1. Why should u care about Georgia’s plan to have voters use hackable $3k electronic pencils? Because GA normalized paperless DREs for the rest of the country by being one of the first to buy them statewide in 2002 & they are about to do the same thing w/ the electronic pencils!
2. Why else? Because there are a lot of great people in Georgia who are rightly concerned that these hackable electronic pencils will mean their votes won’t count, and they need our help!
3. Georgia is about to pave the way for these hackable pencils with the passage of #SB403, a law whose key provision was apparently drafted by ES&S, the vendor of such pencils.
4. If we can help kill #SB403, we may be able to stop the spread of these insecure, expensive devices to other states. So please tune into what is happening with Georgia and #SB403 - this may be our best shot to actually “get ahead” of the voting machine vendors. #PaperBallotsNow
7. PS. GA election history is also fascinating. The ES& Sr. VP pushing hard for this GA bill was previously Georgia’s Elections Dir. where she defeated a voting machine paper trail bill & then promptly took a job with Diebold, GA’s current paperless vendor!
8. As noted, she is now with ES&S on whose behalf she hopes to sell to GA and the rest of America yet another insecure electronic voting device, making for a perfect, horrid kind of loop.
9. By the way, the other state at the forefront of buying hackable paperless DREs in 2092 was MD. So it should come as no surprise that ES&S’s Sr. VP recently persuaded MD to use electronic pencils widely there too (not just for those who are unable to hand mark their ballots).
10. If u read my TL, you will see that the electronic pencil experiment didn’t go so well. But I’m sure ES&S will be back, like some horror movie where the monster keeps returning from the dead.
11. Re: post 9, I meant 2002, not 2092! Walking dog while typing again. Sorry for the typos.
12. And another fun fact: Georgia SOS Kemp, who is pushing HARD for these ES&S electronic pencils, won his first race for office in 2002 on one of those Diebold paperless machines that the ES&S Sr VP helped implement in her capacity as GA Elections Dir. Cozy, huh?
13. And let’s just say that 2002 saw quite a few upset victories in Georgia that favored one party over the other. Voters were infuriated when they realized that with paperless machines it is impossible to conduct a recount!
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14. Having tested these paperless unverifiable machines “successfully” in Georgia, Diebold then rolled them out en made to the rest of the country.
15. So it seems that the same group of vendors (ES&S was founded by Diebold’s long-time Election Division CEO, Bob Urosevich) are using GA and MD again as a testing ground for their latest insecure voting device. If history is any indication, the rest of the country will follow.
16. Our only hope is to actually learn from our miserable experience with DREs and stop the “electronic pencil” train wreck now. Don’t let GA become a guinea pig for hackable election equipment yet again!
17. Re post 14: en masse, not en made
18. The End.
19.
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Study shows that people of all political persuasions are willing to modify their beliefs based on corrective info from reliable sources, but “subjects ‘re-believed’ the false info when retested a week later.” 1/ news.northeastern.edu/2018/06/18/tir…
2/ The author of the article says It may help to warn people in advance that they are likely to forget the correction bc “this helps them mentally tag the bogus information as false.”
3/ It’s also “important that the corrective information be repeated as frequently, and with even greater clarity, than the myth.”
I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings but elections have been electronically suspect starting long before the Trump/Russia scandal. This article is lulling folks into a false sense of security, which is dangerous. Domestic hackers & insiders were always an equal threat. 1/
I agree, tho not enuf time (and 0 political will) to do this in Nov. Wish it were different. For now I hope to stop states from doubling up on electronics w/ touchscreen ballot markers. Using electronics to count votes is bad enuf. Having them mark our ballots too is nuts. 1/
Nuts except for those who are unable to hand mark their ballots. Once you have hand marked paper ballots they can be either scanned or hand counted (my preference) or both. 2/
Any time u put a machine between the voter and the paper record of voter intent there is an opportunity for programming mischief. Here is just the latest example.: 3/
I’m hoping some of the cyber experts who signed the letter about the risks of using cellular modems to transfer election results can answer this question. Thx! @philipbstark@SEGreenhalgh@rad_atl@jhalderm
Seeing as no one has answered yet, I will say that even if the cellular modems CAN be configured to bypass the internet, we should not have to blindly trust that vendors or whoever else is hired to set them up will do that.
Kathy Rogers, the face & voice of @ESSVote, which has installed CELLULAR MODEMS in tabulators in WI & FL, is cozying up to @DHSgov which refuses to advise states to remove the modems despite a letter from 30 cyber experts & EI groups stating it should do so. #CorruptElections 1/
The notion that cellular modems affect only “unofficial” results is bogus bc, among other reasons, in certain jurisdictions, unofficial results become the official results once added to absentees & provisionals—sometimes w/o ever comparing them to the precinct results tapes! 1/
And Wisconsin doesn’t even require that counties publicly post the results tapes so that the public itself can make this comparison! (I don’t know about Florida, Michigan, & Illinois.) 2/
Thus, we must simply trust that someone trustworthy is conducting this due diligence. In Johnson County, Kansas, the County acknowledged that it does NOT conduct this basic due diligence. 3/