforms since the historic Voting Rights Act was adopted in 1965. These reforms face a challenging path to passage given Democrats' narrow majorities, but their adoption is critical for preserving American democracy amid unprecedented attacks upon it by Republican extremists both in and outside Congress.

Chief among these proposals is the reintroduction of H.R. 1, the "For the People Act," which House Democrats passed in 2019 and would enact groundbreaking reforms by (1) removing barriers to expanding access to voting and securing the integrity of the vote; (2) establishing public financing in House elections to level the playing field; and (3) banning congressional gerrymandering by requiring that every state create a nonpartisan redistricting commission subject to nonpartisan redistricting criteria.

ExpressVote XL users select their picks on a touch screen, suboptimal in a germophobic age. Then, to comply with the requirement of a permanent paper record, the machine prints a little grocery store receipt that is visible behind a see-through plastic covering. If the voter determines that the receipt is correct, the vote is cast. If it’s wrong, the vote is canceled. But while the screen shows multiple languages, the stupid machine can only print in English. Ay, caramba.

Barron’s: "A secure election gets the right outcome and convinces the public. No matter what candidate they vote for, every American should be concerned about gaps in the evidence to support the reported outcome. Official assurances without public evidence do not persuade skeptics, and a lack of public confidence in the machinery of elections is an existential threat to our democracy. "

Summary: "Elections are important to anoint winners, but even more important to assuage the losers and thereby maintain a civil society.
..The assertion that “this was the most secure election in U.S. history” repeated quite literally ad nauseum is Orwellian Newspeak. By almost any meaningful measure, the 2020 election appears the least secure; for extent and creative variety of security shortcomings, one would be hard pressed to find an historical equal.
..In 2004 (Bush v Kerry), U.S. Representative John Conyers, Jr., former chair of the House Judiciary Committee wrote,
… More than simply reflecting the desires of the majority, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the electoral process afford a “moral certainty.” Elections needed to convey a sense of fairness and finality if the fledgling democracy was to survive.
...In the current context, such moral certainty may sound like a tall order, but in fact, it’s remarkably easy. All it takes to disprove election fraud is to do what every actual democracy — Germany[ii], Norway, Netherlands, France[iii], Canada[iv], United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and many others — actually does [5a]: (Handmarked paper ballots hand counted in the precinct on election night)
...You shouldn’t have to presume a fair count. The mainstream media has … established … a Catch-22 for election investigation. No investigation without proof — but then, what proof can be had without investigation?

Send an email to the NYS Board of Elections asking them to REJECT CERTIFICATION OF THE EXPRESSVOTE XL VOTING MACHINE. The NYS Board of Elections may vote as early as this Thursday January 7.

Assemblywomen Galef and Paulin Request Postponement of Certification for New Voting Machines
Their Letter Sent to the NYS Board of Elections Signed by Eleven Additional Assemblymembers