“Although all electronic election equipment is vulnerable, e-poll books are particularly risky bc they often rely on a wifi connection or bluetooth. In LA County, e-poll books supplied by Knowink, whose products are in about 25 states, caused chaos...1/ https://thedailyedge.substack.com/p/hacking-our-democracy
...due to massive connectivity problems. Georgia also had significant problems with its Knowink electronic poll books, both during a test election and during the recent primary. “ 2/
“I also find it disconcerting that Knowink’s managing director...is a former Republican election official & that its product developer...once campaigned for Ed Martin, who is now President of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, which opposes the Equal Rights Amendment. “ 3/
“In December 2019, cybersecurity journalist Eric Geller reported that Knowink ‘uses ‘1234’ as the tablets’ default password,’ which he described as a ‘major security risk, given that the devices (which handle voter data) often connect to the internet.’” 4/
“The next largest electronic pollbook vendor in the US. is probably Tenex. In 2015, Tenex pollbooks deleted up to 4,000 Ohio voters in Hamilton County due to a reported programming error.” 5/
“‘The big blunder was the programming error. It happened when someone with Tenex Software Solutions, the company that was paid $1.2 million to create the new system, entered the wrong date as the cut-off for voter registration.’” 6/
The entire state of Kentucky (home ig Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul) is supposed to use Tenex e-pollbooks in 2020, although I’ve heard through the grapevine that some counties refused. 7/
Despite the risks, “electronic poll book use is on the rise. According to the 2018 Election Administration and Voting Survey, ‘26.2% of jurisdictions nationwide reported using e-poll books, representing a 48% increase in e-poll book usage since the 2016 election.’” 8/
“And according to @BrennanCenter, as of October 2018, thirty-four states used electronic poll books ‘in at least some polling places, and six states — Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Utah — use[d] them statewide.’” 9/
“The Brennan Center says that ‘All polling places using electronic pollbooks shld have paper pollbooks ready in case of system malfunction,’ but ‘of the 34 states that use [them], only 1/2 require paper backups to be present in every polling place at the time voting begins.’” 10/
“Traditionally, electronic poll books were used only as an adjunct to the voter registration system.“ 11/
“But a disturbing new trend has emerged over the past several years, which is to use these often internet-connected e-poll books to encode the activation cards that are used to activate new touch screen voting machines known as universal use ballot marking devices (BMDs).” 12/
“This opens a potential pathway for internet hackers to disrupt not only the electronic poll books themselves, but also the voting machines. I wrote about this concern in my recent piece for @WhoWhatWhy.” 13/ https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-everything-easy-including-hacking/
“Moreover, the paper printouts generated by these new “BMD” voting machines put votes into barcodes. Although the printout also includes human readable text, the only part counted as your vote is the barcode, which voters can’t read.” 14/
“Proponents of these systems sometimes claim that the human readable text can in theory be used to conduct a manual audit or recount. But state laws don’t always back that up (see, e.g., Georgia)...” ⬇️ 15/
“... and if voters don’t notice BMD-induced changes or omissions in the text, no manual recount or audit... can correct that.” A recent study shows that 93% of changes or omissions in the human readable text are missed by voters.“ 16/
“This is likely especially true for down ballot races, including races for state office, which is very alarming, as state lawmakers will vote on the maps that decide who will control the House of Representatives for the next decade.” #redistricting 17/
State lawmakers “also will vote on whether to conduct an Article V Convention of States, which the GOP has been pushing for many years with an aim to amend the U.S. Constitution and thereby enshrine permanent minority rule.” #NoConCon 18/
“Even without these auditing issues and the potential for hacking, BMDs (like all electronic equipment) have a propensity to break down. Most of them are supplied by ES&S or Dominion Voting, which collectively account for more than eighty percent of U.S. election equipment.” 19/
“For in person voting, I much prefer hand marked paper ballots, which do not have to be activated, do not put votes into barcodes, do not break down, and can’t be hacked.” 20/
To be continued. Or you can read the article! It’s in post 1. GNite :-) 22/
You can follow @jennycohn1.
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