ES&S for Dummies, 2009: Did Obama really win in 2008? Or did Obama win really, really big?

Last week in his article, The Most Ominous Monopoly (Diebold sale to ES&S), historian Michael Carmichael referred to Election Systems & Software's (ES&S) purchase of Diebold as "the most ominous monopoly in America's long history." Several others have written articles about the negative aspects of this monopoly, including Brad Friedman's Your Once Public Elections & Your Once-Public Elections on ES&S Monopoly Steroids and my own ES&S Acquires Premier Election Solutions. This is just wrong on so many levels.

However, when one considers ES&S' reckless performance as an election provider the real issue is much more basic. Should we even do business with these people? What do you do when a vendor loses your data? What do you do when your vendor sells you inferior products?



Whether you're a day clicker or seasoned techie, what are the first serious things you learn about using computers . . . any computers? . . . . . Check your results. Backup your data. Always. From your precious family photos to nuclear secrets . . . back it up. Check it out. Because if you don't, your computer will hiccup when you least expect it, leaving you in a muddled mess of irretrievable, irreconcilable blips and bleeps. If you're so fortunate as to have no firsthand experience of relying on bad data or computers crashing, you will. At the most inconvenient time. You don't need a degree in computer technology to know these things about your computer. You turn it on. Do your thing. Check it out. Turn it off. It works. And when it doesn't, you've got your backup to move you on to the next go ‘round.


If Joe-the-day-clicker knows these things, how is it ES&S does not? Today, nine years after that first election meltdown, authenticated vote-flipping and result-altering malfunctions are rampant. Election errors continue to roll in as documented by these states during 2009 and/or 2008: AR, AZ, CA, FL, IN, KS, OH, MA, MI, MN, NC, NM, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, WI, WV . . . Some have actual backups in the form of voter marked paper ballots. Others do not. But all incurred errors with their ES&S equipment that changed the final election results.


When Jefferson County, TX reported votes flipping from Obama to McCain on ES&S's touch screens and no fewer than nineteen states reported voting errors on their touch screens and/or other ES&S voting equipment it is evident that ES&S can't or won't produce a solid product. Particularly when considering these 2008 failures represent a long-term pattern of prior election failures, only two of which are listed below:

1.The 2006 Sarasota, FL fiasco that took two years of fisticuffs to conclude in an unresolved fizzle with the usurper holding on to his ill-gotten win. Coincidentally, in April 2009, Saline County, KS discovered that vote-flipping is a known problem affecting 22,619 ES&S iVotronic voting machines. Two years after Sarasota's 2006 lost 18K votes played itself out in the courts, ES&S admitted to touch-screen “calibration drift.” (See iVotronic Touch Screen Errors below.)

2.2004 in Orange County, FL the ES&S vote tabulation program counted backward resulting in a 9,227 vote margin of victory for Senator John Kerry in the precinct-by-precinct results, while the county summary report showed only an 827 margin of victory. Election Problem Log - 2004 To Date.)


How can it be that five years after the highly suspect 2004 election, seven years after Miami-Dade's nightmare, ES&S can't or won't get it right? Voting machines are merely hyped-up PCs, after all. Except these PCs don't need to do a lot of complex thinking. They just need to slurp in a hundred or so ballots, tally the numbers and spit out results.


So if you're the non-techie-and-don't-wanna-be-a-techie-guy, you check your stuff and you Click and Save because that's what the geeks tell you to do. But if you're a real live systems engineer, you've been bitten more than a few times. So for every system you put out there, you design solid recovery into your programs and computer hardware. You plan for every conceivable malfunction from programming to crashing hardware to battery fatigue. And you'd better test it and get it right. Or next time it will be more than data you lose. It will be your job.


Yet that's precisely what the folks at ES&S have failed to do from the beginning, when they foisted those first 7,200 ES&S touch screens on Miami-Dade County, FL. The largest voting machine purchase in U.S. history. (With a little bit of help from their BFF friends: Jeb Bush and one of his running mates, former Secretary of State Sandra Mortham. See Players Play . . . from Bush to Bush). As a question of business ethics, did ES&S know at least some of their machines would fail? How could they not? But if you don't get caught, it can't hurt you. If you don't admit the problem while crossing your fingers, there's a chance your customers won't know. And if they don't know, they'll keep on buying your defective products at a hefty cost to the U.S. taxpayers and all those citizens who toss their democracy away on defective ES&S voting machines.


You don't need a degree in computer technology to know your computer doesn't work. And you don't need a degree in ethics to know you don't want to do business with a company that can't get it right and perpetuates the great cover up. How can we entrust our country to these people?

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Authenticated Election Failures 2008 – 2009:


The number of egregious voting machine errors documented in 2008 and 2009 is literally too numerous to list here. However the following summary highlights some of 268-and-counting ES&S failures as reported to and documented at VotersUnite.org in their interactive Election Problem Log - 2004 To Date.


The intent of this article is to focus on recent ES&S voting related errors, those reported in 2008 and 2009: AR, AZ, CA, FL, IN, KS, OH, MA, MI, MN, NC, NM, PA, SC, TN, TX, WI, WV. If you are interested in errors incurred from 2004 through 2007 or on voting machines manufactured by other vendors, these are available on VotersUnite's Election Problem Log.


States and Counties with Documented ES&S iVotronic Touch-Screen Voting Machine Errors:

1. Saline County, KS. Vote-flipping on the iVotronic touch screen machine. In April 2009, The county discovered that vote-flipping is a known problem that affects 22,619 ES&S iVotronic voting machines, whose screens were made by Bergquist Co. In October 2008, the Brennan Center warned the Secretaries of State in 16 states that the screens had "calibration drift." ES&S admits that calibration may not hold through the entire Election Day.

2. Benton County, AR. iVotronic e-voting machines failed to start up at several polling places. Voters used paper ballots

3. Faulkner County, AR. The iVotronic touch screen "voter-verifiable paper trail" did NOT match the electronic count. When early voting data was uploaded from the iVotronic touch screen to the Unity election management system, the system doubled them. White County, AR.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/ES-S-for-Dummies-2009-Di-by-Lani-Massey-Brown-090924-35.html

We should start paying attention to this now. They're sure to try and steal 2010.

I have lived in fear of voting machine fraud since Bush was placed in office in 2000. As a result, even though I was originally a Dean supporter, I worked extra hard for Kerry in 2004 because none of the problems had been corrected. When Kerry still "lost" in Ohio, I figured that whatever Democrat ran in 2008 had to win by a huge margin in order to be declared the winner. I worked my ass off for Obama because I knew this. I don't believe the election was anywhere near as close as reported or Obama would have had it stolen from him, too. His numbers were definitely too big to fail.

In case this is needed: :sarcasm:

years on making any changes in our election processes in order to make it fair and undeniably accurate. We can do it but congress doesn't lift a finger. Why? The answer is unfortunately obvious but we need to make noise about this.

Those who are against fair and accurate elections reveal their willingness to be corrupted and sell out the public for private interests.