This is a footnote for my 30 March 2023 article The voting vendor in Reality Winner's leak is coming to Texas, published by the Texas Observer, founded 1954.

The front of my website can be found at DouglasLucas.com. This footnote last updated 30 March 2023.

The following bibliography and notes substantiate this portion of my article: "since passage of 2002's Help America Vote Act, which greatly accelerated computerization of elections, civil society has repeatedly warned of myriad rigging risks." The "civil society has repeatedly warned" part serves as anchor text for a hyperlink from the article to this footnote page.

The paragraph in question from my article links many such civil society sources. The ones below are meant as extras. If you are to pick just two, I suggest the Simon and Hartmann books.

Who's civil society? An Oxford Languages definition states: "society considered as a community of citizens linked by common interests and collective activity." Various sources variously list components of civil society as including individuals and various groups among the public; academia; nonprofits and NGOs; independent experts; think tanks; investigative journalists; media in general; more. But not government, and not business.

Below, multiple recommended civil society sources warning of digital rigging risks. Note that the three books all have endnotes, etc. listing many more references. Studying their accumulations of evidence will impart the understanding that when a news story of a voting computer glitch appears, it should not be automatically considered nothing but an unimportant, standalone fluke.

• Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century by Jonathan D. Simon. The website for the book is here. Simon periodically updates the book to analyze new election cycles, most recently Election Day 2020.

• The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back by Thom Hartmann. Published in 2020. A good overview of various elections-related issues such as D.C. statehood and the Electoral College, but also cybersecurity vulnerabilities of the country's privatized voting computers.

• Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris with David Allen. Written in 2003. On the Black Box Voting website, the entire book is available for free. Review in Vanity Fair here; review in Salon here.

• In September 2006, three computer science professors, all with Princeton University at the time, published a security analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. They stated: "Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks." The executive summary is here.

• Project EVEREST -- which stands for Evaluation and Validation of Election Related Equipment, Standards and Testing -- was commissioned by the Ohio Secretary of State, and therefore does not strictly qualify as a warning from civil society. However, it was primarily academics, mostly affiliated with Pennsylvania State University, who conducted the EVEREST examinations, so in that sense civil society participated significantly in Project EVEREST. Either way, the Ohio Secretary of State's final report, dated 14 December 2007, is definitely worth a read. It's a risk assessment of Ohio voting computers based on penetration testing, inspecting source code, and more. Among the systems considered are ones by Hart InterCivic and Premier Election Solutions.

• NYU's Brennan Center for Justice has been covering this issue for a long time. Here's the election security section of their website. See especially their 162-page report The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, which they spent more than a year putting together in 2005 and 2006. The report comes with three pages of endorsements. The authors describe in great detail precisely how software patches, ballot definition files, and memory cards could be manipulated to enable rigging. The report found "All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections." (The three voting systems were DREs, DREs with paper trail, and opscans, all of which are still in use today in some jurisdictions.)

• Founded in 2004 by David L. Dill, Ph.D. -- currently a computer science professor at Stanford University -- VerifiedVoting.org provides great resources on this topic, such as the voting equipment database and the verifier for exploring voting equipment use and post-election audit requirements across the U.S.

• E-book WhoWhatWhy published in 2020 by investigative journalists Celeste Katz Marston and Gabriella Novello titled Is This Any Way To Vote? Vulnerable Voting Machines and the Mysterious Industry Behind Them with an addendum: Is Mail-In Voting the Answer? Download the e-book in full here. See also the news outlet's elections tag for many articles by WhoWhatWhy on the subject. Here's a promo video for the e-book on youtube, just under six minutes in length.

• Collection of articles, videos, podcasts, and more by independent researcher/journalist Jennifer Cohn. She writes about election security and related topics via her twitter account as well.

There are many more books, documentaries, and other sorts of valuable sources, but the above are a good way to get started.