Norm Eisen: BREAKING: we just blocked Musk & Trump out of the Treasury systems!

[Bluetus]

108. AFAIK, none of the DEM Governors in any of those swing states has asked for any kind of audit

Last edited Thu Feb 6, 2025, 03:52 PM - Edit history (1)

OK, about 95% of politicians are lawyers by training and by profession, so maybe we are asking too much for them to understand some basic IT issues. Or maybe we shouldn't be electing so many lawyers to govern the rest of us.

But here's the rundown in bullet form:

* ESS is the biggest supplier of election systems, by far

* ESS was founded by a major Republican contributor

* ESS is used widely in all the swing states (and most other states)

* The ESS solution has 4 major components, 3 being at the polling place and one being at county HQ

* At the polling site, there is an iPad app that uses a 4G/5G connection to the county HQ to verify voter status. This prints a blank paper ballot. No other polling place systems are connected online to the outside world, and none of the machines in the polling place are electronically connected to one another. The only connection is through the paper ballot.

* The paper ballot is taken to a touchpad voting stations. These tablets are claimed to store no information. There may be dozens of these at each polling place, and they are all stand-alone. They read the paper ballot, which establishes which candidates and propositions are relevant to that voter. The voter makes selections, and when done, these selections are printed onto the paper ballot. At that point, the tablet should have no retained information from that session.

* The paper ballot has the selections in human-readable form, which the voter can verify if they have good eyesight. But the tabulation is done based on barcoded information that is supposed to exactly match the human-readable data. In theory the tablets could be hacked to barcode different votes than are shown on the human-readable lines. This could be discovered by auditing the paper ballots. I have no evidence anybody has ever done such a hack, but I am also not aware of any field audits for this vulnerability. It isn't the easiest hack.

* The last step at the polling place is to feed the paper ballots into the tabulator. The tabulator reads only the BARCODES, not the human-readable version of the votes. It keeps a running total of voting throughout the day and stores results on a memory card. In theory, one could hack the tabulator, but there are various physical and electronic measures to detect tampering. Again, not the easiest hack.

So far, so good. That's all pretty secure. The big vulnerability is this:

* At the end of voting, the supervisor/inspector removes the memory card from the tabulator and places the tabulator (which holds the paper ballots) into a locked storage to be retrieved later by the county officials. The supervisor personally delivers the memory card to the central location. In my experience (and I have worked over a dozen elections with this equipment), there is very light chain-of-custody. It really depends on the integrity of the person transporting the memory cards.

* I do not know the format of the data on these cards. But I do know that Republicans went to great lengths to gain illegal access to these systems in 2020 and made electronic copies that could enable reverse engineering. I also believe there are people at ESS who would share that format with a person like Musk, given the right incentives and protection promises. Either way, given time (and they had 4 years), there is absolutely no question that people with some specialized but common IT skills could reverse engineer the memory card format. And knowing the format, it would be trivial to write a program that would read the memory card, and change the tabulation results in a way that would not be detected when the cards were read at the county HQ.

* Such a scheme would require the collaboration of numerous corrupt precinct-level election workers, or a much smaller number of corrupt county-level workers, because the tampering would have to occur between the time the cards left the voting places and were officially received at the county HQ. I have no evidence that anything like this actually happened, but we have plenty of evidence of corrupt election officials, illegal access to machines, fake electors and such.

* Finally, it is important to note that a memory card tampering scheme could easily be detected simply by scanning the paper ballots in a known safe setting with plenty of witnesses. The memory cards would either match the paper ballots or they would not. The point is THERE WERE NO RECOUNTS ANYWHERE, so the scheme I described could have succeeded in this particular election. Again, I am not alleging that is DID happen, only that it could happen and would not be particularly difficult for a person with Musk's financial and technical resources.

And then we have Trump saying, basically, yeah, Musk knows all about these vote-counting system. WHY would Musk know about these vote counting systems. Doesn't he have a CEO job at Tesla, SpaceX, and several other companies? Why would Musk waste time becoming an expert in vote-counting systems when he can't get his self-driving software to work in 10 years?