A Dominion voting machine ended up on eBay. Here's how much it sold for

Authorities in Michigan are investigating how a missing voting machine from the state wound up for sale on eBay last month for $1,200.

The machine was purchased by a cybersecurity expert in Connecticut who alerted Michigan authorities and is now waiting for law enforcement to pick up the device. CNN determined the machine was dropped off at a Goodwill store in Northern Michigan, before being sold last month on eBay by a man in Ohio.

NYS Board of Elections urged not to certify the ES&S ExpressVote XL due to noncompliance with NYS law

Below is a letter that is in the mail to the New York State Board of Elections.

In it, Citizens for Voting Integrity and others ask the Board of Elections not to certify the ES&S ExpressVote XL as it does not comply with current NYS law.

The Board of Elections must deny certification of a voting machine that would move New York backwards from our current verifiable system of hand-marked paper ballots. Any new or replacement voting machine or system must preserve all the rights and privileges thus far granted by law to New York's voters.

Rensselaer County's Republican elections commissioner arrested by FBI

"The actions of Schofield, 42, surfaced in the federal criminal case involving former Troy Councilwoman Kimberly Ashe-McPherson….she pleaded guilty June 8 to a felony charge in U.S. District Court after admitting she had fraudulently submitted absentee ballots in last year's primary and general elections. ...Schofield was the unidentified board of elections official listed as "Individual-3." According to the document, Schofield had allegedly facilitated helping Ashe-McPherson obtain an absentee ballot through an online portal using the name and date of birth of a voter without "lawful authority.”

‘The US could lose the right to vote within months’: Top official warns on threat to democracy

.. a near-daily torrent of threats, many violent and eerily “descriptive”. “Jena Griswold: "It is really hard to do your job when someone’s telling you over and over how they’re going to hang you" ..earlier this year, Tina Peters, a far-right county clerk in Colorado, was indicted on charges that she directed a breach of voting machines. The episode spurred Griswold to raise the alarm about “insider threats”.”

Suspect petitions were assembled at NY Republican headquarters

""It is clear the Zeldin campaign perpetrated a fraud," Myrie alleged. "Pages of valid signatures were photocopied. Thereafter, the original sheets were paginated, as were the photocopied pages. These sheets were assigned different page numbers in order to create the appearance that the pages contained separate, valid signatures. ... What is unknown and must be investigated by your office is who committed these criminal acts.””

Barcode Voting Machines: The Most Unnecessary Gap in US Election Security

"“Voters can’t read barcodes,” said Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan. “The problem is that you’re putting a potentially compromised computer in between the voter and the permanent and only record of their ballot.”...“ Will Adler, a senior technologist in election and democracy at the Center for Democracy and Technology,"All of those concerns about someone manipulating the software — to change the election or to even just create chaos and distrust — apply equally, or even more, to people who have had insider access,” he said. “

...At a time in which mistrust in elections has been stoked, the opaqueness of BMDs poses a problem even if the vote counting goes entirely by the book. ...“People who want to delegitimize the results of elections will go to the ballot marking devices and risks and point out that we don’t have a good way to know whether we had a malfunction or not,”

COMMENT: Since the NY Assembly failed to pass a bill banning them, the New York State Board of Elections is in the process of certifying the ES&S Expressvote XL, a voting machine like those raising alarms in this article. If this bothers you, contact the New York State Board of Elections and tell them to deny certification to ES&S Expressvote XL, since voting machines with barcodes violate your right to verify your vote before it is cast. They must not certify this voting machine. Allegra Dengler

Michigan Officials Detail a Brazen Voting Machine Scheme by Trump Supporters

Revelations of possible meddling have set off a political tsunami in a critical battleground state, as the attorney general seeks an independent inquiry into her likely rival on the ballot this fall.
The office of Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, said that Matthew DePerno and other people had persuaded local clerks in three counties to hand over election equipment.Credit...Max Ortiz/Detroit News, via Associated Press

Rebutting Raffensperger's 'Recount' Remarks, Calling Out His Coffee County 'Cover-Up': 'BradCast' 6/22/2022

BradBlog. “... we're joined today by MARILYN MARKS of the non-partisan, nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance for a bit of a rebuttal to Raffensperger and Sterling's testimony before the House J6 panel, and an update to a stunning and troubling story of corruption we initially reported here last month, which could have very serious ramifications for elections in both 2022 and 2024…."We have found nothing that would suggest that Biden should not have been declared the winner. However, there are massive problems with the audit, the recount, and probably the original count, as well," Marks describes.”

Trump's false election claims made it tougher to talk about election security

WAPO: “There are real deficiencies of security in our systems that can and need to be improved, but in many ways, the ‘big lie’ has tainted discussions or efforts,” Susan Greenhalgh, senior adviser on election security for the group Free Speech For People, told me. “There is fear any election security improvements could be twisted to validate the incredibly bogus claims from the Trump campaign.”

Lobbyists killed a bill to protect elections with an assist from the NAACP

Times Union: SUMMARY: "New York elections could soon be at risk of getting hacked, after lobbyists, the NAACP and the Assembly elections committee chair teamed up to kill a bill banning certain voting machines.
After passing the Senate on May 31, the bill, sponsored by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Westchester, seemed like a solid bet for passage in the Assembly, since it was sponsored by nearly half of the Assembly’s Democrats, as well as several Republicans.

Cyber agency: Voting software vulnerable in some states

Finally! Top U.S. Cybersecurity Agency Issues Warning About Touchscreen Voting Dangers” …"The vulnerabilities, according to CISA, could allow manipulation of results in a way that would not necessarily be discovered by most security provisions employed by most jurisdictions which use these terrible types of voting systems. Halderman told AP that he believes it is not only the systems made by Dominion that are vulnerable. Similar touchscreen systems made by ES&S, the nation's largest vendor, are used in many more states across the country, or by Smartmatic, whose touchscreen BMDs are now forced on voters at the polling place here in Los Angeles County, the nation's largest single voting jurisdiction. They all have many of the same design flaws, such as the use of barcodes/QRCodes to tally ballots printed out by the systems, ignoring the human-readable selections printed on the same ballot paper that may or may not have been correctly verified by the voter.”

New York on brink of major voting rights act

Good news; the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York passed at the last minute.
Bad news: the bill to preserve our hand-marked paper ballots by banning hybrid voting machines did not pass. A1115. Voters will not know if their ballots are counted as cast in counties that purchase these machines. Counties like Westchester have already purchased them and there are now no plans to retire them. These machines undermine the integrity of any audit to verify the machines count.

Security fears persist about New York’s potential use of electronic voting machines

Good-government groups and election security experts are sounding the alarm bells about new electronic voting machines that may soon come to New York. The state Board of Elections as early as this summer may approve touch-screen electronic voting machines that have come under scrutiny in other states. In a new letter to state leaders, election security experts from around the country as well as organizations that advocate for fair elections made the case for lawmakers to approve legislation that would ban the machines before the end of this year’s legislative session on June 2.

Did GOP Election Officials Facilitate Voting System Software Theft in Coffee County, Georgia?

Did GOP Election Officials Facilitate Voting System Software Theft in Coffee County, Georgia? "Certainly they were violating state and federal laws," Marks tells me. "The difficult part of this is It puts virtually all states that are using the Dominion system --- without doing thorough audits and [using] hand-marked paper ballots --- it puts all of these at risk. "The system has been breached," Marks cautions chillingly, before explaining what must be done now to safeguard our elections --- including from insider election officials who have now put our entire democracy at very serious risk. Even hand-marked paper ballots, she notes, are still tabulated by these same computer systems.””

COMMENT: New York uses such voting machines. The New York legislature is about to adjourn without creating strong automatic audits, or banning voting machines that print your ballot for you (no more hand-marked paper ballots in counties that buy them). We are at the mercy of the voting machines to get the vote count right, but the Dominion proprietary voting system software is now in the hands of Republican party operatives. Allegra Dengler

Voting machine company behind so many surprise wins this year raises some questions

COMMENT: Lest we forget. Despite red flags in the 2020 election, federal legislation to regulate the private, proprietary, secret voting machine companies have failed. (the PAVE Act, Protecting American Votes and Elections Act of 2019, the SAFE Act, Securing America's Federal Elections Act 2020). We still have the same “revolving door between government officials and ES&S.”"Owned by a private equity firm, ES&S has been elusive about identifying the people in its ownership”. At the state level, the New York state legislature has not passed A1115/S309 which would ban ES&S machines that can print on ballots after they are cast, changing or invalidating a vote, and counting bar codes that voters can’t read. If they don’t act in the next week or so, those unauditable machines will be coming to New York City.
Allegra Dengler

Advocates call for end to 'all-in-one' voting machines

Advocates and state lawmakers are calling for a ban on the use of "all-in-one" voting machines that use a printer and ballot scanner in the same device.

Supporters of ending the use of those machines argue they lack sufficient cyber security standards and are too costly.

"Lawmakers must act quickly and pass legislation that bans One-in-All voting machines for good," said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause/NY. "They are wasteful, insecure and deeply flawed machines. Our current system is already the current gold standard: voter-marked paper ballots and optical scanners. Any one-in-all voting machine would be a serious –and expensive – needless step backwards. Protect the voters and secure the right to vote."