Ray Lutz: “...we must ASSUME that any central tabulators can be subverted, and thus audits are essential….Audits are absolutely necessary. Election experts agree that such manipulation is possible and stress the need for paper records to verify machine counts. However, these records are effective only if thoroughly reviewed.”

COMMENT:  Paper ballots to verify machine counts are now used in New York, but many New Yorkers (including New York City)  will soon be voting on the touchscreen ES&S Expressvote XL if the New York State legislature doesn’t act to preserve our right to vote on paper ballots. Demand that  your state legislator support  the Voting Integrity and Verification Act of NY (VIVA NY). Even with paper ballots, our audits are woefully inadequate to find fraud or machine malfunction.  Support the  COUNT EVERY VOTE ACT (CEVA) to close loopholes in the close vote margin bill.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship.

While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

Times Union:  NY Voting Rights Act doesn't violate Constitution, appellate court rules “Race-based districting is only one of the possible remedies under (the law),” the decision said. “The (law) also contemplates remedies that do not sort voters based on race, such as ranked-choice voting, cumulative voting, limited voting and the elimination of staggered terms.”

In the run up to the 2024 election, amid all the noise of the horse race, there was almost no coverage of the condition of the track.  Who owns the voting machine companies?  Are the Russian hackers still in the voter rolls? Did Dominion patch its security holes after MAGA operatives stole their election systems software and equipment in GA and MI?  And the big question, why did the media go silent on election security in the run up to this all important election?   And why are Democrats and opinion leaders so adamant in saying how “free, fair, and secure” the 2024 elections were?  Where’s the evidence?

Greg Palest: “...vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no fewer than 3,565,000 votes. Harris would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million. Most important, this 2.3% suppression factor undoubtedly cost Harris the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. If not for the wholesale attack on votes and voters, Harris would have won the election with 286 Electoral votes.”

COMMENT: This is a long dense article from 2018, but is one of the few examinations of ownership of the computerized voting machine companies. 

Update: shortly after the sale of Dominion to Staple Street (manager Hootan Yaghoobzadeh previously of Cerberus Capital), Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital became chair of the Presidents Advisory Board and is now slated to become the second in charge at the Pentagon.  

"It is a bitter irony that the election standards President Carter helped establish in so many nations have been ignored in recent years by county and state officials in his beloved home state. Georgia’s elections cannot be considered democratic until these glaring deficiencies are addressed by Georgia officials at both the county and state levels….In 2021, Georgia’s current voting system was assessed by leading voting system cybersecurity experts to be dangerously subject to exploitation and the DHS/CISA (Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency) verified the vulnerabilities in 2022 recommending prompt mitigation for the security design flaws to reduce risks of electronic manipulation. But Georgia officials did not act to heed the grave warnings. “ Coalition for Good Governance

…we are working feverishly to get the data to calculate the effect of racist voter suppression trickery on the election’s outcome.  Not unexpectedly, we are getting stonewalled by red-state officials about the number of provisional ballots uncounted (above 42.3% we find from well-hidden data), the number of  mail-in ballots discarded (we know it’s way over two million), and the number of vigilante challenges to legit voters (we’ve counted 852,000 so far).

Note:  Print edition title is  this “Liberal Voters Assert Their Own “Stop the Steal” Claims, Without Much Success”. The online title is slightly better, except they don’t investigate just how and why “top Democrats’ aren’t interested.

Why didn’t they talk to Jacky Singh?  (cybersecurity lead on Biden and Harris campaigns) Or Doug Buell?  Instead they cover Spoonamore who is dedicated but controversial.   

“ The Nation:  If Less Than 115,000 Votes Had Switched in Three Battleground States, Harris Would Have Beaten Trump...Or, if they could had developed strategies to get just 114,884 working-class Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania voters to shift from Trump to Harris, the Democrat would have prevailed.

COMMENT: Or, if they did hand-counted recounts in those states, as requested by leading cybersecurity experts pn November 16,  the official results might reflect how people actually voted. To date, Harris has not requested any hand recounts. Allegra Dengler

The work of J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering, has made the United States election system more secure—largely by uncovering vulnerabilities in equipment like voting machines and ballot scanners, and by advocating for best practices and technological advances.

Here are some of the key ways Halderman’s work has helped to strengthen election integrity in the U.S.

Election security is the cornerstone of democracy, yet it has come under unprecedented threat in recent years. A letter from Jackie Singh, the  cybersecurity lead for the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign, has added weight to growing calls for a forensic audit of the 2024 US presidential election.

Singh’s detailed plea to Vice President Kamala Harris highlights verified domestic and foreign election interference, including breaches of voting systems, a surge in rejected mail-in ballots, and more than 60 bomb threats targeting polling places – threats that the FBI traced to Russian domains.

These concerns are not confined to the United States. From Romania to Mozambique, democratic processes worldwide face manipulation from both foreign and domestic actors.

Frank Moseley president of Unirealm Information Systems announced a warning to 17 North Carolina counties that they must perform a special audit check because statistical anomalies indicate that presidential electronic ballots with no corresponding physical ballot may have been tabulated.

While we were off last week, another expert rang in. Jacqueline Singh served as the Lead Incident Response and Threat Analyst for the 2020 Biden-Harris Campaign. Last week she penned a brief, open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, urging them to seek "a comprehensive forensic audit" of the 2024 results, based on a number of issues that she argues "undermine confidence in the election results.” 

Please consider using your right to speak to make your voice heard during this crucial time for our democracy. Call for a forensic audit. Here is the number to call and a sample script.

Democrats continue with the big lie, that our elections are "free, fair, safe and secure.” There was nothing free and fair or secure about these elections, starting with the obscene amount of money unleashed by Citizens United, running through extensive Russian troll farms targeting voters, gerrymandering, massive purges of voter rolls, and finally, in the coup de grace, inadequate audits of the ballots to ascertain whether the voting computers counted the votes right. Democrats need to stop defending a broken Democratic system!  If they are in denial that they have a problem, how is anyone going to solve the problem?

COMMENT: In New York,  it used to be that the press and interested parties could examine the ballot images after an election to verify whether they matched the computer tally.  But since a bad ruling in the 2016 Kosmider v Whitney lawsuit, no-one can look at those ballot images or ballots, which are available for about two years  but are locked away.

Since then, bills have been introduced year after year  to establish that ballots as subject to FOIL (the Freedom of Information Law) and to make ballot images public  The bills never get out of the  Assembly Election Law Committee.

Example: New York FOIL Ballot Images Bill. S286A/A6589A  Clarify that ballot images and cast vote records are public documents subject to FOIL and  require public posting automatically shortly after vote count  (Senate passed June 1, 2021; to Assembly Election Law Committee March 19, 2021; amended, recommitted, and printed April 28, 2021)

Ada County, Idaho is doing it right o restore confidence among voters.

While the group of experts cite well-documented evidence of Trump supporters unlawfully breaching proprietary voting systems, copying its software and distributing it across the Internet following the 2020 election, in states including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado (for which several have been charged and/or convicted with felony crimes), Spoonamore's worries are a bit more speculative. He is concerned by his analysis of a reportedly high number of what are known as "Bullet Ballots", which include one single vote (in this case, for Trump for President) and for no one else on the ballot. He augments that concern with what he fears could be a related bevy of hoax bomb threats in largely Dem-leaning jurisdictions on Election Day, said to have come from Russian email domains, as well as the use of Trump supporter Elon Musk's Starlink Internet system in a number of places.

The same left-leaning nonprofit advocacy group that unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify Donald Trump from the November ballot in several states is now calling for a recount of the votes, alleging a mass breach of voting systems. 

Dear Vice President Harris, 

We write to alert you to serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections, and to identify ways to ensure that the will of the voters is reflected and that voters should have confidence in the result. The most effective manner of doing so is through targeted recounts requested by the candidate. In the light of the breaches we ask that you formally request hand recounts in at least the states of Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.