The Democratic Party needs to investigate ES&S voting machines.

[UCmeNdc]

1. Find out who really owns the company
2. Who really owns the companies patents and software
3. Make sure all of its machines provide a written, verifiable, paper trail for recounts.
4. Is there any problems within the ES&S machines that would allow vote switching

Just another election issue to look into......

If you want free and fair elections within the USA.

[pwb]

1. The red states I hear use those.

I agree.

[FreepFryer]

2. Former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) is a good place to start (Nt)

[Greybnk48]

44. That is THE place to start, for sure! Chuck Hagel. n/t

[SheltieLover]

3. Agreed!

[secondwind]

4. Whatever happened to the electronic voting machines that Ivanka

has a patent for, that are imported from China.........

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Trademark. Very different from patent. A patent is dependent on high intelligence

It is worth knowing the difference between copyright, trademark, and patent.

All three are about intellectual property, but very different from each other.

[reACTIONary]

18. And, the trademark was...

... just for a Chinese variant of the name Ivanka. It included all sorts of potential products.

I don't see anyone in China buying voting machines name Ivanka. They don't even vote, do they?

[Mister Ed]

5. Manufactured GOP outrage over "election integrity"...

...could help provide the momentum to take meaningful measures. This would be one of them.

Others would include laws to reduce voter suppression and gerrymandering.

[SmartVoter22]

6. No, just because you suggested it.

While conspiracies are rampant, including things like this post, ther are significant steps in designing and developing a ballot reader that this post is making HUGE ASSUMPTIONS with.

Who cares who owns the company? Does Mr Ford make every part and install them on every Ford car?
No, and neither do ballot reading machine manufacturers.

All ballot readers create a paper trail.
or is your 'buzz-word' verifiable, the assumption you're trying at?

Vote switching is as easy as writing Windows10 from scratch.
software is just like a Tweet post? changable anytime by anyone?

Really? While everything was being designed and built, nobody ever tested the software?
and
your questions never came up when governments were approving these ballot readers?

How could we have gotten this far without such brilliant observations? or are these from Parler posts?

[Native]

10. Before you blast a post, you should do some research.

[link:https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting-system-paper-trail-requirements.aspx|

Also, there have been a lot of posts over the years on DU about ES&S, most with links to news articles. All you have to do is Google ES&S on its own or with "ownership" or other tags to find out more, specifically why this OP along with plenty of politicians have major concerns about it.

And did you know that U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg ordered Georgia to retire its old voting machines — which recorded the votes only digitally, with no auditable paper trail — before the March 2020 elections?

Bottom line - virtually no laws govern the cybersecurity aspects of voting machine technologies.

[SmartVoter22]

53. One state no paper trail

One out of 50 states. Louisiana does not require paper trails and uses older machines.
In the 2020 elections, we did not hear of any widespread voting issues, which would have happened if the suggested hacking did occur.
This is not a widespread problem, because there have not been; scientifically repeatable tests showing votes change.Double blind.
Pollworkers are not reporting issues, that a voter would see on the screen, if a choice was changed, before they validated and voted.

What I see in these posts, is speculation, not proof. Proof is easy to find.
Especially in computer code, it must have the famous "if then" step. I see lots of ifs, and no thens.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

11. Cool it. OP did not make the assumptions you are pinning on them, YOU are making a bunch

YOUR post is full of deceptive debating tricks that misdirect and logical fallacies. It doesn't accurately address the OP.

The OP's concern about who owns the company is a valid concern. If I recall correctly, ES&S does have some Republicon connections.

Then YOU use a bogus analogy. A company owner does not need to actually make all the parts and install them to exert control over what is done and how it is done.

YOU are the one introducing "buzz-words", notably the "ballot readers" you focus on.

Then YOU go on to bring in bogus claims about software as if the OP wrote them.
The OP did NOT claim vote switching was easy or just like a Tweet post.
The OP did NOT claim it was changeable anytime by anyone.
Election machine software difficulty is in the middle of the vast range between writing a tweet and writing an operating system.

YOU assume that the only way to switch votes is by rewriting the software system from scratch and then you raise a bogus impossibly high barrier. YOU don't address the issue that a corrupt company can put backdoors and other entries to the software so that corrupt election officials would not have to write any software.

The OP did not claim that "nobody ever tested the software."

YOU are assuming that testing can't be defeated. Perhaps you have forgotten or not heard of how Volkswagen engineers wrote car performance software to detect when an EPA test was in progress and behave differently during the test.

Further, YOU are assuming that the partisans in the affected states would have been entirely hands off with the procurement and customization and testing and validation. Reference the OP's concerns about ownership and who the owners are connected to.

I presume the OP is not limiting it to ballot readers, but also ballot generators and tabulators, since the OP did not mention ballot readers. Some do and some do not make paper trails. I don't have special knowledge about voting machines or ES&S machines, but some of the things you write are bogus on the face of them. I hope YOU are an expert, who have made some sweeping claims. You claim to be an ex election official. In what capacity and how long ago? Do you have software expertise? (I doubt it.) Care to back up your claims with your knowledge about the range of machines they make and the range of machines, ballot readers, and tabulators of theirs that are in use?

In general, some machines report directly to tabulators, some print paper ballots which are then collected and scanned by readers and then tabulated.

For some reason YOU have focused only on the readers, as if that is all there is.

The paper trail that you claim is created by "ballot readers" seems to be a confusion you may have between ballot printers and ballot readers. The ballot printed by a voting machine is a paper trail but it is not one created by the "ballot readers". Readers and tabulators do not in principle have to generate paper trails, but probably some do.

Finally, YOU imputing that the OP has based concerns on a Right Wing web site is a personal attack without foundation.

[brooklynite]

14. No losing candidate, campaign manager or Party leader claims vote flipping...

...except Donald Trump and friends.

[reACTIONary]

21. +100

We need to focus on how to WIN elections, not making excuses about losses.

[Turin_C3PO]

30. Whoops, didn't see your post!

I posted the same thing below.

[jaxexpat]

22. Thanks for that. Impressive job. The interloper appears to have vanished. At least for a while.

[ariadne0614]

28. +1 n/t

[Turin_C3PO]

29. I agree with brooklynite. If vote flipping is an issue

then why aren’t any elected or defeated Democrats demanding investigations? Let’s leave these conspiracy theories to the MAGAts.

[questionseverything]

36. Judge raul did fight his lose in sc but the Democratic Party would not look at his case

They said he lost fair and square to a homeless guy w/o a cell phone

There was no paper to count

Sc has since replaced those machines but there are many of them left

[Hermit-The-Prog]

38. The problems with electronic voting are not "conspiracy theories"; they're about physics.

You cannot have a verifiable election based on abstractions. Human beings need physical tokens they can perceive.

[SmartVoter22]

52. Most states have a paper ballot

that a voter marks, then it is put into a 'ballot reader'.
The ballot reader makes a paper roll of the votes cast.
There is a digital record of each ballot, which can be compared, by hand to the actual paper ballots but is printed at the end of election day.
All counts; voters, ballots issued vs counted, undervotes & overvotes are all recorded.

A simple hand count of the paper ballots does find, and proves the ballot readers are correct.

PS: I have been a pollworker for over a decade. E&S Eagles until 2016 and not one lost ballot, which are all marked by voter only.
I have worked on hand counts of a polling location, a hand recount of a recall election and not one ballot reader came up with different results, in any race on the ballot or final total numbers.

The average voting ward is about 1500 people and you suggest that there is changes, of high enough counts, to flip an election.
A county, which there are over 3700 have dozens of wards, if not hundreds of wards and would have to affect millions of voters in hundreds of wards, in a coordinated real-time flip. It is statistically impossible to happen as you suggest.

[Lonestarblue]

25. Have you ever heard of Diebold and irregularities with the 2004 election in Ohio?

Here’s a link. https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-spectre-still-haunts-ohio-elections

It’s a long article, but it lays out several issues with Diebold voting machines. The issue with the 2004 presidential election was that the head of Diebold was a Republican fundraiser who pledged to help Bush win Ohio. On election day, with many voting machine irregularities occurred in Democratic districts. Diebold and ES&S (Election Systems & Software) later merged and at one point controlled around 80% of all electronic voting.

The linked article gives several examples of unexplained historic Republican wins with these voting machines, as well as last-minute software patches that were not vetted by outside, independent programmers.

It is not conspiracy theory territory to wonder if elections have been stolen through manipulation of machines that had no separate paper trail. We need a federal law that requires every voting system to have a paper backup.

[oasis]

40. Dem. Sen. Max Cleland had concerns about Diebold after his 2002 loss

to Saxby Chambliss in Georgia.

[DFW]

48. My brother does top secret tech projects for DARPA

He told me, referring specifically to Diebold and ESS machines, "give me a laptop and a cell phone, and I'll make any one of those machines give you any result you want, and they don't even have to be connected to the internet."

That was in 2002, and he says their software has barely been updates since then. What they did was to get a court order declaring their machines "private property," only available for forensic examination if the owners gave their consent (they never did). Indeed, there was the famous incidence in Ohio in 2004, when one of the (ESS or Diebold, I forget which) machines in some out-of-the-way precinct DID get forensically examined before the company came to collect it. It gave Bush 3000 votes in a precinct with 600 registered voters. Ohio Republicans called it a "gltch," subtracted 2400 votes from Bush's margin of "victory," and then refused to let ANY of the other machines in Ohio be examined. Ohio, of course, was the deciding state in 2004, and victory there meant Cheney (+Bush) got another term in office, even though all exit polls said Kerry had won Ohio. Never mind that the head of Diebold said he would "deliver Ohio for Bush," and the head of Bush's re-election committe in Ohio was (coincidence!) also Ohio's Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell.

Of course, it could all STILL be a coincidence, and it is theoretically possible that ALL other voting machines in Ohio had no glitches, and that all the exit polls were wrong. But the fact that the Republican manufacturers would not permit verification after such a huge programming "error" rather indicates that the HUGE ASSUMPTION is that there was no Republican interference. The logical answer of a company who had nothing to hide would have been, "be my guest," and not, "get lost, 'cause you ain't lookin' at nuthin' !"

[mezame]

7. YES!

Finally! Much has been made about Dominion, etc., but hardly a peep in the press about ES&S - a company used almost exclusively in red states (like Maine/Collins). For example, in late October 2020 polls, Sara Gideon was "neck and neck" with Susan Collins in Maine, but then Collins won 51-42; and that's a state with ranked-choice voting which should've spelled Collins' doom.

Alison Greene from DCReport starts to lay it out here:

[link:https://www.dcreport.org/2020/12/31/ess-voting-systems-a-friend-to-republicans/|

And the money quote: "Of the 25 states Trump won, all but 3 either partially or fully relied on ES&S machines."

[we can do it]

13. Also used in Ohio, I'm pretty sure.

[DFW]

49. Correct

See my post #48

[Voltaire2]

9. They need to pass the voting bill from last year.

It required auditable paper ballots.

[mezame]

12. Nancy's All Over It

It's coming soon: The Voting Rights Advancement Act (forward march!) AND ...drum roll... The Equal Rights Amendment!

About frickin' time!

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

15. Complete transparency and accountability are all we ask.

Any reputable, on the level manufacturer and marketer of EVM would gladly provide all requested information to the public, and federal government investigators, without hesitation.

Any EVM manufacturer that hides information from the public is suspect. We have the right to see, and know, everything about our voting processes.

If ES&S is hiding something, there is a problem.

[moondust]

16. When they're done with that

maybe they can take a look at the curious July 4, 2018 trip Republican senators made to Moscow. Any chance that involved "strategizing" for elections in 2018 and 2020?

If you want free and fair elections within the USA...

[gab13by13]

20. Republican controlled states that Trump lost are already looking at ways to make it harder to vote.

I voted in Pa. by mail for the first time, I expect that Republicans will pass legislation to stop mail in voting for future elections. We do have a Democratic governor which will help, but they are trying.

[ariadne0614]

27. +1

I make a point of bringing up the Moscow trip every time I call Ron Johnson's office.

[gab13by13]

17. Also, exit polling is a reliable indication of a fair election,

If exit polling is different from machine count it indicates a problem. Are there anomalies in exit polling from sites that use ES&S machines, if so, there needs to be investigations.

Also, Donald Trump gives away what is going on by his use of projection. If Trump says Dominion machines are bad that tells me they are OK, look somewhere else.
Also, it isn't like Republicans haven't been caught before flipping votes, such as 2004 when Ohio votes were routed to a warehouse in Tennessee. The computer programmer who was going to testify about this was on his way to DC to testify when his small plane crashed.

ES&S machines were used in Kentucky where there were possible anomalies.
ES&S machines were used in Florida where races were supposed to be tighter than they were and Republicans were quick with the talking point that Cuban Americans were the reason.

Now is the time to have a look at all our voting machines since Republicans are complaining about them. So, yes, states run elections but I see no reason why we can't have federal standards for voting machines, all brands.

[bearsfootball516]

24. I don't think they're always particularly reliable.

Just look at the Georgia runoffs. The exit polling there showed Perdue/Loeffler running away with it.

[JI7]

31. Because exit polls mainly were same day voters and most people that voted for the democrats did it

by mail while those who voted in person on election day tended to be republican.

[reACTIONary]

34. Considering that there hasn't been...

... any unfair elections discovered, I don't see how you can say that.

Could you provide a proven instance of an election that had been stolen and the exit polls that indicated that was so?

[questionseverything]

37. How would you prove an election was stolen with no paper to count?

Go to bradblog and look at judge raul’s case

[reACTIONary]

47. Exit polling? I don't think that would do it....

The suggestion that exit polling is a reliable way of proving election fraud doesn't seem to have been substantiated in any practical case. I doubt it has been held up in an actual court of law.

After searching a bit I found something called Brad Blog. But an exact link to the Judge Raul case you mention would be helpful.

[questionseverything]

50. ...

https://bradblog.com/?cat=519

https://bradblog.com/?page_id=8954

https://bradblog.com/?p=7896

[reACTIONary]

51. There is nothing about exit polling...

.... in any of the articles you linked. At least the word "exit" is not in them.

From the Wikipedia:

Rawl ran for the Democratic Party's nomination for the United States Senate seat in South Carolina currently held by Republican Jim DeMint. He announced his candidacy in a statewide tour with consultants Harlan Hill and William J. Hampton, kicking off with a rally in Charleston, SC. He was ultimately defeated by Alvin Greene in the June 8 primary in what was widely viewed as a surprising result, given that Greene had little campaign funding and had no campaign staff or website. Rawl filed a formal protest of the official election results. On June 17, 2010, the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party held a formal hearing on the matter. The committee rejected Rawl's request for another primary election, and upheld the June 8 election results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Rawl

So, there was no exit polling and there was no fraud found. How does this help?

[questionseverything]

55. You didn't read the articles

All wiki says is whatever the last idiot posted

[reACTIONary]

56. I didn't find anything specifically about exit polling....

.... help me out, and excerpt a sentence or two about the exit polling so I can find it.

The wiki cites sources:

Toeplitz, Shira (2010-06-18) "S.C. Dems reject Rawl appeal", Politico. Retrieved 2010-06-18.
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/06/sc-dems-reject-rawl-appeal-038704

Kinnard, Meg., The Desert news. Retrieved 2018-11-10.
https://www.deseret.com/2010/6/18/20122179/sc-dems-uphold-us-senate-primary-shocker

[arlyellowdog]

19. A fraudulent election is Trump's only defense

They wanted to delay certification for this reason. With the impeachment coming up, Democrats should not give credence to election fraud. It is Trump’s ONLY defense. Yes, promote paper ballots for future elections, but do not join in the fraudulent election defense.

[gab13by13]

23. I respectfully disagree,

Trump doesn't have a valid defense. Trump's best defense is not election fraud, it is threatening Republicans with primaries if they vote to indict.

We need to have federal standards for voting machines.

Besides, Dominion, which is who Trump is claiming flipped votes has sued Rudy for over a billion dollars, so voting machines are already in the news. The CEO of Dominion was on CNN I think, last night, he said he welcomed discovery looking into his company. Looking at ES&S machines won't do anything to sway Republican votes for indictments, the charge against Trump is for inciting insurrection against the government.

[arlyellowdog]

35. Trump's actual defense is fraud

In the trial, they will argue that Trump knew there was fraud. Threatening Republicans is a tactic. Fraud is what they are actually going to use as a defense. We don’t want to give them the ability to say, “See, the Democrats know there was fraud. The election should not have been certified until there is an investigation as the Democrats want.”

[bearsfootball516]

26. I've actually had firsthand experience working with those machines.

I know this is completely anecdotal, but they've always worked flawlessly in Elkhart Indiana. We had a city council race in Goshen in which the Republican won by TWO votes. With those ES&S machines, the paper ballot is dropped into a lockbox after it's scanned in case a hand recount is needed. When we did the hand recount, the results were exactly the same. The machines had scored the election with 100 percent accuracy.

Like I said, I know it's only one instance, but they've worked perfectly for us.

[reACTIONary]

32. What we need to investigate is...

... how to win elections, not how to make excuses when we don't.

[ananda]

33. Jaime Harrison and Stacey Abrams..

probably know this.

At least I hope they do!

[oasis]

39. Stacey Abrams&Associates likely have them on their radar. nt

[GulfCoast66]

41. We sound as silly when we do this as the whole Dominion thing the nuts are pushing.

But honorable people can disagree.

[questionseverything]

42. Georgia hand counted paper ballots

Plus two machine counts,all gave biden the win......so trump was obviously wrong but

In some of the states that repubs win, it is not transparent counting

All states machines must be double checked on a regular basis (hand counted)

And we not getting that

So isn’t the same

[GulfCoast66]

43. So when democrats win the machines are A-OK

But when republicans win they are suspect?

So how is that different than the whole Qanon thing questioning the ballots counted by Dominion?

Because I really don’t see a difference.

You have presented no evidence. And DU is a fact based community. Not a conspiracy site.

[questionseverything]

45. When the machine is double checked with a hand count,if things are transparent, we can trust that no

Matter who wins

[questionseverything]

46. Stacey fought for those paper ballots in Georgia

And for the hand count audits

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

54. Big equipment maker threatens critics as doubts mount about electronic voting

Princeton University Professor of Computer Science Andrew Appel says security concerns surrounding the ES&S machine are well-founded: "The ExpressVote XL, if adopted, will deteriorate our security and our ability to have confidence in our elections, and indeed it is a bad voting machine." Appel was co-author of an authoritative study of electronic voting that was published last year.

ES&S previously defended their litigious approach, claiming they sue in order to keep competitors honest. But the company has a history of legally threatening election-reform groups and governments choosing not to buy their equipment.
............
However, experts are clear that SMART Elections is "basing their journalism and advocacy on good science." Princeton's Appel, one of the authors of the study "Ballot Marking Devices (BMD's) Cannot Assure the Will of the Voters" disputes the ES&S lawyers: "The ExpressVote XL, if hacked, can add, delete or change votes on individual ballots—and no voting machine is immune from hacking."

https://www.rawstory.com/electronic-voting-2020/

Something stinks.