Fool Me Twice (28 page)

Harris sounded the alarm that results reporting will now be redirected to Scytl's centralized privately held server, which is “not just USA-based, but global.”

“Because most US jurisdictions require posting evidence of results from each voting machine at the precinct, public citizens can organize to examine these results to compare with SOE results,” Harris continued. Black Box Voting “spearheaded a national citizen action to videotape / photograph these poll tapes in 2008…. With the merger of SOE and Scytl, that won't work.

“With SCYTL internet voting, there will be no ballots. No physical evidence. No chain of custody. No way for the public to authenticate who actually cast the votes, chain of custody, or the count.”
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By purchasing SOE Software, Scytl has only increased its involvement in the U.S. electoral process, according to MarketWatch.com:

The integration of these two software companies creates the industry leader in the election software market with a full range of solutions covering from Internet voting to election night reporting and online pollworker training, and a strong market presence worldwide.
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In May 2009, Scytl had formally registered with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (AEC) as the first Internet voting manufacturer in the U.S. under the EAC Voting System Testing and Certification Program.
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Also in November of that year, Scytl entered into an agreement with another firm, Hart InterCivic, to jointly market a flexible and secure electronic pollbook purportedly to allow U.S. election officials and poll workers to easily manage the electoral roll on Election Day in an efficient and convenient manner.
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Scytl's ePollBook had already replaced the paper precinct roster in Washington, D.C., During the November 2010 midterm elections, Scytl
successfully carried out electoral modernization projects in fourteen states. The company boasted that a “great variety” of Scytl's technologies were involved in these projects, including an online platform for the delivery of blank ballots to overseas voters, an Internet voting platform and e-pollbook software to manage the electoral roll at the polling stations.
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The states that used Scytl's technologies during the midterms were New York, Texas, Washington, California, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

At least as early as 2008, serious doubts were already being cast upon Scytl's systems. At that time, Project Vote noted that the Florida Department of State commissioned a review of Scytl's remote voting software and concluded, in part:

• The system is vulnerable to attack from insiders.

• In a worst-case scenario, the software could lead to

1. voters being unable to cast votes;

2. an election that does not accurately reflect the will of the voters; and

3. possible disclosure of confidential information, such as the votes cast by individual voters.

• The system may be subject to attacks that could compromise the integrity of the votes cast.

In April 2010, Voter Action, an advocacy group promoting elections integrity in the U.S., sent a lengthy complaint to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission charging that the integration of Scytl systems “raises national security concerns.”
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Voter Action charged that

Foreign governments may also seek to undermine the national security interests of the United States, either directly or through other organizations.

The Voter Action document notes that Scytl was founded in 2001 as a spin-off from a research group at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona,
which was partially funded by the Spanish government's Ministry of Science and Technology. Scytl's headquarters are in Barcelona, with offices in Washington, D.C.; Singapore; Bratislava; and Athens. And the company provides voter services worldwide, including in France, Norway, Spain, India, the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Australia, Britain, Mexico, Switzerland, the Philippines, and Finland.

Just prior to the November 2010 midterm elections, however, the new Scytl electronic voting system in Washington, D.C., was hacked. The D.C. Board of Elections & Ethics, as a program security trial, reportedly had encouraged outside parties to hack and find flaws in its new online balloting system. A group of University of Michigan students then hacked into the site and commanded it to play the University of Michigan fight song upon casting a vote.
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Paul Stenbjorn was the U.S. elections officer who had been deployed in the voting districts that partnered with Scytl during the 2010 midterm elections, and Stenbjorn was directly involved in testing the Scytl system that was hacked. He was executive director of the Board of Elections and Ethics, the independent agency of the district government responsible for the administration of elections, ballot access and voter registration, and he also served as information services manager for the Virginia State Board of Elections.
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After the Michigan students infiltrated the system, Stenbjorn told the
Washington Post
: “The integrity of the system had been violated.” Stenbjorn said that because of the hack, a portion of the Internet voting pilot was being temporarily scrapped. He told the
Post
the security hole that allowed the playing of the fight song had been identified, but it raised deeper concerns about the system's vulnerabilities. “We've closed the hole they opened, but we want to put it though more robust testing,” he said. “I don't want there to be any doubt … This is an abundance-of-caution sort of thing.”
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After the hack, Stenjborn's ethics board decided to relaunch the Internet program under a download-only format, allowing users to access ballots but forcing them to fax or mail them rather than cast a vote online. Still, his D.C. elections board was hailed by the Minority Media and Telecom Council as “[leading] the nation in attempting to overcome the security obstacles and offer e-voting.”
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While on the elections board, Stenjborn
had told the Council that e-voting “is many, many years away, more than a decade, possibly more than a generation away.”

That, of course, is simply not true. Nor is it true that Scytl can guarantee hacker-free election results.

Meanwhile, after the 2010 elections, Stenbjorn retired from his government position and went to work for Scytl.
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Hacking—akin to past election frauds “where the dead cast their votes”—may not be the worst that can happen in November 2012. A mysteriously funded, highly organized effort to secure a place on the 2012 presidential election ballot for a third-party candidate has ties to President Obama and top Democrats.

A group calling itself Americans Elect, or AE, seems designed to appear like a massive, grassroots effort involving millions of citizens acting to draft a third party-candidate. However, the organization's internal voting process has been called into question and there also are concerns AE's by-laws may allow the group's own board members to bypass votes and nominate their own candidate.

AE describes itself as “a non-partisan, non-profit organization founded by Americans from across the political spectrum, who are worried that our nation's deep political divisions keep big problems from being solved.”
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AE sought to hold its own nominating convention on the Internet this June to select an independent presidential and vice-presidential candidate. While it is unclear whether AE will ultimately run an independent candidate in November's election, the organization warrants close observation as it can be called upon in the future to nominate a so-called independent with the intent on splitting the GOP vote. AE is also a case study in how Obama's crafty progressive backers deploy all sorts of electoral schemes to ensure victory at the ballots.

AE reportedly has raised more than $22 million so far and already has been certified to be placed on the ballot in every state in the U.S.
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To get onto state ballots, AE evidenced mass organizing skills, claiming it collected over two million signatures nationwide in its effort to get on state ballots. Two of AE's board members, Kellen Arno and Michael Arno, were paid by the group for helping to run the massive signature-gathering drive via their firm, Arno Political Consultants.
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Arno's firm, APC, has reportedly previously been accused of both forging and fraudulently collecting signatures. In 2004, APC was accused of forging signatures on a petition to legalize slot machines in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.
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The next year, Boston's Fox 25 News ran a feature interviewing paid signature collectors hired by APC through subcontractors. The interview subjects said they were trained on how to trick people into signing a petition using fraud, including by switching the actual petition text after each signature was collected.
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In 2007, APC reportedly hired JSM, Inc., which in turn hired independent contractors, who gave snacks and food to homeless people in exchange for signing petitions and registering to vote.
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Then in 2009, APC gathered signatures to put the Ohio Casino Initiative on the November 3, 2009, ballot, but a subsequent review reportedly found the overall validity of the signatures was certified at just under 51 percent.
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Americans Elect, meanwhile, reportedly had earlier been associated with another group that sought an independent candidate. That organization, calling itself Unity08, eventually suspended operations citing organizing and fund-raising issues.
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Unity08 said it did not back any particular candidate, but two of its founders launched their own national effort to draft New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to run for president. The
Irregular Times
documented how AE and Unity08 shared the same Washington, D.C., address. Previously, Unity08 had shared an address with the Draft Bloomberg Committee.
Irregular Times
also found that the founders of Unity08 “registered the domain name draftmichaelbloomberg.com in 2007 at a time when Unity08 was insisting that it had no candidates in mind.”
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AE's funding has been called into question. In late 2010, AE changed its tax status from a tax-exempt group to what is known as a 501(c)(4), or social-welfare organization, which is not required to show its donor list.
Capital Weekly
reported that prior to the change, in the second and third quarters of 2010, AE's more than $1.5 million in funding came from one person—venture capitalist, Unity08 activist and Obama donor Peter Ackerman. Ackerman reportedly gave AE a total of at least $5 million in seed money.
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Many of AE's other donors are unknown.

AE officials have defended their secretive donor collection practices. “We have to be able to raise significant amounts of money to be able to take on the status quo,” Kahlil Byrd, AE's chief executive officer, told
Mother Jones
last November. Byrd said that if his group would be compelled to disclose its donors, there would be “a chilling effect … on people's willingness to participate in this process.”
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Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, two campaign finance watchdogs, requested in September the IRS investigate Americans Elect, charging it may be violating nonprofit status by function like a political party. But AE's finances are not the only source of controversy.

Mother Jones
reported that AE's Internet voting system has been called into question. Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, a voters' advocacy group, argued AE's reliance on Internet voting is insecure and difficult to audit. “If you allow it to be used in public elections without assurance that the results are verifiably accurate, that is an extraordinary and unnecessary risk to democracy,” Smith says.

Regardless of any improper voting results, there are also concerns that current guidelines would allow AE to anoint its own candidate.
Salon
reporter Justin Elliott noted that candidates chosen by voters must be approved by a Candidate Certification Committee, which according to the group's bylaws consists of AE's board members.
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According to the by-laws obtained by
Salon
, this committee will need to certify a “balanced ticket obligation” consisting of candidates who are “responsive to the vast majority of citizens while remaining independent of special interests and the partisan interests of either major political party.” AE official Darry Sragow also told Elliot that his group's guidelines are subject to change, and went on to defend AE's board:

While we don't mean to put the board in the company of the Founding Fathers, we'd point out that nobody picked the Founding Fathers, either. They took it upon themselves to turn a popular dream into a shared reality. And they, too, had debates over how much control should be centralized. They knew that too much power in the hands of too few isn't real democracy, but that power too diffuse is anarchy.

AE's board includes multiple ties to Obama, but some Republicans also grace the committee, for example former John McCain aide Mark McKinnon, former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, Larry Diamond of the
Hoover Institute, and former director of national intelligence Dennis Blair. Besides Peter Ackerman, an Obama donor who gave money to help start AE, the advisory board includes Lawrence Lessig, an Obama technology adviser.
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Lessig has been mentioned as a future candidate to head the Federal Communications Commission. He is an activist for reduced legal restrictions on copyright material and advised Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.