So my talk is titled, Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security.
How's the slides coming through?
Good?
Okay.
So, if you saw the program, it had a typo saying this is also the solarpunk talk, talk,
but it's not the solarpunk talk, although I do write science fiction.
A little about me.
I'm a freelance writer and investigative journalist.
My day jobs are copywriting, content marketing.
You can hire me.
I'm most known for reporting on hacktivism, transparency, legal cases,
including that of Jeremy Hammond, who will be presenting here this weekend,
as well as whistleblower Reality Winner.
We will talk about her shortly.
I'm also known for analyzing and corroborating the Stratfor private spy files
that Jeremy Hammond gifted all of us and went to prison for 10 years for. [10 years per sentencing]
I always say that I corroborated a lot of the information in them
because the corporate media did not bother to do so.
They just simply said, 'Stratfor executive says blah, blah, blah,'
the end.
But I had bothered to, you know, find additional sources,
which editors are always mad at me about,
too much effort.
All right.
So, and now probably I'm most known for, get the most retweets for, election security matters,
particularly Coffee County, Georgia, which we will get to.
My day job, of course, one of them is substitute teacher.
So, if, you know, no ins and outs in the first or last 10 minutes,
and if you need a hall pass, raise your hand, and you can sign, all that good stuff.
All right.
So, Mr. Lucas will write you an infraction if you don't cooperate.
Now, on a more serious note than substitute teaching,
I want to just say very briefly that a decade ago,
I spoke on a panel here about crowdsourcing research into the private spy industry.
And I was on that panel thanks to the late Kevin Gallagher, who spearheaded it.
And I would not be here today, if it were not for him doing that,
and kind of encouraging me a decade ago.
So, you know, there's a lot of, there should be more talks someday about mental health,
and activism, and drug, recreational drug abuse, and things like that.
I'm alluding to Kevin's story.
So sometimes I wonder what he would say about stuff I'm doing now.
All right.
Moving on.
I made a 14-page recommended resource list, a PDF bibliography.
You can find it on various pages of my website.
It accompanies this talk.
It gives you lots of great information.
And it looks like this. [Technical difficulties]
So, this is what nerdy investigative journalists do in their spare time.
So, you can find [in the PDF], you know, a bullet[point], you know, a particular book,
and why it's a good book, or Reality Winner, election activism.
Oh, well, you know. [More technical difficulties]
Life is short.
What can you do?
It comes at you fast.
A quick note on terminology.
There's several things I'd like you to take away today,
and one of them is this simple term.
We say voting computer, or we should say voting computer, and not voting machine.
Does any of you do your homework and know why?
No?
Okay.
So, a machine, you remember from physics class, does one and only one thing,
like a lever or a pulley, okay?
It can't be reprogrammed to swap the votes around, okay?
But a voting computer is a universal machine.
That's Alan Turing, pictured there, who invented the concept of computer software in 1936.
Universal machine being a machine that can be programmed and reprogrammed.
He called it 'instruction tables', right?
Do this.
If not, then do that.
So, when we say voting machine, we give a wrong impression that this is like a lever you yank,
and it's going to do the same thing every time.
Not that the levers weren't messed with as well in the past,
but voting computer emphasizes [made for reprogrammability, and],
Oh my god, it's going to have all these pop-ups,
and I can play Doom on it during the election and all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so, framing election security for today.
That slide is from one of my favorite movies, possibly my favorite movie, 1976 Network.
If you have not seen it, you must see it immediately.
Neither fake news.
So, you know, the Trumpers have said things like,
'Well, there were these Italian artificial satellites that were lasering the elections and stuff',
and they tried to go into court with some of this nonsense.
And the judges, pretty much universally, in all cases except for one minor case [in Pennsylvania],
smacked them down, fined them, made them take remedial education on education standards,
legal education, things like that,
because when it came time to pony up and show the notarized evidence of,
you know, under penalty of perjury, of Italian satellites,
and have the other side be able to critique it in the courtroom,
the Trumpers said, blah, blah [to try to distract from lack of evidence].
So, what they were doing is they were leveraging the lawsuits for media attention
to get their sound bites out there, and also donations, right?
So, that was what Sidney Powell's 'Release the Kraken' lawsuits were all about.
So, that's one extreme of this, how it's typically, the topic is typically framed today.
So, it's not fake news nonsense about satellites and lasers,
and the elderly poll worker is really a lizard, you know, it's none of that.
On the other hand, the opposite framing is that our voting computers are these perfect,
wonderful things, as wonderful as your I Voted sticker and Mount Rushmore and apple pie.
This is exemplified by, of course, Barack Obama,
who said in 2016 when Trump was starting to say all his crazy Stop the Steal stuff,
which was very far out for a [U.S.] presidential candidate to start saying,
Obama said, anybody who brings up rigging is not a serious person.
It doesn't happen. If you want the exact quote, you want to look at my Texas Observer article on Reality Winner.
And so, you know, even one of the federal judges Obama appointed
has said that gerrymandering is tantamount to rigging, a federal judge.
And Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat in Oregon,
said in the Senate, Kremlin, [Senate] intelligence [committee] reports about the Russian cyber attacks in 2016,
Wyden said, well, you know, he can't rule out hacking by these distant Kremlin hackers,
of the changing the votes and voter registration, all that kind of stuff.
There's no way to rule it out. So, it's okay to bring it up.
You know, this audience doesn't need this kind of like hand-holding against these,
you know, duopoly extremes. But what can you do? I try to write for everybody sometimes.
Okay, so now we have more of this framing. The global situation we have today, really fast,
you know, we have the NATO countries, the so-called Western countries [more democratic or less overtly fascistic],
with the Five Eyes countries in the lead, US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, right?
So, that's all the State Department diplomatic cables [leaked by C. Manning] about Five Eyes and all this kind of stuff.
Then we have the BRICS countries [several autocratic], Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa,
and many others have joined, such as India and Egypt, and United Arab Emirates.
I think Argentina still wants to join.
Versus the others, just various countries, you know, like, I don't know, I better not say one,
but countries in Africa, right, that don't really have a stake [of their own] in this kind of thing.
Versus the public, everybody, the global -- what are we now -- 8 billion?
And, you know, of course, the quadrennial [U.S.] presidential elections get the spotlight,
but [besides int'l.], there's [also] all these down-ballot [U.S.] elections for your local dog catcher and your mayor
and all this kind of stuff, where you can have a lot more impact than you might think,
[even] if you live in a non-swing state, for example.
Then we have, you know, our choice between two, you know, autocrats [candidates], Donald Trump,
you know, these are the Epstein pictures, everybody has seen those,
SpookyConnections.com is on the recommended resource list.
That'll really dig into him.
He [almost certainly] owes a lot of money to China, despite what he says,
you can see the blog post about that on my blog.
So, you know, demagoguery is a word probably all of us know here.
His Trumpers fans, MAGA people, they don't care about Trump's [likely] debt to China,
they don't care about any of this stuff, because they see a big, tall, tough guy
who is a celebrity TV person yelling and pounding his chest on TV and saying
he's the chosen one, and they like that, because their brain is no longer on file,
intellectual and emotional atrophy.
Then we have Joe Biden.
So, you know, a lot of this is sort of remedial, but I feel like you can't really talk
about elections without this kind of context being set forth.
You know, there's lots of stories of creepy Biden.
Here's, like, a typical video.
This Ramrants Twitter user is a right-wing source.
He kisses her three times [HOPE's cuts removed one kiss & audience gasp], like it's not just once, you know, and then like the,
you know, it's just he says something weird [and creepy], but the audio is off.
So this Ramrants source, you know, it has a lot of videos that are C-SPAN
that need to be collected.
What's the date? Who are the people in these videos?
Call them and interview them, that kind of thing.
But the Ramrats source does have a few that are like, you know,
he quoted some news article about a college graduate who was kissed by Biden,
but she was actually glad she was kissed, and he made it look like it was,
you know, bad.
So take that source with a grain of salt [and] as a jumping-off point.
But there's a lot of smoke there that indicates a serious fire,
which means that, you know, this presidential voter's choice
between the greater or lesser evil has now mutated into the choice
between the greater and lesser pedo, or at least the greater and lesser
creeper, because we could use more data on Biden, I believe.
Meanwhile, so that's the world.
That's where we're picking from for presidents.
That's this country.
And meanwhile, activist organizations such as the Center for Election Science
are saying things like, the most important thing we do as a society
is to elect leaders.
It's not bearing or raising children or composing a groundbreaking
sonata or curing cancer or anything like that
[all those, interactive, are "as a society"] It's I Voted stickers every four years.
It's really hard to work with election security topics because
you're constantly reading stuff like that, the advertising.
It's gross.
All right, overview of mass collaboration.
Is the talk over yet?
How much time do I have?
I better talk faster.
Nobody's going to the bathroom or recess.
You gotta listen.
Okay, so mass collaboration, all right?
So we have humans collaborating in numbers [of] more than one.
I guess you can collaborate on your own with yourself and any sort
of imagination [connecting nonlocally across spacetime].
But with consensus, we usually start there, right?
Consensus is voting and it has pros and cons.
Probably the biggest pro is that it's one of the most comfortable
ways for us to work.
If you're hanging out with friends and you're like, 'Hey, what do
you want to do for dinner tonight?'
I mean, if you have a good relationship, that's a good conversation.
If not, not.
But you know, it's a comfortable thing.
We're going to go for dinner.
I vote for, you know, vegan.
I also vote for vegan.
Okay, kick out all the carnists.
We're good.
All right.
Consensus also has a lot of cons.
I think we're going to have something like a hundred and seventy
million voters this November.
And for example, I will be voting from Seattle.
Let's say that Washington state is a swing state.
It's not, but I'm going to go vote for Biden, who's going to
appoint an appointee, who's going at the National Weather
Service [or whatever agency], who's going to appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to
appoint [or hire] somebody else, who's going to make some decisions about
meteorology that's going to affect people in Florida.
I'm not in Florida.
I don't know anything about meteorology.
Why am I part of the input here?
Why am I part of the garbage in that's creating the garbage
out, right?
So that's one of the cons of it.
And usually advocates of, 'Hey, we got to do everything, but
voting is the most important thing you ever do in your life.'
Those kind of people say, 'Well, sure, you're right about these
counterarguments, but the only other option is hierarchy, and
that's gross.
So we have to have this horrible [admittedly problematic mass consensus].'
It's the 'Democracy is crappy except for all the others,' whatever
that quote is, 'is the crappiest except for all the others.'
Okay.
So hierarchy, pros and cons.
It's really good in an emergency.
Oh my God, the building is burning down.
Like, I'm going to push you out the window onto the lifeboat --
I mixed my metaphors -- right now! Because, you know, hurry, hurry,
hurry!
It's also good for things like sports, right?
[Which is] simulated war. Or, you know, BDSM or something like that.
Like, it's, you know, so sometimes people have their claws out
and the boxers, right?
You can see boxers compliment each other before and after the
fight, but during the fight there, you know, there's a definite
hierarchy when you knock him to the ground, right?
You give him a concussion.
All right.
So the hierarchy cons, you know, I think there's like a statement
that everybody is depressed.
Everybody who's a paid worker is depressed because they lose
autonomy.
There's like two others, [creative] control [or purpose] and mastery over their own life
work or something.
We all go to paid jobs here.
We know the cons of hierarchy.
So people say, well, I guess it's back to consensus then because
there's no door number three, but thankfully there is a door
number three.
That is stigmergy.
This is a concept not invented but developed by Heather Marsh
in her Binding Chaos philosophy books, which everybody should
read and they're in my recommended resource list.
I'll keep it really short with just like two examples.
One is you go to a doctor's office.
You're the only person in the waiting room.
A puzzle is partially put together.
The goal is clear:
Put together the puzzle.
Anybody in the waiting room can participate and put together
the puzzle pieces.
It's transparent:
You can see all the puzzle pieces.
And everybody gets to enjoy the end product, the beautiful
puzzle. So you're sitting there puzzling.
You're not voting with another puzzler because you're the only
person in the room and you're not giving or taking orders
so it's not hierarchy either. [Yet it's collaboration with past/future puzzlers]
Okay. We have things like this socially, finger-tapping on
guitar, for example, or any sort of cultural thing when you
know, when Eddie Van Halen was first finger-tapping on guitar,
he turned around so that people wouldn't see his trick.
He was trying to have a unique sales point and keep it kind
of a proprietary secret, but over time, you know, it melted
out and other guitarists started finger-tapping and they start
influencing each other [i.e. indirectly collaborating].
But nobody's like voting, do you,
Do you finger-tap with your index or your middle? Or giving
[hierarchical] commands or orders, right?
So we do this [stigmergy, indirect collaboration] with like slang too.
Like the goal might be make English language better, like,
say cool stuff.
And so you hear something like, you know, 'Bet' or all this
Gen Z slang, right?
And you adopt some of it.
So that's, like, stigmergy.
It's [indirect] collaboration.
You're collaborating to make the language cooler, the guitar
playing cooler, the puzzle better, and you're not doing
hierarchy or consensus.
So boom, just smash this framework of all these [seemingly] millions
of well-funded election security nonprofits that won't ever
say this stuff with their corporate mask.
Okay.
So next is, I don't know why I'm looking at that when I have
that here, Survey of Typical County Elections System how we're
doing on time? [Tech problems had eaten more time than I thought.]
Ah, not bad. [Wrong.]
Okay.
So when we are looking at the election system today, what
we're doing is we're studying how, you know, mass-scale
multi-million people consensus is working in this
country, right?
And what are the pros and cons of that?
How is it going down?
There are 3,000 something [usually considered] voting jurisdictions in the United
States [But 6,000 or more if fully comprehensive]. Most of them are counties.
So people just kind of loosely call them all counties, even
though some of them are townships or municipalities or whatever.
So now we're going to go into this flowchart.
This is what I was doing in my hotel room this afternoon.
It's a work in progress.
I aim to improve it over time and eventually put it on my
website.
All right, time to rock and roll.
This is the voter knowledge right here.
This is where it all starts, right?
Knowledge is power, all that kind of stuff.
So you have education, media, propaganda, and a big part
people overlook is trust.
They talk about, like, oh, do people like Biden's policies
or do people like Trump's -- I don't know -- [his] money, you know,
but it's like, trust.
Who do you trust, right? [Any politican? Any institution? Any data source?]
And you want to trust but verify, but trust is a big part
of this knowledge.
We're not the best word, but in, you know, relationship, social
emotional picture is the trust.
Okay, so you get pre-election tracking polls happening at
this point.
This is all pre-election stuff. Voter eligibility and registration.
Here are multiple issues with that that you can find resources
on in the recommended resource list.
I don't need to read that aloud.
So here we have vote capture.
Okay, so here's a big concept that's going to help you
whenever you talk about this subject from now on.
Divide, you know, Gaul was all, all of Gaul was divided into
three parts, but this is divided into two.
On one hand is vote capture.
On the other hand is a vote tallying.
Okay, so vote capture is, we see the vote capture can happen
at home with vote by snailmail.
Vote capture can happen at the precinct on touchscreens or
paper ballots or ballot marking.
Vote capture can be the astronauts voting from outer space,
right?
There's a lot of registering, recording your, well, not the
right word, capturing your vote.
What did you, what did you vote?
Who did you vote for?
And then the other half of it down here is this vote tallying,
totaling, or tabulating.
Those words all mean the same thing.
So you say, well, are elections secure or paper ballots good?
Well, are you talking about the vote capture or the vote
tallying? Because feeding paper ballots into, hand-marked
paper ballots into an optical scanner is one thing, but the
actual bubbling in with a pencil or what[not] is something quite
different, right?
And so the, maybe one is good and the other isn't or something
like that.
So vote capture on one hand, vote tallying or counting or
whatever on the other.
There's no French Academy mandating a single word.
All right.
Or what planet...
Here, before the vote capture, we have election professionals
readying. They do things like ballot design or logic and
accuracy testing.
This is the voting vendors and the election workers and the
counties working together.
Like, each county [of] these 3,000 counties is one unit or one
cell of the country's system.
Ballot design is more complicated than it sounds, right?
Because you might have which little pixels on the touchscreen
go with this candidate or something.
And if you look at the story of whistleblower Clint Curtis,
you can see how that was important.
He was murdered.
It's in the recommended, I'm sorry, he was not, the civil
investigator Raymond Lemme, who was investigating [Clint Curtis's] claims
was. You can see that in the recommended resource list if
you want that kind of stuff, including a documentary.
But this stuff is all really important and not really covered
widely at all.
Vote capture, UOCAVA, Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee
Voting Act.
So a lot of that happens by the internet, right?
If you're a soldier on a base on the other side of the
planet, or if you're a migrant, something like that.
Even candidates themselves voting, you know, there's always
kind of like a big publicity thing where the president goes
in, or the presidential candidate goes in to vote.
So there are these unusual kind of circumstances that are
fun because they're part of the system too.
You can't, you know, they're more attack surface, right?
There's more ways things can go wrong.
I should say that UOCAVA is not the only internet voting
happening right now in the United States.
King County, where I live, which is Seattle.
They have a, I can't remember, it's some sort of strange
environmental board or something that votes, it's set aside
from everybody else and does internet voting. [King Conservation District]
And I've done it a few times and tweeted at the vendor who
runs it and tried to provoke them into responding and I
didn't win that one.
I mean they didn't respond.
So then we have, let's see.
So you can vote from home, which is basically absentee
ballot, right?
Instead of living in another country, you are voting by
snailmail from home, like your absentee headquarters or
country is your house.
So that's what happens in Washington state or Oregon.
[Technical difficulties] Okay, let's see if it's the, so, you know, once we have
this vote recording, this vote capture, you know, you
capture the vote and you record it.
I guess it happens at the same time [more or less].
Ask Jacques Derrida about that.
But you have post-vote capture exit polls.
These are the exit samples.
You can see a lot in the recommended resource list from
Jonathan Simon about that.
I'll talk about that in the activism section.
The vote might be recorded, you get the idea, right?
But this is, you can, I'll make sure to upload this to
my website afterwards so that people can find it.
Here we have, once the vote is recorded at a county
precinct, a bipartisan transport team, you know, drives
it to the central counting facility of a county.
Okay, so it's like central headquarters.
That's always kind of crazy.
It's like, who's in that car?
Is the car videotaped?
They have a chain of custody documents and they have a
lot of measures.
But, you know, it's just an interesting kind of thing
that you don't hear about that you don't see in the
news. Once it gets to that central counting facility
is where you have processing, right?
So you remove the memory drive from the storage bag.
So in the transport team car, there's a storage bag
with the memory sticks into the central county thing.
You take it out, or maybe if it's vote by mail, you
check signatures on the ballot envelopes to see, you
know, that kind of thing. In Seattle, Washington
state, you have to sign the ballot envelope. During
processing and beyond, review teams of election
workers adjudicate the gray areas of the edge cases
where they're not really sure, like, what happened [with voter intent].
This can be a vector for a lot of problems. It can
also be blown out of proportion as a lot of problems
I'll talk about. Let's see what I'm doing on time.
Yeah, I think we're okay. [In fact, tech difficulties meant less time than I thought]
All right.
So in Georgia, they changed their voting vendor. So
in Georgia, every single county uses the same voting
vendor. 159 counties all use Dominion Voting Systems
right now. Whereas in Texas, where it's 254 counties
where I'm originally from, each county has a different
voting vendor. But the, oh yeah, so in Georgia,
they changed from their previous voting vendor,
I think it was Diebold or somebody who bought
Diebold, to Dominion voting computers. And one
of the Coffee County election workers' complaints
about these Dominion computers was that the adjudication
fields in the software, if they're going to say,
you know what, we got to throw out this ballot
because they voted for everybody, they bubbled in
everything. Well, with their own -- that's called
over-voting. So you could, in their old voting
computers, you could go and say, well, the adjudication
panel, the vote review panel, was Joe Smith and
Susie, you know, but once they updated to, I mean,
changed to Dominion, Dominion no longer gave them
an option to write down who the adjudicators were
and what date and time and all that stuff that
helps investigative journalists or auditors or whatever
figure out what really happened. So that was a
legitimate complaint. But then when they made
some, Misty Hampton, then the election supervisor
shortly after Jan. 6, with the Coffee County
elections office breach, now one of Trump's
co-defendants in the RICO case in Fulton County,
Misty Hampton made some videos about this
adjudication problem, but she didn't explain it
just like I explained it. [She portrayed all adjudication as inherently sketchy.] She was one step from
lizards and Italian space satellites again. So,
you know, it's a real kind of legitimate vector
for problems and a solution for it, a big
solution, is to have more election monitors,
election observers. And I'll talk about that
later on. That's where you have eyes-on these
adjudication teams and so you can look for
sketchy stuff. Okay, once we process the votes,
we have to count them, vote tallying, totaling,
tabulating. We might scan the paper ballots.
We might read the memory device, could be a
CD-ROM. We might insert into a computer, read
the data off. And when it's a ballot marking
device [BMD], like Georgia is using currently, it is
a touchscreen essentially that's yoked to a
printer. And the printer prints out what is
claimed to be a voter verified paper audit
trail, but is instead a QR code that humans
can't read. So it's like, you know, if you got
a receipt and it was written in, you know, Farsi
or something, unless you're Reality Winner,
you can't read it, right? That's one of the
languages she knows. So it's a QR code. You
can't read it, you know, that causes a problem [for oversight].
So there's lots of issues here. And that's a
swing state, right, that's having that. [Georgia] And the
Curling v. Raffensperger case in federal court
in Georgia is now trying to abandon mandatory
BMDs and use hand-marked paper ballots in most
circumstances. We have our voting computer
vendors here in this part and elsewhere, like
with voter registration, for example. The current
triopoly of opaque proprietary vendors is ES&S,
headquartered in Omaha on John Galt Boulevard.
They're the biggest voting vendor in the United
States, if that tells you anything. Dominion
Voting Systems, which is based in both Toronto,
Canada, and I believe Denver, somewhere in
Colorado. [Denver] So you often hear the far right
saying, 'Oh my god, Dominion's based in Canada!'
Well, yeah, but it has two offices because it
serves multiple [countries]. Okay, this is like chasing
the tail around, you know, that's like what
the media does with people. Okay, so then we
have Hart InterCivic based in Austin. There's
an example of a voting vendor that's aiming for
less opacity. I'm not optimistic enough to say
more transparency, but that's Clear Ballot based
in Boston and they're used in King County in
Washington state. But they're definitely, you
know, I don't want to, like, neg them. They're
definitely like interesting and good and worth
checking out, but they're not also not putting
Libreboot on the firmware or anything like that,
right? So, politics is the art of
the incremental little bits till the global
warming kills us all, right? Okay, so we go
into vote totals here. This is, like, post-election
time. Canvassing. What the heck is canvassing
versus tabulating? Well, I finally figured
this out the other day. There's actually an
Election Assistance Commission, a federal
agency that has a glossary of election terms,
very useful. But canvassing is where you organize
the vote totals. You might say we had this many
overseas soldier votes and overseas citizens
votes [i.e. UOCAVA], or we had this many votes that were
challenged or something. We're going to put
them all in a little spreadsheet and have a lot
of fun with it. That's what canvassing is, and
it helps with the certification processes of,
you know, various states have. When you figure
out the vote total at a precinct rather than
a central facility or maybe both, they
sometimes tape poll tapes, a.k.a. result tapes,
on the window, sometimes required by law,
sometimes not. You can sometimes persuade them
to do it or show it to you, and you can take
a picture or a video and crowdsource it to
scrutineers.org. They look like cash register
receipts. So then we go down to here, retention
of ballots, 22 months if there's a federal race,
otherwise state law determines it. Then we
have a thing here about audits versus recounts.
I should explain this really quickly because
this is, again, you're reading the news or
you're watching TV and audit this and recount
that, and you're like, 'What does that even mean?
I don't know. Why don't they tell me?' Well, they
don't tell you because they're not talking to
you. The corporate media is talking to the
intelligentsia, the commentariat, the civil
bureaucracy, journalists, you know, the
commentariat, the intelligentsia, whatever,
the three-letter agencies. They're not
talking to Joe Schmoe, who doesn't know the
difference between a recount and audit. We're
not the audience for this stuff. So audits with
like, Philip Stark, his risk-limiting audits,
his, not the fake imitations [accepting QR codes] -- and there are
some -- are statistical spot-checks where you
take little samples of the [ballot] vote totals and
then all that kind of stuff in the trail, the
evidence trail, to determine if a recount is
needed. And if the margins are really, really,
really, really close and the Stark risk-
limiting audit is saying, 'Hey, something might
be sketchy here, that's when you do a recount
that's exhaustive.' You recount every ballot.
There's a kind of a dispute within election
activism where some people say we need hand-
marked paper ballots. Both sides of this dispute
agree that for vote capture, we need hand-
marked paper ballots. But then they say for the
vote tallying portion of the program, do we
need to hand-count all of those publicly [as in Australia and elsewhere]? Like,
make it a federal holiday and take a month to
like do it? Or, you know, right now people expect
overnight results, right? But get them accustomed
to the 18th century, like let's take a month to
everybody count it. Or is it okay to feed them
into the voting computer optical scanners, digital
scanners? Might that be faster? Might that be
more accurate than tired humans being pressured
to do it overnight? As long as, with the caveat,
the proviso that we do these risk-limiting audits
with statistical perfection and make sure that
the software on the voting computers is not,
you know, compromised in some way. All right,
last slide of this. So now we've totaled our
votes. Hopefully the county will upload it to
the website for public use [and post poll tapes]. They'll probably
upload it to the state entity for certification.
They might get it there another way by, you know,
by courier or something like that. Then you have
the state election board or maybe the state
Secretary of State. They're going to certify it,
sign the certification documents, all this kind
of stuff. At that point, it's going to go to the
federal level if and only if there are federal
races on the ballot. And the Election Assistance
Commission sometimes gets these [other] reports. They
get reports from each state [about election processes there]. The U.S. president
of the, I'm sorry, the President of the U.S.
Senate gets it [for the Senate, i.e. the vice-president]. The U.S. House gets it. National
Archives and Records Administration gets the
presidential for the Electoral College. I was
wondering how do these votes get from the state
to the feds? Because you hear about ballots,
you hear about paper trails sometimes, right?
But that's only on the county level. That's
level you as a human, you know, 180 million
voter[s] is interacting with. But what about, how
does it get from the state level to the federal
level or something like that? So I asked people.
They didn't want to be attributed, but they
were in a position to know. And they told me
that it's sent by private carrier like [DHL] or
FedEx. Now, if you know these companies, you
know they have special divisions, like, for
shipping organs or something that have to be
kept refrigerated, things like that. So they
assuredly have a division for government
records, like shipping them around. But I think
it's pretty funny because you could make a great
stoner movie where you have like this stoner
who's, like, an election worker and he's got like
this thumb drive. It's got, like, the dispositive
thing about the who's going to win the
presidential. He's got to drive all the way to
D.C. and stop for like marijuana and getting [into]
all these crazy complications, you
know. But okay, so that was the survey. We
surveyed the election system and now we're
going to scrutinize it. This is whistleblower
Reality Winner. By show of hands, how many people
know, vaguely acquainted with who this person
is? Cognoscer. Okay, maybe half. Okay, maybe a
little bit more than half. All right. And then
raise your hands if and only if you know what
she revealed, even vaguely. Now we have about
three people. So that's the great job of the
media right there. You know, as she said,
the scandal of who Reality Winner is and how
weird her name is became the focus and not what
she leaked. The Intercept printed five pages of
a top-secret National Security Agency report.
She leaked it in 2017, but it basically showed
the Kremlin issuing cyber attacks against the
U.S. election system in two stages. Stage one
was you had the Kremlin breach VR Systems, a
voting registration vendor in Florida and they
denied that they were ever breached. That's a
huge story I could go into, but I won't. And so
they go into VR Systems, these Kremlin military
intelligence hackers and they, with actual
names, there's actual, like, names of these people
[hackers in] indictments that came out later, thanks to
Reality Winner. Assuredly, I mean, I'll tell
you, Obama wasn't going to talk about it. You
know, if you look at the Senate Intelligence
Committee report about the Russian interference
in the 2016 elections, [then-U.S. Secretary of State] John Kerry said,
'Hey, let's have this big public thing and let's
all like talk about this, like an inquiry and
talk about this Russian, Kremlin cyber attacks.
And Obama said, No, we're going to get, we're
going to kind of like keep it quiet because we
don't want people to lose faith in the system
and da-da-da-da-da.' Oh, everybody's like, oh
Barack, but I think, you know, it inspired me
to come up with the Doggerel for Democrats.
Let's see if I can remember it. What raises doubt
might lower turnout. So only open your mouth to
fellate the state. That's Obama's response to
Kerry essentially in a nutshell. Okay. [abridging for time] Now, so
the first stage was they breached the voting
systems vendor, VR Systems (everything's system
and system and cyber and system!). And they
essentially did that so they could use VR Systems
internal documents to imitate their logos and
stuff and put together better spearphishing
emails. Then they sent these spearphishing
emails to Florida county election supervisors
and according to the Florida governor and
[both U.S.] Florida senators [at the time], some of the county election
workers fell for this spearphishing trickery
and according to [journalist] Bob Woodward, some of them
got malware installed on their systems. And
meanwhile, you have, you know, people dancing
around on the Dem side saying that it's, it's
this is all made up, it's not real. But it's
very real. So that was the two stages, right? 
The next one is this Coffee County elections
office breach [insider threat]. That's Mike Lindell, the MyPillow
CEO. He flew into Coffee County, Georgia
shortly before that Misty Hampton election
supervisor resigned supposedly for, or was
forced out, terminated supposedly for her
timesheets, but in actuality for her role in
the breach, she was [just one of the breachers], Coffee County basically
made her the scapegoat. There's a lot more
people [breachers] in Coffee County, this rural southern
Georgia county in the swing state of Georgia,
16 [Electoral College] electors. This will come up, I'm sure, in
the news November and December. The Coffee
County, Sidney Powell hired, you know, the big
MAGA lawyer, Trumper lawyer, hired SullivanStrickler,
an Atlanta-based forensics firm to
go in there as operatives and make off with
exact copies of the [Dominion] voting software [Democracy Suite v.5.5-A].
And remember, every county in Georgia uses the
same [vendor], so it's a whole statewide voting software
compromise. Now, of a swing state, one of the
biggest swing states, 16 electors, and the
media's like, well, you know, they're like
sleeping and when they're talking about, you
know, Taylor Swift or whatever. There's a lot
I've written on both of these. They're all in
the recommended resources list and the, there's
CVEs as well from the Curling v. Raffensperger
trial, which is what the Coalition for Good
Governance is a nonprofit that's a plaintiff
in the Curling v. Raffensperger trial to
change the mandatory BMDs to handmarked paper
ballots and with RLA Stark [audits]. And they discovered
the Coffee County breach and that Curling
case has CVEs, lots of them. You know what
CVEs are, right? The official [computer security] bug classifications
on the the BMDs, Dominion systems used in
Georgia. So it's not a kooky thing. It's about
as legit as you can get. Finally, let's see,
election activism is the last thing. These you
can all look up in my recommended resource
list. I want to especially point out some of
the nerdier stuff like the statistical forensics
and better data access, maybe trying to make
a free software voting company. If you're in a
state where each county gets to make its own
choices [of vendor] and you get to go become friends with
the election supervisor [and board], maybe you can hack
together something and put Libreboot on the
firmware. Or you can just have another big
picture where, you know, maybe the most important
thing in life isn't coming to consensus on
whether we want to be ruled by Creep Number
One or Creep Number Two, but instead, you know,
picking ourselves and each other. We can do that.
We can vote with our wallet. We can vote with
our words. We can vote with our actions. We can
vote with our choices. So all this voting software
stuff is great and important, but you know, in
the 19th century, the New York Times reported
that there was a poll worker who simply took
ballots he disfavored and ate them. Right? So
you don't have to have superduper computer
hacks to rig an election, but you do need
dishonest people that aren't being observed,
aren't being scrutinized, aren't being observed.
You know, you get the idea. So now Q&A.
Thanks.
I'm not sure if you covered it because I did
miss the beginning of your talk, but the recent
lawsuits that were going on, my understanding
of them was that, you know, I was all excited
because I was thinking that there was finally
going to be discovery and we get to really
find out what was going on in these machines.
But my understanding is really what was going
on is some people made the mistake of saying
that they knew the person who was an employee
who made the actual tampering, and that was
the misstep. Is that sort of your understanding?
That's really the only thing that really
came out.
So a civil lawsuit is like a souped-up Freedom
of Information Act request because you can do
discovery and all that. In Georgia, there are
three major lawsuits that are discussed in
my recommended resource list. They're all
civil. No, they're not. Two civil, one criminal.
Then the Stop-the-Steal Kraken ones, if those
are the ones you mean. Yeah, I mean, it would
be like, oh, great. We're going to get interesting
discovery and transcripts and quotes, but
essentially the judges very early on in the
hearing said, you guys don't have squat. Quit
wasting my time. Get out of my courtroom.
Okay. Thanks.
I have a couple questions. If you went back
to the 1950s, where all the machines from
mechanical and you used the handle, would you
say that was more secure or less prone to playing
games? Douglas W. Jones is a computer science
professor who has a website that gives a brief
illustrated history of voting in the United
States. That's in the recommended resource
list. And he talks about the dials and the
levers and the pros and cons of each. They've
all been messed with at some point. I think
the difference with computers is you can do
things at vast scale that much faster than you
can eat ballots. Would you be better off with
paper ballots? Because, you know, look at what
you got. You look at some of the stuff in the
news with things like AT&T being hacked, or
let's say you go to where people have changed
code in a and they couldn't even see it in a
gaming machine in Vegas. So there's so much you
can do so much with those ROMs. You could, you
could. Yeah. So have a program that says, Okay, if you
press A, I'm going to make it C. And you would
even know that if you're not in on it. Yeah. The
story of whistleblower Clint Curtis and the
detective Raymond Lemme is an old school [touchscreen manipulation]
version of that in [Florida and in] Georgia, same state where
Lemme was killed. Before the BMDs, there were
touchscreens that were paperless. So there was
no trail [not even QR nonsense]. You just touch the touchscreen and
then you hoped that it was OK. Then they hooked
it up, the judge said, 'Hey, you need to make a
paper trail.' So they hooked it up, the
touchscreens (or different ones), up to printers
and printed out with a QR code that nobody can
read. So same difference. So would you, OK, one
more question. Would you say the elections in
the last six, twelve years have been accurate
or do you think it's more hype if people say
it's funny or the numbers don't jive? Yeah.
Two answers to that. Number one, I think the
most honest answer is we don't know, not enough
data. And I think the second answer is if you
look at Code Red by Jonathan Simon, the statistical
forensics of exit polls, which are used by the
United States to monitor elections, free and
fair elections in other countries, he's using
that same method to monitor elections here. And
they're often good enough, but there's often
disparities here and there as well, enough that
there's people need to fix it or evolve our
democracy past this mass consensus thing, not
mutually exclusive goals. Hi. So some states are
moving to a ranked choice voting system. How do
you think that affects us in the fact that it's
going to need more computational power to
actually tally a winner in some runoffs? You
can't really do that by hand in a timely manner.
And do you think that's a better system overall?
OK, so ranked choice voting [RCV] called instant runoff
voting in Canada and elsewhere is in my
recommended resource list. There's an answer
there, but I will say briefly that it's a good
idea with difficult implementation. There's
different ways, like, what we know is the voters
first preference. But after he fills out the
[RCV] ballot, what if the election changes dramatically?
Ayn Rand enters the race and somebody [another candidate] dies and
you know, you [a voter] can try to predict that with
[RCV] algorithms, but the public and election workers
and the candidates in the United States and the
voting computers are still struggling
with how to implement etc. I do think overall
it's a good idea to get away from the spoiler
effect and let people vote their heart, their
principles. But implementing it correctly is
another question. I think this is the last
question. Oh, shoot. Hi. You said you're from
Seattle. From Texas originally, but live in
Seattle last [eight] years. Well, you're voting
King County in Seattle. Yes. So I wanted to
ask you, what is the role of the PCOs from King
County into the whole voting system that you
have there, like choosing the commissioner
voting or presenting the candidate that will
become the commissioner that will become the
guy who will decide what the little[?] dot is. The
role of those people, of those local
PCOs, how they're called over there, the
Precinct Committee Officer of the parties of
the Republican and Democrat. We have another
name here in New York and every county has a
different name. And so what's their role in
your presentation? And in a segue, there is a
documentary called County on PBS that you can
stream and maybe add on your resource. So if
if you want to have, you have election poll
workers, I'm sorry, you have election workers
and you have voters, but then you have people
watching to make sure that things go smoothly
and fairly. These people are usually partisans
registered with the political party because
they're the only ones who care enough in many
cases. If you're a nonpartisan observer, like
in King County, you have to get a training from
the through the League of Women Voters with
King County Elections, which I'm actually doing
later this month. And then you can go in and
you can observe as a nonpartisan observer and
you can see about these bipartisan transport
teams or these multi-partisan or bipartisan
adjudication vote review, all this kind of
stuff. And I think what's important is, yeah,
those things do have a role, right? They're like
the employees of the party, of the candidate,
like advocating for that candidate's interests
at the election office, at the precinct, or the
central counting facility. But they're
still attack dogs for their party. They're not
nonpartisan observers or scrutineers or public
interest minded people. I'm not sure if that
answers.
It's interesting because you're right. There are
parties and people, but like, for example, in
New York, Democrat and the Republican, in
the county where there is most Republican, the
Democrat position is filled by a Republican.
It's still having a Democrat and a New Yorker.
Thank you, everybody.