Excerpts from: Can we count election results... by Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet
Covertly, there was not just the open question of whether Russia would hack into election computer systems—voter rolls is one system, vote counting machinery another—but some real evidence that it might have happened in North Carolina.
What people heard about were scrambled voter registration database files in Democratic stronghold counties. What they didn’t hear about but what alarmed some computer scientists who track voting machinery, was the vendor that maintains North Carolina’s voter files was in all probability the “unnamed” Florida-based company hacked by the Russians. You can be sure nobody is quarantining those computer systems for immediate examination by computer security experts.
Jonathon Simons ...calls this one-way pattern the “red shift.” The bottom line, he said, is that both data sets—the exit polls released in real time on Tuesday, not “adjusted” later on to match the vote count, and reported results from election officials—cannot be reconciled. One has to be wrong, which raises questions about the polling, the machinery’s accuracy or vote count tampering. But without a transparent vote-counting process, people with questions run into a brick wall.
“We call a shift towards Republicans a 'red shift,' and a shift toward Democratic candidates a 'blue shift.' We are seeing no blue shifts in this election,” Simon wrote Friday. “This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging, but in this case even more dramatic than usual.”
“With all that has been said and written about the vulnerability of the computers that count our votes in secret, one must ask why these votes and states shifted?” he continued. “And why the outcome-changing results are simply accepted as accurate and honest. There is every reason to investigate and then recount key states by hand where possible. This is too often not possible, because some of these results come from paperless, touchscreen computers. And even where possible, with optical scanners, it is just not done.”
Excerpts from a Steven Rosenfeld Interview with Jonathon Simon
SR: Let's go through this piece by piece, because it's a lot for people to really understand. You get the raw state-by-state exit polls that are commissioned by a big consortium of national media organizations. What did you find this year, that happened this week? What do you see in the raw data?JS: Of course, we don't get the raw data. The raw data would be... we have three definitions here. There's raw data, which is the actual questionnaires and the simple numerical toning up of answers on the questionnaire. That is never publicly released. It's if you want to characterize it as such, it's what's inside the sausage of exit polls, and we are not privileged to see that. I've had one opportunity in my life through an inside source to actually look at some of the raw data, but that's a very rare thing. It's not generally accessible to the public. Many of us have clambered for the public release of that raw data, certainly in the aftermath of the 2004 election and have been denied it.
just in this particular election, they bought machines in Ohio that had a feature in them that was basically capable of self auditing. It was a security feature. The Republican secretary of state of Ohio allowed the counties to switch off that feature. You have to ask why. You bought it and it had that feature. They said, Well, it would create chaos. You look at things like that and say hmm. You scratch your head and say, what is going on here? What may be happening in that darkness of cyberspace that the exit polls are giving us a pretty good hint about, but the vote counting system itself completely conceals?
The fact is, we are denied, when I saw we, the candidates, the public, very often election administrators, by the rules of their states, are denied access to the actual hard evidence we call it, that would allow a determination of whether the election has been accurately counted or perhaps has been illegitimately counted and manipulated. As a matter of fact, in quite a few states and usually under Republican control, but the Democrats have not been tremendously cooperative about this either. The trend has been for ballots to be removed from public record status so that they are no longer susceptible to four-year requests and similar public information requests, Freedom of Information Act requests. They are getting less transparent, not more so.
What we're left with is a system that was accepted more or less without real proof.
If that's what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, Yeah, I'm going to vote or I'm not going to vote. It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observe the counting of the votes so we don't have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear them shred the ballots, comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we've got now and it's what we've accepted. We spend more money in two weeks in Iraq then would cost us for 30 years to hand-count our elections.
