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The Hidden Underbelly of Election Engineering - Why We Cannot Entrust Our Sacred Republic to Automated Elections
Interesting Facts About Firmware

Four key properties of firmware, commonly in use in America's and overseas elections and recently approved for statewide deployment in New Hampshire. Each property is confirmed as "TRUE" by a number of technical experts.:
· Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.

· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.

· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.

· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.

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NATIONAL BALLOT INTEGRITY PROJECT
NEW HAMPSHIRE BALLOT INTEGRITY TASK FORCE
[e-mail] http://www.ballotintegrity.org

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: WHAT'S WRONG WITH COMPUTER VOTING MACHINES? WHY CAN'T WE SAFELY ENTRUST OUR ELECTIONS TO AUTOMATION?

· Five former CIA Directors are identified as directly involved in election engineering, overtly or covertly: John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, Bobby Ray Inman, Robert Gates, and George H.W. Bush.

· Investigative journalist, Lynn Landes, reports that SAIC (Science Applications International Corp., sometimes also referred to as Scientific Applications International Corp.), of San Diego, California, is described as, “the shadow ruling class within the Pentagon,” and as a “behemoth military defense contractor with a shadowy, if not tarnished reputation,” which maintains strong business ties to the military and intelligence communities, such as the NSA and CIA. Many of SAIC’s board members are formerly with the Pentagon and CIA.

· Behemoth military contractor SAIC and ChoicePoint, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, have developed a strategic alliance, teaming up as partners in “data mining”.

· SAIC is aligned with a number of major voting machine vendors, including Diebold Election Systems, Hart Intercivic, VoteHere and ES&S (Election Systems & Software).

· SAIC has bid for state voter registration database contracts, such as that of the State of Nevada, under the name of “Votec/SAIC/ES&S”.

· Investigators have uncovered hidden colorful criminal histories of investigation, indictment, prosecution, and imprisonment for corruption among voting machine vendors and their networks. Among the offenses uncovered: serious security lapses, creative accounting, multiple sets of books (including in the vote counting software itself), dummy front companies, and numerous counts of racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, fraud, theft, bribery of officials, and embezzlement.

· According to T. Hommel, expert computer programmer, attorney, and Editor of wheresthepaper.org, SAIC, ChoicePoint and Diebold Election Systems now control America’s electronic automated elections.

· Jeffrey Dean, Senior Vice President of Diebold, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, of planting back doors in his software, and of using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.” While heading up the development of Diebold’s GEMS controversial central compiler software source code at Global Election Systems (later, purchased by Diebold, and renamed Diebold Election Systems), convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, worked in association with John Silvestro, Owner and CEO of LHS Associates of Methuen, MA, which maintains, pre-programs and configures the voting machines and memory cards of five New England States, including New Hampshire.*

· Diebold Election Systems is under tremendous scrutiny nationwide for sales of voting systems proven to be highly vulnerable and easily hackable by anyone from a teenager to a terrorist. Diebold CEO, Walden O’Dell, recently resigned, Diebold shareholders and numerous others have filed suit, and contracts for Diebold voting systems sales and services are in question, and being canceled, throughout the country.

· According to Peter Phillips, Director of Project Censored,“Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines.”

· Yet, the State of Maryland hired SAIC as an “independent reviewer,” to assess Diebold’s Accuvote-TS (touch-screen) software security, in light of widespread concerns about its Diebold touch-screen voting machines. On September 2, 2003, SAIC released a “Risk Assessment Report,” with significant deletions, and the media reported that the machines “passed muster.”

· ChoicePoint and its associates lobbied aggressively for a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) provision for federally mandated statewide voter registration databases. ChoicePoint has since bagged the lion’s share of state contracts nationwide.

· ChoicePoint was in the news, in 2000, for purging 91,000 African-American males from Florida’s voter registration database, for which ChoicePoint was paid well. Asserting that they were felons, the company claimed those purged were, thus, ineligible to vote. ChoicePoint’s controversial voter purge list was proven erroneous after the Florida 2000 Presidential Election, which George W. Bush was reported to have won by 537 Florida votes.

· ChoicePoint was in the news for “Grand Theft Identity,” as reported by Newsweek Magazine on July 4, 2005, and for massive credit card identity theft, reportedly, in the hundreds of thousands, possibly more, on its watch, just prior to the 2004 Presidential Election.

· ChoicePoint controls the “no-fly” watch list, recently augmented to 88,000.

· On April 22, 2005, Andrew McIntosh of the Sacramento Bee reported that, despite being under investigation by federal and state regulators for improprieties, ChoicePoint was poised to receive an $845,500 contract from California’s State Attorney General to “develop a computer system (to) help probe suspected criminals and terrorists.”

· The now infamous PROMIS software was originally developed by a company called INSLAW (Institute for Law and Social Research), which was awarded a contract for $10 million by the U.S. Department of Justice, “to adapt a computer program to the needs of U.S. attorneys and government agencies in tracking criminals (later termed “terrorists”), inter-agency.”

· Upon being shorted $2 million of $10 million, INSLAW filed suit against the U.S. Justice Department for breach of contract. Discovery revealed that the PROMIS software had been unlawfully altered with a quiet nod of approval from high-level officials at the Justice Department.

· According to INSLAW Owner and CEO, Bill Hamilton, PROMIS software was later sold with companion hardware, “with extra signal-sending hardware chips that broadcast data to satellites owned by the NSA.”

· Robert Gates, a Senior American intelligence and national security official (later, appointed Director of the CIA by President George H.W. Bush), personally peddled the PROMIS software overseas, complete with “back doors by which to spy on client countries.”

· Corroboration regarding the illegal sale of PROMIS came from, among many, former agent of the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lester Knox Coleman III. According to Coleman, bootleg copies of PROMIS were “made without the knowledge of INSLAW, to which a “backdoor’ software routine had been added. No matter how securely the front door might be barred with entry codes and passwords, American operators, holding the key to the secret back door, could break into the PROMIS systems operated by Cyprus, Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Jordan, Iran and Iraq whenever they wished, access the data stored there and get out again without arousing the slightest suspicion that the security of those systems had been breached…”

· Numerous PROMIS client countries also included Canada, Libya, and Chile.

· Similar language has been noted in the case of the computer voting industry, as follows:

On July 8, 2003, an article was published, by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, elections investigator and author of Black Box Voting – Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, stating that Johns Hopkins and Rice University technologists had discovered secret “back doors” in the Diebold GEMS software source code (which accounts for the tabulation of 50% of America’s votes) by which votes could be changed, in real time, by remote, during America’s elections.

· In January 2005, it was reported at Boston.com, that SAIC was awarded a $170 million contract for a PROMIS-type computer software program for the FBI, intended “to help agents share data about terrorist threats and criminal cases.” Could SAIC be the keeper of the “improved” PROMIS technology?

· Robert Gates now presides over election engineering, in association with SAIC and VoteHere (satellite cryptography technology).

· An electronic voting project is in progress, at MIT and Caltech, funded by Carnegie and others, that is based on satellite cryptography technology, and which entrusts the security and control of whole elections to five individuals, possessing one-fifth, each, of a single encryption key. Encryption is as much about secrecy as it is about security. Exactly what is being encrypted and who is to be entrusted with the secrets?

· Note that, of the five former CIA Directors identified as directly involved in election engineering, John Deutch is with MIT and Bobby Ray Inman is Caltech-connected.

· Career CIA professional, Ray McGovern, wrote unfavorably of Robert Gates, in Chapter 19 of his book, Neo-Conned, as follows: “Why dwell on Gates? Because a careerist in both senses of the word, he bears the lion’s share of responsibility for institutionalizing the corruption of intelligence analysis (at the CIA).”

· If such is the case, why is Gates presiding over election engineering? Could Robert Gates have interest in “institutionalizing the corruption” of America’s elections?

· Similar properties have been noted between the PROMIS technology (with “extra signal-sending hardware chips that broadcast data to satellites owned by the NSA”) and firmware, commonly in use in America’s elections.

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· Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.

· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.

· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.

· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.

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· We understand that LHS Associates, New England’s exclusive “independent” voting machine sales and service vendor for Diebold and ES&S equipment, long advised New Hampshire that we were using software v. 1.92 T (an early “non-GEMS, pre-GEMS”) test version of the Diebold software, and that we have, therefore, not been using firmware (v. 1.94 W and above) in our automated elections. Thus, we in New Hampshire were advised that we have been safe from any concerns over “central tabulation” and the controversial Diebold GEMS software source code (now known to involve flashable firmware). The matter of firmware’s involvement in New Hampshire’s elections, however, has not in fact been clear, and now, firmware is openly proposed for all of New Hampshire.

· LHS Associates, overseen by Owner/CEO, John Silvestro (a long-time associate of Senior Vice President of Diebold Election Systems, Jeffrey Dean, convicted felon and designer of the controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code and source code)*, has long been entrusted with the pre-programming, configuration and maintenance of the memory cards and voting machines of five New England States, including both Diebold and ES&S optical scanners in New Hampshire. LHS typically pre-programs the voting machine memory cards on site at its location in Methuen, Massachusetts, absent oversight, and delivers them directly to client communities, throughout New England, for a fee of approximately $500 - $700 per client community, per election period.

· Coincidentally, LHS Associates is also in the business of census demographic data collection for sizeable geographic areas of New England.

· Voting machine software and memory cards provided by private vendors, such as Diebold and ES&S, are regarded as “proprietary.” Thus, even election supervisors are not permitted to closely inspect the memory cards and voting machines widely in use throughout America. As such, it is unknown as to what precisely, is being programmed on the memory cards and voting machines in use in New England, which election officials have long dutifully employed in their elections, in accordance with instructions issued by LHS.

· New Hampshire is presently comprised of 45% hand counted paper ballot areas (encompassing 22% of New Hampshire’s votes), with 55% of areas the state conducting its elections on electronic voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems (72 towns) and ES&S (25 towns), encompassing 78% of New Hampshire's votes. New Hampshire’s automated elections have long been conducted on Diebold AccuVote OS (optical scanner) and ES&S Optech-OS (optical scanner) computer voting systems, all overseen by LHS.

· Due to a ballot design change ordered by a New Hampshire court and related legislation, the use of columnar-styled ballots is scheduled to be implemented in this next election (2006). New Hampshire is now poised to fully convert over to Diebold electronic voting systems in all of its automated areas. Or, it can recommend an immediate return to community-based, locally controlled hand counted paper ballot elections.

· We first understood that the columnar ballot design change was to require the conversion to Diebold voting systems of only the 25 towns now running elections on ES&S equipment. We later learned from Diebold/LHS that, to conform to the ballot design change, New Hampshire is also compelled to uniformly “upgrade” the software running its existing Diebold voting machines to a recent version of the controversial Diebold GEMS firmware, a change which would impact all electronic voting machines throughout the State.

· Journalist, Bill Moyers, has referred to elections as, “The reform upon which all else depends.” With each successive U.S. election, America and the world have long looked to the State of New Hampshire to lead. New Hampshire is in an interesting position to set an important example for America. This is, in fact, a Jeffersonian moment in our nation’s timeline, at which what we do or don’t do in New Hampshire will have powerful far-reaching effects into the future.

· We now ask ourselves two pressing questions:

Q: Can we really safely entrust our sacred New Hampshire democratic elections to such proprietary and surreptitious technology?

Q: Are we prepared to courageously lead in staking a righteous claim on our own elections, by recommending an interim or long-term return to a time-honored system of locally controlled, community-based hand counted paper ballot elections?

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UPDATE: On Friday, March 10, 2006, the NH Ballot Law Commission, in a vote of 4:1, voted to approve the upgrade and use of the Diebold GEMS v. 1.94 w firmware on all electronic voting systems throughout the state. ES&S machines will be eliminated.

Barring an appeal or decision override, in the 2006 election and thereafter, 78% of New Hampshire citizens (55% of areas) will vote on Diebold Accu-Vote Optical Scanners with v. 1.94 w firmware, and 22% of New Hampshire citizens(45% of areas) will vote on hand counted paper ballots.

“Under the circumstances, I cannot in good conscience vote to approve the upgrade,” said Gregory Martin of Keene, the Commissioner who opposed the action, and the sole member of the panel to have studied the materials presented.

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Testimony of:
Sharona Merel, Co-founder
National Ballot Integrity Project & New Hampshire Ballot Integrity Task Force

New Hampshire Ballot Law
Commission Hearing
Concord, New Hampshire
March 10, 2006

(Note: A portion adapted from a recent press release, “Vote Rescue Acts to Save Vanishing Voting Rights With Hand-Counted Paper Ballot System in Citizens' Parallel Election, Austin, Texas, March 7, 2006,” from Karen Renick of http://www.voterescue.org {TX}and Vickie Karp of Black Box Voting and http://www.coalitionforvisibleballots.com {TX})

Good morning!

With this testimony, today, it should be noted that we are not questioning the actions of election officials, but, rather, the proprietary secrecy that shrouds the electronic voting machines, the mystery pre-programming of the memory cards and the very suspect nature of the firmware that runs them. This firmware is at issue, today, here in New Hampshire.

As we share these comments with you today, we ask you to consider that just a single vote in multiple precincts across the board can swing an election and invite election officials to consider who, in fact, controls your community’s vote count.

Black Box Voting, a citizens’ watchdog group for elections, has recently exposed serious flaws with two of the four major electronic machine vendors, Diebold and Sequoia. The evidence against electronic voting, both touchscreen systems and optical scan counters of paper ballots, is so irrefutable as to make all electronic voting systems suspect of fraud.

Many hundreds of serious problems with electronic vote tallies across the country – including on optical scanners, such as we have here – have been documented, since November 2000, and repeated tests by computer experts have discovered embedded election “flipping” software. The total lack of transparency inherent with electronic voting, coupled with these other revelations, have stripped voters of their fundamental sacred right to vote and have their votes counted correctly.

We have concerns about hidden factors and ask that they be addressed, here in New Hampshire.

For one thing, the Homeland Security Warning, which was issued, as follows:

HOMELAND SECURITY WARNING of September 2004 Regarding Diebold Back Door:

From US-CERT
Diebold
GEMS Central Tabulator 1.17.7, 1.18
A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could a local or remote authenticated malicious user modify votes.
No workaround or patch available at time of publishing.
We are not aware of any exploits for this vulnerability.
GEMS Central Tabulator Vote Database Vote Modification
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB04-252.html#diebold
Medium BlackBoxVoting.org, August 31, 2004

See also: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001842.htm

Jeffrey Dean, Senior Vice President of Diebold, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, of planting back doors in his software, and of using a “high degree of sophistication” to evade detection over a period of 2 years.” While heading up the development of Diebold’s GEMS controversial central compiler software source code at Global Election Systems (later, purchased by Diebold, and renamed Diebold Election Systems), convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, worked in association with John Silvestro, Owner and CEO of LHS Associates of Methuen, MA, which maintains, pre-programs and configures the voting machines and memory cards of five New England States, including New Hampshire.*

LHS Associates, overseen by Owner/CEO, John Silvestro (a long-time associate of Senior Vice President of Diebold Election Systems, Jeffrey Dean, convicted felon and designer of the controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code and source code)*, has long been entrusted with the pre-programming, configuration and maintenance of the memory cards and voting machines of five New England States, including both Diebold and ES&S optical scanners in New Hampshire. It is our understanding that LHS typically pre-programs the voting machine memory cards on site at its location in Methuen, Massachusetts, absent oversight, and delivers them directly to client communities, throughout New England, for a fee of approximately $500 - $700 per client community, per election period.

Voting machine software and memory cards provided by private vendors, such as Diebold and ES&S, are regarded as “proprietary.” Thus, even election supervisors are not permitted to closely inspect the memory cards and voting machines widely in use throughout America. As such, it is unknown as to what precisely, is being programmed on the memory cards and voting machines in use in New England, which election officials have long dutifully employed in their elections, in accordance with instructions issued by LHS.

In addition, according to technical experts, voting software certification to 1990 standards is inadequate. Certification must be to at least 2002 standards.

Further, here is what we now know about firmware, confirmed by numerous technical experts, one with high-level NSA security clearance, who has worked on software security for missile systems.

Four (4) key properties of firmware are as follows:

Interesting Facts About Firmware:

Four key properties of firmware, commonly in use in America's and overseas elections (each point confirmed as "TRUE" by a number of technical experts).

· Firmware is "flashable." Modem firmware is often stored in updateable 'flash' memory, rather than requiring chip exchange.

· If there's a remote interface, firmware can be updated by remote and such an interface can be a wireless receiver inside a case, and we wouldn't see it. Simply putting a scanner around it would ensure no telltale signals that might arouse suspicion.

· In the case of wireless, one transmitter can hit all receivers in a given area, and one server can send out and download a particular program, such as a vote-changing program, to every device.

· Such microprograms, composed of microinstructions, can control the sequencing of computer circuits directly at the detailed level of the single machine instruction.


It is clear to see that firmware is, by no means, benign. Can we really entrust our sacred New Hampshire elections to this suspect technology?

If we allow outside interests to flood our state with firmware, essential control of our own New Hampshire elections will slip right through our fingers in a flash. Should we allow outsiders to wrest control of our elections right out from under us?

We submit that the incursion of the proposed firmware in New Hampshire’s elections poses a grave threat to our state and to elections throughout the nation.

I am a long-time resident of the State of New Hampshire and a co-founder of a national project for election integrity, so am in a position to see the havoc and the veritable war over the incursion of this voting technology occurring throughout the country. Hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens, many of them technology experts and other professional people, are meeting in gatherings similar to this, up in arms, to defend America’s elections. Very often, the vendor in question is Diebold, whose representatives we may see here in this room today. Diebold, whose CEO has recently resigned, whose stockholders are suing the company, whose certifications are suspect in whole states, such as California, and whose firmware has been repeatedly revealed as highly hackable by anyone from a teenager to a terrorist – even from a simple P.C.!

So, let’s ask ourselves just whom do we want controlling our elections, here in New Hampshire: outsiders with proprietary interests or our own earnest election officials and communities?

There are also numerous lawsuits against Diebold occurring throughout the country. If we certify and approve known “flawed” firmware in New Hampshire, who is liable for costs and damages? The Secretary of State’s office? The New Hampshire Ballot Law Commission members? This is, no doubt, a path we would all like to see averted.

Further, five or six (5 or 6) attack points are identified in the case of hand counted paper ballots – a simple, traditional, decentralized form of vote counting that is still openly administered by our own New Hampshire local election officials, with assistance from the citizens, in 45% of our state. We have a beautiful exemplar system for hand counting here in NH, as directed by our good Secretary of State Bill Gardner, whose fine legacy of exemplar elections we intend to protect, and we ask you to assist us with this. Many of us have witnessed a model hand counting system that works well, here in Concord, during post 2004 election recounts.

Why “fix” a cost-effective system that is so exemplar with non-transparent technology that is purposely made complex to justify enormous sales, service contracts, and resales of proprietary non-transparent technology?

Conversely, in the case of electronic voting, there are upwards of 50, some say 110, some experts say “infinite” attack points, with which we must constantly contend. And, if we should manage to overcome one or two attack points (as we saw in Georgia in 2002) patches, with 20 more attack points, simply take their place. And, all facilitated, invisibly, behind the scenes, via flash firmware technology of which we have not even been advised.

We have some handouts here today that describe in some detail some of the hidden involvements of shadowy, corporate defense and intelligence interests in this very election technology, including five former CIA Directors directly involved in election engineering, both overtly and covertly. Suffice it to say, there is more going on behind the scenes in this high stakes game than it would seem.

I ask the good members of this Commission to consider carefully: Whom do we want in charge of our elections in New Hampshire? Outside proprietary interests? Or, are we, in fact, in control of our own elections in New Hampshire?

Today, we are presented with an opportunity to set firm limits against the incursion of outside interests and suspect technology in our own New Hampshire elections. Let us seize the day and save our state.

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For more information about the perils and underbelly of electronic voting, see the following sites:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org
http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm
http://www.coalitionforvisibleballots.org
http://www.ballotintegrity.org/
http://www.votescam.com
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com
http://www.votersunite.org
http://www.voterescue.org

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*Note: We in New England election integrity circles (3 States, VT, MA and NH) are in possession of clear evidence of the long-time association of LHS CEO/President, John Silvestro, with convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, designer of the highly controversial Diebold GEMS software compiler code/source code, and have made this information available to New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens and others.

While still under oath at the March 10, 2006 Ballot Law Commission Hearing, Mr. Silvestro stated that he does not know Jeffrey Dean, has never met him and has "never even shaken his hand". If Mr. Silvestro wishes, he is, of course, welcome to provide clear evidence to that effect.

http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/2420