That is the second article in a three-part collection on Election Safety.
LACAG and different Louisiana advocacy organizations, together with Residents For Election Integrity, We The Folks Northwest Louisiana, We The Folks Bayou Group, Conference of States, Louisiana Energy Coalition, Louisiana Republican Meeting, Girls’s Republican Membership of New Orleans, and quite a few others have been persistently elevating the alarm about the acute vulnerabilities of ALL computer-based voting methods, together with and particularly Poll Marking Units (BMDs).
The greatest cyber safety specialists in the world have beneficial outlawing their common use as soon as and for all. Alex J. Halderman, arguably the world’s foremost knowledgeable on election safety, informed the Louisiana Voting System Fee that BMDs have critical vulnerabilities that allow extremely subtle cyber hackers to remotely entry the voting machines and change votes from one candidate to one other:
“Common use of BMDs is a main safety problem as a result of if they are hacked they can misprint or alter votes. They are a giant, enticing goal to hackers, making assaults extra seemingly.” Halderman added that “The attackers that I fear about are the attackers like international governments, and very subtle legal gangs, the ones we learn about in the newspapers who commit cyber fraud and manipulation… international governments have tried to penetrate these machines and we have each cause to consider they will in the future.”
Halderman went on to say that “BMDs might be hacked with out being detected.” This actuality is beautiful, and may alarm each voter in America, no matter political persuasion.
None of this is misplaced on President Trump, who has emphatically urged an all-paper poll system.
In his latest tackle to the nation’s governors, together with our personal, Trump reiterated his place in crystal clear phrases.
He emphasised the significance of 4 issues in order to absolutely safe our elections: identical day voting, voter ID, proof of citizenship, and paper ballots. Concerning paper ballots Trump mentioned the following:
“If you went to paper ballots in your voting, and I would hope that each Republican (state) would… it prices precisely 8% of what the machines value… and paper is very subtle at present. It’s known as watermark. It’s inconceivable to copy, inconceivable to cheat…You would save tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, and you would have a a lot safer election…The most safe means that you can safe an election, and in all probability the quickest… is paper ballots. If you actually consider that computer systems work, which they don’t, if you wish to save some huge cash, all you need to do is go to paper ballots.” (Emphasis added).
Clearly, President Trump is not calling for pc voting with a “paper part” generated by a hackable machine (BMD), however an all-paper poll voting system, each as a result of it’s far safer and much inexpensive. Any confusion about the place President Trump stands on that is willful.
The President’s place is at odds with that of Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry, who stays insistent upon investing lots of of hundreds of thousands of tax-payer {dollars} in new voting machines.
In a latest interview with BRProud Information, Landry repeated the hackneyed narrative that Louisiana wants new “machines” with a “paper part” for the voter to evaluation for accuracy.
There are two deadly issues with the “paper part” strategy. First, most voters do not evaluation BMD- printed ballots, and these who do typically fail to discover when the printed vote, i.e. “paper part” is not what they expressed on the touchscreen.
Secondly, even if the “paper part” precisely displays the intent of the voter, there is no assure that the vote can not be manipulated inside of the voting machine the place the vote is recorded.
BMDs are topic to hacking, bugs, and misconfiguration of the software program that prints the marked ballots.
There is merely no means to deter, include, or appropriate pc hacking in BMDs. And, importantly, there isn’t a strategy to decide whether or not manipulation occurred inside the machine.
Why? As a result of the software program is “proprietary”, and solely the producer of the machine is allowed entry to it.
Let that sink in. Americans have a basic constitutional proper to know that their vote is correct and safe, but no one besides the seller who programmed the machine and designed the software program is legally allowed contained in the tent. This is the reason the notion of a dependable machine generated “paper part” is a fiction, and why elections carried out on BMDs can’t be confirmed by audits.
No chief in Louisiana can precisely say that they stand with President Trump on points of profound significance until they stand with him on the most necessary challenge of our day: absolutely securing our voting system via a safe, hand-marked, all-paper poll voting system. It’s time to get transferring. Louisiana voters deserve no much less, and may demand no much less.
J. Christopher Alexander
Louisiana Citizen Advocacy Group www.lacag.org
