- Who makes the vote-counting machines.
- Rothschilds Family, part owner of Largest Voting machine Co.
- Smartmatic Voting Machines in 16 States Tied to George Soros Ally.
- Why more than 130,000 new voting machines could lead to more distrust in the 2020 presidential election results.
- THE VOTING MACHINE MONOPOLY — IS THIS ANY WAY TO VOTE?.
- Election Systems & Software, Inc. - Company Profile.
New Voting Machines For The 2020 Presidential Election
By Savannah Tribune | on September 18, 2019
By Mercedes Hopson, SSU Student Intern
New voting machine with paper ballot receipt
With
the new 2020 presidential election approaching, Georgia has decided to
make new changes to their voting machines. Unlike usual voting machines
that have been used in the past by Electronics Systems & Software,
Georgia is now in the process of implementing new voting machines and a
new system for the 2020 presidential election. After being awarded
30,000 new machines under a $107 million contract by Dominions voting
system, the new machines are gearing towards providing a more secure
voting experience and assure voters that their vote is accurate and
accounted for.
One of the biggest changes with the new voting
machines is the combination of touchscreen and paper ballots. In the
past, voters would electronically cast their votes. They select the
“cast ballot” option and rely on the machine to correctly submit their
vote. With the new system, it will now say “print ballot.” The machine
will then print out a paper ballot as a receipt, and scan into the
tabulation machine. This will show that the person’s vote has been
submitted and that their candidate selections are correct. It will also
allow tellers to have an accurate count on the presidential candidates.
The paper ballots will then be locked away in a ballot box for future
use like audits or recounts.
Antwan Lang, a member of the Chatham
County Board of Elections, said, “The machines will not be implemented
until March 2019. Until the primary presidential election, we will
continue to use the DRE voting machines for the General Election runoff.
Once we have confirmation that the machines are ready, is when they
will go into operation.” The machines are currently being tested to
insure accuracy. In the past, there have been many issues regarding the
old voting machines. Many voters reported that there were glitches
during the voting process causing them to select a candidate they did
not desire. This is a major issue for many reasons, one being that
candidates are being wrongfully voted into office. Another major issue
voters encounter is no written confirmation of how their vote was
successfully submitted. With the new machines being implemented, this is
a hurdle that can be overcome.
The new voting machines will have
their first trial run in November 2019 during local elections in six
counties that are not currently specified. Once they have been cleared
and ready for use, they will be provided statewide during the
presidential primary election in March. Dominion is looking forward to
having a safe and secure 2020 presidential election.
For
more than 40 years, Election Systems & Software has helped election
officials run successful and secure elections. Today, our products and
solutions continue to capture accurate voter intent, reduce waste,
improve accessibility, and protect elections from outside threats. 
https://www.essvote.com/about/management-team/
How Are Ballots Counted?
Have
you ever wondered what the deal is with the barcodes that surround the
edge of your ballot, or in some instances, are at the top of your
ballot?
Election Systems & Software
Election Systems & Software (ES&S) is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services.[1] The
company's offerings include vote tabulators, direct-recording
electronic (DRE) machines, voter registration and election management
systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, Ballot on Demand
printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.
ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group, LLC.
In 2014, ES&S was the largest manufacturer of voting machines in
the United States, claiming customers in 4,500 localities in 42 states
and two U.S. territories.[citation needed] As of 2014, the company had more than 450 employees, more than 200 of whom are located in Omaha.
Michael R. "Mike" McCarthy (born August 27, 1951, Hancock, Iowa) is an American businessman. He is the co-founder and chairman of the McCarthy Group, LLC, and of McCarthy Capital Corporation,[1] an investment firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, which manages more than US$1 billion in assets. Election Systems & Software is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group, LLC
In 2014, ES&S claimed that "in the past decade alone," it had installed more than 260,000 voting systems, more than 15,000 electronic poll books, provided services to more than 75,000 elections. The company has installed statewide voting systems in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.[citation needed] As of 2019 ES&S claimed a U.S. market share of more than 60 percent in customer voting system installations.[2]
The
company maintains 10 facilities in the United States, two field offices
in Canada (Pickering, Ontario; and Vancouver, British Columbia) and a
warehouse in Jackson, Mississippi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Systems_%26_Software
Rothschilds Family, part owner of Largest Voting machine Co.
by xxWednesday Nov 6th, 2002 6:01 PM
The Rothschilds are part owners of voting machines.
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Soros-Connected Company Has Provided Voting Technology In 16 States
DAVID KRAYDEN OTTAWA BUREAU CHIEF | October 18, 2016
Smartmatic, a U.K.-based voting technology company with deep ties to George Soros, has provided voting technology in 16 states including battleground zones like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Other jurisdictions affected are California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin.
Its website includes a flow-chart that describes how the company has contributed to elections in the U.S. from 2006-2015 with “57,000 voting and counting machines deployed” and “35 million voters assisted.”
After this report’s publication, Smartmatic updated its website to remove the flow chart and declare that “Smartmatic will not be deploying its technology in any U.S. county for the upcoming 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.”
In 2005, Smartmatic acquired Sequoia Voting Systems, a California-based Company that had been automating US Elections for over a century.
By combining Sequoia’s extensive experience in the US market with its own technological, logistical and operational capacity, Smartmatic became one of the top US election technology and services provider.
In less than one year Smartmatic tripled Sequoia’s market share, offering a portfolio that included innovative technology, consulting and top-quality services, plus an unrivaled flexibility to customize its solutions to meet the client’s needs.
In the US, Smartmatic offered technology and support services to the Electoral Commissions of 307 counties in 16 States:
ArizonaIn 2006, Smartmatic signed what at the moment was the largest election automation contract in US history – Cook County, Illinois.
California
Colorado
District of Columbia
Florida
Illinois
Louisiana
Michigan
Missouri
New Jersey
Nevada
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Virginia
Washington
Wisconsin
In 2007, Smartmatic announced the sale of its subsidiary Sequoia Voting Systems to a group of private U.S. investors. Sequoia was Smartmatic's election systems unit for the United States of America.
Since the sale of Sequoia, Smartmatic has only participated directly in a few election projects (e.g. Utah Republican Caucus, a pilot in California or a pilot in the City of Richmond).
Smartmatic is not deploying its technology in any U.S. county for the upcoming 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.
In 2005, Smartmatic bought-out California-based Sequoia Voting Systems and entered the world of U.S. elections.
According to Smartmatic’s website, “In less than one year Smartmatic tripled Sequoia’s market share” and “has offered technology and support services to the Electoral Commissions of 307 counties in 16 States.”
In 2007, Smartmatic announced the sale of Sequoia “given the difficult climate in the United States marketplace, tainted by a non-stop debate against foreign investment, especially in the election technology area.”
It also lists Cook County, Illinois as another success story, when in “in 2006, Smartmatic signed what at the moment was the largest election automation contract in US history.” Cook County includes Chicago and its suburbs, a geographic zone that has historically and lately been subject to criticism for voter fraud.
The chairman of Smartmatic is Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, who sits in the British House of Lords and on the board of George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. He was formerly the vice-chairman of Soros’s Investment Funds and even the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations when he worked as chief of staff to Kofi Annan.
Malloch-Brown’s resume includes stints as vice-president of the UN World Bank and in British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
In addition to a close relationship with Soros, Malloch-Brown has worked with consulting firms that are well-connected to Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was an international partner with the Sawyer-Miller consulting firm and was a senior adviser to FTI Consulting.
One of Sawyer-Miller’s alumni is Mandy Grunwald, who ran the firm’s communication contract for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run. She was also the head of communications for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.
Jackson Dunn, who is a senior managing director with FTI Consulting, spent 15 years in Washington where he worked as an aide to President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hilllary Clinton.
Smartmatic has already encountered controversy in the ongoing presidential contest. It ran the online balloting for the Utah Republican caucus last March, when many critics said it was impossible to secure personal electronic devices that are used to register and vote.
This report has been updated to include statements by Smartmatic after publication.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200205225100/https://dailycaller.com/2016/10/18/soros-connected-company-provides-voting-machines-in-16-states/
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Why more than 130,000 new voting machines could lead to more distrust in the 2020 presidential election results
October 9, 2019By Steven Rosenfeld -- Independent Media Center
Those key issues concern the transparency of voting and counting votes, whether reported election results can be double-checked and what role local election boards should play after Election Day to judge voter intent on ballots during challenges and recounts.
The boosters of these new voting machines, called ballot-marking devices (BMDs), say that these touch-screen computers printing completed ballots will make voting simpler and more trustworthy. They say that is especially true for infrequent voters and voters with disabilities. They also say that automating ballots will end vote-counting fights—because printing completed ballots will eliminate that jury-like process, which BMD salesmen tout.
“Recount lawyers love hand-marked paper ballots and we are eliminating that [scrutiny] with this system,” said Mac Beeson, a regional vice president with Election Systems and Software (ES&S), at a recent demo in North Carolina. ES&S is the U.S.’s largest election vendor and has sold 67,000 new BMDs. “That’s a much bigger deal than [using] bar codes [on the ballot summary cards], I can promise you that… Voter intent is a major, major issue.”
“Everybody is saying, ‘Oh, just do a risk-limiting audit, that will take care of it,’” said Philip Stark, a UC Berkeley mathematician who created that statistical process a dozen years ago (which some states are piloting and requiring in new laws). Outside experts have cited similar methodologies to verify election results on BMDs.
In other words, Stark is saying that these new systems might report that all of their records and counting were consistent, “but you will still have zero evidence of whether the printout reflects voter intent. You don’t have what the voter did to look at it.”
Voting Is Changing
These diverging views are not a mere clash of priorities. Access, efficiency, observable and verifiable outcomes are all issues that impact how elections are run and seen—including what evidence can be shown to winning and losing sides to legitimize results.
This summer, Georgia, South Carolina and Delaware chose new ballot-marking device systems for their entire states. Georgia will buy 30,000 machines. Pennsylvania’s biggest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, might soon have them. Los Angeles replaced its countywide system with 31,000 customized BMDs. A quarter of North Carolina’s counties must select a new system for 2020’s primaries, and most appear to be picking BMDs.
Most of the opposition to BMDs has come from election integrity and civil rights activists who say these systems are not sufficiently trustworthy, which is their bottom line. Printing a ballot summary card with bar codes or a QR code to record votes is not transparent, even if there also is a readable printed text of the voter’s choices below. Voters might review the readable text, but scanners analyze the bar or QR codes to tally votes, which is not the same baseline.
Critics also cite academics like Stark and computer scientists who say that hackers could secretively re-program the software running the new systems to print one set of votes on paper summary cards, but present another set of votes when submitting its totals.
“Have you heard of the expression ‘software-independence’ in voting systems?” Stark said. “The idea is that if there is a problem with the software, even if you don’t detect the problem, you can know that there is a problem with the [reported] outcome. Using BMDs basically makes voting systems not software independent, because as a practical matter, altering the software in a way that allows votes and the outcome to be altered cannot be detected. There is no mechanism to detect it.”
As expected, BMD vendors say hacking scenarios are unrealistic. Meanwhile, some nationally known independent election policy experts in non-profit circles and academia, who have no financial stake in BMD sales, have recently been saying that these systems can be audited and have other benefits—namely enlarging turnout among infrequent voters and unrepresented communities. These experts have begun to work with states buying BMDs to create new policies and procedures surrounding this technology.
Notably, these independent experts say that the most frequent anti-BMD argument is based on a “mistaken” premise. They say that there is no difference between the way a precinct scanner reads a paper ballot that has been hand-marked or printed by a computer. In short, they contend there’s no difference in these records.
“A hand-marked paper ballot is just a hand-drawn bar code,” said David Becker, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Election Innovation and Research, a non-partisan non-profit. “A voter might see a mark next to a vote, but that mark means nothing until a computer, which has been programmed to do so, associates the coordinates of that mark on a piece of paper with a vote for a particular candidate.”
In other words, the vote-counting process begins with a scanner creating a digital image of the ballot. Software then analyzes that image as a grid—to associate the location of marks on the page (by pens or via bar codes) with candidates and ballot measures.
“This is how a ballot is tallied whether it uses a bar code or not,” Becker continued. “We use systems like these because we demand fast and accurate vote tallies, as we should. And machines can count ballots more accurately and quickly than people.”
Becker is an ex-Justice Department voting rights litigator who then created a non-profit that has helped states to register around 10 million new voters nationally. He said the anti-BMD activists “are mistaken in thinking that if they mark something by hand then that is the vote, when, in fact, that hand-marked ballot is machine counted using computer code, just like a machine-marked ballot.”
Becker does not oppose hand-marked paper ballots, but said they are “more likely to have errors or mismarks, and are more likely to make voting difficult for people with disabilities and [for people primarily speaking foreign] languages.”
Another pro-BMD argument concerns infrequent voters. Whitney Quesenbery, co-director of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Civic Design and a ballot design expert, is finishing a soon-to-be-published report that will conclude key cohorts of infrequent voters are more confident using BMDs than hand-marking ballots.
“What do people trust?” Quesenbery asked. “They trust that they know how to hand mark a ballot. This turns out to be quite inaccurate if you look at the residual vote rate [voting more than once in a race or skipping it]. It’s one or two percent. And then if you look at when there’s a particular usability problem [confusing voters], it shoots up to percentages that affect election results. So people shouldn’t trust themselves so much.”
A Deepening Divide
This divide over BMDs is not merely philosophical. While opponents have been trying to stop states and counties from buying these devices and instead acquire systems built around hand-marked ballots, a different cadre—including Becker, Quesenbery and the national advocacy group Verified Voting—has been working with officials buying BMD-based systems to create new protocols to attest to their results.
Another expert supporting BMDs is Rice University’s Dan Wallach, a computer scientist specializing in voting systems. In August, he wrote a paper criticizing Stark’s opposition to BMDs and suggested that a variation of the auditing approach that Stark pioneered—called risk-limited audits—could verify BMD results. Becker said he expected Wallach’s method to be tested in 2020.
“My essay considered a new sort of audit I called a ‘live audit,’ where trained auditors will exercise a BMD, selected randomly, with a pre-made script of choices, and will then examine the output of the machine,” Wallach said. “They would examine the human-readable parts as well as the bar codes, to ensure that both match up to what the script had them enter in the machine. Even one counter-example is evidence of a serious problem and would set off suitable alarm bells and emergency procedures.”
Stark called this approach “wishful thinking” on many levels, which he enumerated in a recent scholarly article.
“Yes, you can do a risk-limiting audit on the [ballot summary card] paper,” he said, referring to statistically sampling randomly pulled printouts and comparing their votes to larger electronic tallies.
“The question is: What does that show?” Stark asked. “That shows that the paper was tabulated correctly. It doesn’t show that the [election] outcome was right. The whole point of all of this is to correct the outcome if the outcome is wrong. But once you have separated the evidence from what the voter [physically] did, it can no longer offer that guarantee.”
These diverging views will not be reconciled. Moreover, they are likely to split election advocates who focus on verifying votes into two camps. This debate not only affects whether voter’s choices can or cannot be double-checked at the starting line of voting—at the precinct level—but what evidence local election officials can evaluate at the finish line, in challenges and recounts.
Unexpected Consequences
Chris Sautter, an adjunct professor of election law at Washington’s American University and a longtime expert on post-Election Day procedures, said the arguments over BMDs are not new, but will likely lead to doubts about outcomes in very close contests.
“These arguments for BMDs are the same arguments that were used first for computer punch cards [which caused problems in Florida’s 2000 presidential election] and then for DREs,” he said, referring to the entirely paperless systems now being replaced.
“Each time when these systems crash—and inevitably they do—and there is an election outcome in doubt, there is no way to figure out what really happened—who the true winner is,” Sautter said. “That happened in numerous instances with DREs and it will occur again with BMDs further undercutting confidence in elections.”
The opponents of recounts exaggerate the number of genuinely disputed ballots, he said, adding that some states, like Virginia and Minnesota, have established standards to review disputed ballots. In contrast, he said there is no obligation for states to undertake audits, which is a different process and often is not done until after winners are certified—making their findings academic.
“Our entire system of jurisprudence is based on the right to review and the right to appeal an adverse decision,” he said. “BMDs, just as their predecessor the DRE, eliminate a fundamental American right to meaningful review.”
Debate and controversy over election technology, election results and proof of unpopular outcomes are as old as America itself. No matter what any faction or interest says, they are not disappearing as the newest generation of voting machinery debuts in 2020.
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/why-more-than-130000-new-voting-machines-could-lead-to-more-distrust-in-the-2020-presidential-election-results/
THE VOTING MACHINE MONOPOLY — IS THIS ANY WAY TO VOTE?
SEPTEMBER 22, 2020 | WHOWHATWHY STAFF
“Is This Any Way to Vote?: Vulnerable Voting Machines and the Mysterious Industry
Behind Them” by Celeste Katz Marston and Gabriella Novello. Photo credit: WhoWhatWhy
A tiny group of companies has become dominant in the field of voting equipment, in part because they are deeply engaged in setting up the rules that govern who can enter the marketplace.
For a system directly used by so many people — nearly 137 million Americans voted in 2016 and more than 122 million voted in 2018 — it might be surprising that there are not more players in the election equipment business.
The players we do have? The Big Three: Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart Intercivic.
By far the dominant supplier of voting equipment in the United States is ES&S. ProPublica reported in 2019 that ES&S controlled around 50 percent of the market. In the past several years, ES&S has established its presence in places including Pennsylvania, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, and Wyoming.
Dominion Voting Systems claims to have been around for more than a century. It counts many counties in New York state among its clients, as well as having a presence in Illinois, Nevada, Louisiana, and, outside of the US, in Canada, Mongolia, and the Philippines.
A profile assembled by Dun & Bradstreet said Dominion makes special hard- and software used in 22 states, in addition to Canada and other countries. They produce optical ballot scanners and vote tabulators, voter list generators, election management software, and electronic ballot systems for absentee voting.
In 2019, the company found itself the target of activists’ concerns after the state of Georgia contracted to use its Dominion ImageCast X Voting System, which WhoWhatWhy has reported as “a type of ballot-marking device [that] allows voters to mark a ballot on paper or electronically, but produces a summary count of votes on a QR code rather than a human-readable paper list.” Unlike conventional paper lists, the QR codes can’t be read by poll workers and can only be tallied by Dominion’s machines.
Hart InterCivic is the third, and provides paper ballots, precinct digital scans, electronic poll books, election night reporting, supplies, and printed ballot products. Hart does business in places including Tennessee, Texas, California, Missouri, Idaho, and Oregon.
Photo credit: WhoWhatWhy
During the 2018 midterms a number of “straight-ticket” voters complained that Hart’s eSlate system had switched their choices to the opposite party. The complaints to the Texas secretary of state’s office recalled similar complaints that had cropped up in Texas a decade earlier.
So, how did The Big Three achieve this near-monopoly?
It’s been feast or famine for the companies that produce the machines, says Tammy Patrick, the senior adviser to the Democracy Fund, a bipartisan foundation that promotes advances in election administration.
Building a relatively impregnable, affordable, easy-to-use voting machine is difficult, and the companies who have already cornered that market are not anxious to share the wealth.
Before the 2000 elections, most vendors sold equipment on a rolling basis as districts replaced aging machines.
“One year they were in Nebraska,” said Patrick, “the next year, it might be Minnesota.”
In the wake of the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential elections, however, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which created new election standards to help prevent meltdowns similar to the one that plagued Florida. With the changed requirements, election commissions across the United States were suddenly forced to buy new voting equipment at roughly the same time. That resulted in a temporary sales bonanza. Once the sudden demand had been met, however, sales numbers dropped and remained stagnant for nearly a decade.
“That’s a huge shift in a market,” Patrick said. Smaller vendors either dropped out of the market completely or were taken over by the bigger players.
The market for new voting machines is relatively small — about $300 million.
“It’s highly regulated, and there aren’t very many opportunities to sell new equipment. So for new companies, it’s really not a great business to get into,” said Ben Adida, executive director of Voting Works, a nonpartisan nonprofit that makes machines and software to conduct and audit elections.
During the last proposed rulemaking process, “The largest spenders came in with their lobbyists,” said Gregory Miller, CEO and co-founder of the Open Source Election Technology Institute (OSET), “and they essentially helped craft the regulations that are known today as the HAVA regulations.” It was obvious, at least to Miller, that the lobbyists would make certain that the new rules served their company interests.
“They create[d] barriers to entry,” Miller said. Mostly, this was accomplished by creating high switching costs, which meant each player was almost guaranteed to keep its customer base, according to Miller.
“A perfect example of a ‘barrier to entry,’” Miller said, “is to institute a federal certification program.” That alone can become “incredibly costly,” he said. Developers need enormous amounts of cash if they want to even begin to break into the marketplace.
Miller also said that if a state government wants to switch systems, they’re “going to have to figure out how to take all of that data and either reverse engineer it or rewrite it.”
Bottom line: Building a relatively impregnable, affordable, easy-to-use voting machine is difficult, and the companies who have already cornered that market are not anxious to share the wealth.
Excerpted from Is This Any Way to Vote?: Vulnerable Voting Machines and the Mysterious Industry Behind Them by Celeste Katz Marston and Gabriella Novello. Available on Amazon and at WhoWhatWhy, starting Sept. 29. Find out everything you need to know about voting machines, from how they work, to who owns them, to how easily they can be hacked.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/09/22/the-voting-machine-monopoly-is-this-any-way-to-vote/
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from puzzle shapes, ES&S / Wikimedia, PR Newswire, and PR Web.
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ELECTION SYSTEMS & SOFTWARE, INC.
Active Omaha, NE
(402)593-0101
Election Systems & Software, Inc. Overview
Election Systems & Software, Inc. filed as a Foreign Limited Liability Company (LLC) in the State of Texas on Monday, November 28, 1994 and is approximately twenty-six years old, as recorded in documents filed with Texas Secretary of State. A corporate filing is called a foreign filing when an existing corporate entity files in a state other than the state they originally filed in. This does not necessarily mean that they are from outside the United States.
https://www.corporationwiki.com/Nebraska/Omaha/election-systems-software-inc-4864085.aspx
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