[no subject]

Hart Intercivic and ES&S Up to no Good
David Allen
I have come into possession of a pair of letters written by a former
Hart-Intercivic technician to the Secretaries of State for Ohio and
Texas. These letters detail a "long history of concealing problems"
and a willingness to ignore potentially serious problems "largely
for the sake of corporate profit".

When I read these letters, I contacted the writer to verify his
story and authorship. The technician verified that he was the author
and that the letters had been sent, but did not wish to have his
name revealed as he had sent the letters privately to the two state
Secretaries. He did not object to the details of the letters being
revealed as he was concerned about whether the matter had been or
would be addressed.

These letters were written the end of July and I held off until now
in order to give the relevant states the opportunity to do the right
thing and investigate these charges. The writer has never been
contacted and I must assume that election officials in Texas and
Ohio just don't care.

The tech worked for H-I for over two years and left voluntarily
because of what he believed to be "criminal fraud, extreme
negligence, and a distinct and troubling pattern of failure to
uphold the public trust both in violations of the spirit of its
contracts [and] also in concealing problems in an industry which so
crucially represents the public interest."

The technician addressed problems in Ohio, which he saw while
working for H-I, and problems in Tarrant County, Texas, which is
where he went to work after leaving H-I.

In Ohio, he is concerned with three main problems:

Fraudulent Acts

- The computer submitted for security testing in Ohio was not the
same as the computers being actually used in the field. EVM vendors
are supposed to provide "production models" of their units so that
they can be evaluated by both InfoSentry and Compuware (the vendors
hired by the state to evaluate the voting machines).

Fraudulent Claims

- H-I's eSlate is billed as storing vote data randomly, so as to
prevent specific votes from being traced to specific people. The
tech says that this is not true and that simple remedial measures
which could have addressed this flaw never made.

- H-I claimed to InfoSentry that it had an "ongoing information
security awareness program" which it did not.

- H-I claimed to InfoSentry that it maintained numerous documents on
information security systems policy for its employees. Our tech was
never able to read any of these documents or even find proof of
their existance.

- H-I told the Ohio SoS that election results are not transmitted
over public networks, which is not true as unofficial results were
transmitted this way. A computer hooked to a public network (like
the Internet) is a system vulnerable to outside attack.

Misleading Conduct

- Compuware claimed that safeguards were in place to prevent H-I
computers from crashing. One would assume that such a claim was
based upon information supplied by H-I. Our source says that systems
crashed still occurred and that the causes were seldom revealed to
the customers.

- Compuware report claims that storage cards containing vote data
cannot be altered using the Windows File System. While true, there
are still many other easily procured tools which CAN be used to
alter the data.

- Compuware claims that error and audit entries are tracked. This is
misleading because only SOME entries are tracked, not ALL.

Since Compuware was supposed to audit H-I software we are left to
wonder about these misleading claims. Either Compuware failed to
look closely at the system or they simply accepted claims from H-I
without question.

Something Rotten in Texas

After leaving H-I, our tech took a job with the Office of the
Tarrant County Elections Administrator, which had equipment from
Hart-Intercivic and ES&S.

Once there, he discovered more of the same problems he had found at
H-I in Ohio, along with shenanigans from repeat offender, ES&S.

What makes the situation scarier is the report of "shockingly
inappropriate management decisions", "unethical decisions and
erratic behavior" by Robert Parten, the Election Administrator.

According to our insider, Parten displayed a "blatant disregard for
election law" and a "poor understanding of and interference with
important technical aspects of the election systems".

Problems observed

- Invalid entries in the audit trail generated by H-I's election
generation software. These problems could have been corrected, but
Parten refused to allow the correction, meaning that any audit of
the voting system would be immediately questioned due to the invalid
entries.

- Public tests of the voting system were conducted improperly. When
problems arose during the tests, they were corrected by altering the
election database, which should have required a repeat of the public
test, which was not done.

- Individuals required to be present to validate testing were not
present for some or all of the tests.

- H-I sold equipment to the (card readers) to the county claiming
that it was faster and would prevent corruption problems with ballot
cards. In fact, internal testing showed that it did neither and
seems to have been sold only to fatten H-I's bottom line.

- H-I sent a poorly trained tech in to do contract support work,
which then had to be corrcted by staff techs.

H-I knew that despite its claims of "triple-redundant vote storage",
problems occurred that still resulted in lost votes. Tarrant County
was never told this until the problems appeared in elections. H-I
then said it could recover lost votes, but that the units had to be
shipped to Colorado to facilitate the repair. This was utter
nonsense and the real reason was to keep the process for recovering
votes secret. At this point, H-I would also reveal that the process
didn't always work.

- ES&S persuaded other counties, and pressured Tarrant Co. to go
along with a plan to force approval by the Texas SoS of uncertified
software patches. The idea was to get enough counties asking for the
patch (with the implied threat that the machines would not function
correctly come election day) that the SoS would feel compelled to
approve the request. This operation was personally conducted by ES&S
vice president Tom Eschberger (the same Tom Eschberger who took an
immunity deal for his involvement in a bribery/kickback scandal in
Arkansas).

- Sensitive computers engaged in vote tabulation were left
unprotected because Parten prohibited the assignment of passwords to
them, claiming such changes a violation of election law.

- Sensitive computers, documentation, memory cards, and software
media were not properly secured or kept track of.

- Anti-tampering devices were used improperly or not at all.

- County IT techs would routinely work on election computers,
installing anti-virus software which caused the machines to crash
due to incompatability with election software. Remote control
software was installed on a computer containing sensitive election
information.

- Tarrant county failed to perform regular and routine backups of
their computers.

- H-I performed fixes of "on the fly" reports during elections, even
while results were coming in.

In summing up his concerns, the tech reports being baffled by
Parten's "continued work with these election companies; even after
admissions of concealing software problems, inappropriate pressure,
hints of backroom deals, and poor support."

I asked him further about "backroom deals" and he replied:

Both vendors would hint at discounts, extra support that might be
available, ES&S drastically cut their price on a software upgrade,
the one I mentioned for the FEB[ruary] election, to try to entice
Tarrant to upgrade further. Nothing dramatic while I was there, but
the staff reported, and other people I've worked with as a Hart
employee have reported that vendors have either made or suggested
things that were inappropriate, or they had heard things and had
reason to believe them. I cannot be more specific here, let's just
say I know for a fact it was happening in the industry, though I
don't know that Hart did anything like that in any specific
situation.

As you know, ES&S has repeatedly been investigated for bribery. In a
competitive market, when a company like Hart loses a deal
unexpectedly, let's just say you hear things. If you want some
concrete example of inappropriate influence, an obvious one, look to
Diebold offering to put offices in counties that bought their
product. It's happened more than once.

Once again, here is a prime example of why our vote should not be in
the hands of private contractors. When you mix greedy and unethical
vendors with clueless or "pliable" public servants, you get a
concoction toxic to democracy.

Texans and Ohioans, you need to get on the phone with your
Secretaries of State and find out what they are doing about this
problem.

Texas SoS
Goeffrey Conner
(800) 252-8683
(512) 463-5650
Fax (512) 475-2811
elections@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Ohio SoS
J. Kenneth Blackwell
(614) 466-2585
election@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Letter to Geoffrey Conner


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Letter to J. Kenneth Blackwell



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Hart-Intercivic has e-voting machines in:

Orange Co. CA
Tarrant Co. TX
Harris Co. TX
Travis Co. TX
Charlottesville, VA
Brazos Co. TX
Boulder, CO
Honolulu, HI
Yakima Co. WA
Catawba Co. NC


Posted by David on Tuesday, September 28 @ 02:22:01 CDT (450 reads)



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