Honest elections

Now that would be nice - a look at Broward County, Florida by The Westside Gazette:

Election Data Sits in a Database: County Election Office Is Denied Access
The Supervisor of Election, as defined by Florida statutes, is the custodian of all election documents and records, from voter registration to candidate filings and election results. So, you can imagine my surprise when a senior election office official acknowledged that while they maintain custody of the Microsoft SQL Server database where all votes are recorded, no one in the office can log into the database or query its data.

According to the senior official, Election Systems & Software, the company who owns the election management system software the county uses, refuses to give them a user account. The company says it is a preventative measure to reduce the risk of record tampering, whether intentionally or accidentally. ES&S also issued a mob-like warning: if the election office accesses the database through a backdoor, or other means, the company will automatically revoke all results pending certification and terminate the contract immediately.

And a bit more:

The audit was conducted by the Broward Citizens Audit initiative, a non-partisan group of citizens advocating for integrity and transparency in election results. Despite initial skepticism on both sides, election office leaders and representatives of BCA have been able to find common ground around the issue of accuracy and integrity in the SOE’s results.

This particular meeting was to review some minor discrepancies between precinct tabulator totals and those posted by the SOE, and to get clarity on an answer concerning a data file I had requested. Sharing the results was going to be the easy part. I had no doubt Antonacci and his team would welcome such positive results coming from a group of citizens. What wasn’t going to be easy was hearing them confirm my suspicions about their election database and how results are reported and certified. If what they were saying was true, they were no closer to verifying the results than BCA.

“We can log into the server where the SQL Server database files are located,” said John Wolf, the election office IT Director, “but we don’t have user access to the database.”

I was employed by Microsoft for five years and part of the time was as a member of their SQL Server lab team. I like databases - they are fun to play around with and I have a reasonably good general working knowledge of MS SQL.

The one thing I like about Structured Query Language (SQL) is that it keeps a record of everything. Absolutely everything. Were someone to log into the server and make a change, that act would be recorded. The data prior, the fact that someone logged in, the fact that they changed the data and the new data. Everything would be recorded.

Some more - about the company: ES&S:

In this Information Age, where such terms as open source are part of the common vernacular and users share data across multiple platforms, ES&S clients find themselves locked into a system and contract that equates secrecy with security and views data sharing as a high risk threat. What ES&S is doing is nothing short of unethical and runs counter to industry practices regarding data collection systems.

For years, the company has hidden behind the veil of proprietary rights and patents, when asked to share even the most basic components of their software. But a software company can’t have proprietary rights to a user’s data, and any patented rights surely do not extend to a user’s data.

ES&S is based in Omaha, Nebraska and has nearly 500 employees. The company is owned by the McClatchy Group, a private equity firm, which means their financial records aren’t public. Conservative estimates say the company controls nearly 50% of the U.S. election system market, which equates to approximately 70 million votes processed using any combination of the company’s hardware and software.

The company has a well-earned reputation for routinely filing lawsuits against competitors and election officials when they don’t win contracts or has them taken away. They have even gone so far as to sue voting jurisdictions and groups advocating for greater election security. Not looking to push the issue or make any enemies, Wolf dropped the reporting project and focused on other areas.

Security is definitely one thing - ES&S has every right to protect their intellectual property but, as the author said, the data belongs to the user. ES&S is privately owned, the McClatchy group is a major media outlet and given the inherent bias in the mainstream media, these are people I do not want to have controlling my election data. Their routine use of lawfare points to their having something to hide.

The article goes on to cite several examples of where the results gathered from the individual voting machines differed from the "official" tally by a significant margin. Not good.

Wonder if there is a potential whistleblower in there - this would be an amazing exposé if there was.