J. Alex Halderman is an election expert who has made headlines the past few years. He now is calling out another election issue related to voting systems. But is his solution to protect individual privacy or destroy verification of election integrity?
Before the 2020 Election, professor J. Alex Halderman gave this presentation on the many vulnerabilities with the voting machines used in US elections.
Halderman was then asked to review the voting machines in Georgia after the 2020 Election. He provided his report, but to this day it has been sealed by corrupt Judge Amy Totenberg. This corrupt judge is hiding this report from the American public.
About a year later, CISA, the government agency that said that the 2020 Election was the most secure in US history, released a report in response to the issues identified in the Halderman report (which has never been released). The CISA report provided ample evidence of voting machine issues that could be used to materially change the results of elections.
CISA assured us that this was what was in Halderman’s report and that there was no evidence any of these issues had been used in the 2020 Election. Unfortunately, CISA can no longer be trusted.
An obvious observation is that the issues identified with the voting machines are so egregious, it is most likely that they were put there intentionally rather than by errors in design.
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Now Halderman has identified with some colleagues what he claims is a privacy issue with the machines.
This is just one more reason why we should never be using voting machines in our elections.
However, there may be an ulterior reason for this recent announcement.
Halderman makes the following claims in a Twitter thread:
2/ We call the flaw DVSorder. It’s a privacy vulnerability, so it *cannot* directly modify results or change votes. However, under some circumstances, it could allow members of the public to identify other peoples’ ballots and learn how they voted.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
4/ DVSorder is unusual in that it doesn’t require exotic skills or special access to find and exploit, only public information. Fortunately, now that we know about the problem, election officials have time to prevent it from affecting voters in the midterms.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
6/ In other jurisdictions, ballot-level data is treated as a public record, and there has been a surge in FOIA requests for it:https://t.co/kHztMTGzzn
People have used FOIA requests across the country to assemble data repositories like this: https://t.co/kXh3lNFFzx
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
8/ (a) For example, scanners usually display a count of ballots cast. I can note the count when I vote, and if my wife uses the scanner next, I’ll know her ballot number too. If my locality releases vulnerable CVRs or ballot images, I can find her ballot and see how she voted. pic.twitter.com/UVeGS1DClq
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
10/ (c) Some localities publish scanner log files from the ICP or ICE. These pose little privacy risk by themselves, but combined with the DVSorder vulnerability they reveal the exact time each ballot was cast. This provides an additional route to identify voters’ ballots.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
12/ The cause of the vulnerability is that Dominion uses a flawed random number generator to generate ballot IDs.
When a ballot is cast, the ICP and ICE assign it a random-looking 6-digit id, which stays associated with the ballot even after CVRs or ballot images are shuffled.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
14/ Worse, the scanners essentially all follow the same fixed sequence of 1,000,000 ballot ids. It’s only the starting point in this sequence that’s randomized from one batch of ballots to the next. pic.twitter.com/skFL7MRc35
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
16/ Public access to election data, including cast-vote records and ballot images, can be valuable for voter confidence. Fortunately, mitigating the DVSorder flaw does not require reducing this transparency.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
18/ We provide data sanitization instructions at https://t.co/cGRw6fSPUF, and we’ve also created an open-source tool to help sanitize more complicated data formats and scenarios.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
20/ That’s why we’re making our findings public now, to give election officials time to safely sanitize the data they release from the midterms. Our priority is to prevent this flaw from affecting voters this November, which is ultimately the best way to uphold public trust.
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
22/ More from @braden_crimmins: https://t.co/5p8W8TGnWg
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) October 14, 2022
For those that have been heavily involved with voter integrity, this appears to be another effort to prevent transparency in the elections. It appears Halderman and gang are not helping things, they’re hurting them.
Here’s why.
1. The issue they claim is that ballot ids with time stamps in Cast Vote Records (CVRs) can be exploited when locations provide videos of individuals making their votes. The issue is 2 fold – CVRs provide time stamps and so do the videos. Rather than address the videos, Halderman and team are trying to get rid of the timestamps in CVRs.
2. How many voting locations videotape individuals voting and how many of these locations use CVRs? This is not provided. Is it 10 locations or 50,000? We have no idea. We are not provided data on how material this issue is.
3. Halderman makes it sound like ballots can be easily put in order based on data in CVRs and ballot images. However, to date the data reported in CVRs has not reconciled with the final data provided to the MSM and state.
4. The most glaring omission from this Twitter thread is spelling out why Americans want to get their hands on the CVRs. The reason for the requests in CVRs is to reconcile election results from a location to election results provided to the state and mainstream media.
What was found in 2020 Election results is that the detailed list of vote results at a location found in CVRs produced from the voting systems doesn’t agree with the data being reported to the state and the MSM.
These amounts should agree but they don’t.
Halderman and company are requesting that timestamps be eliminated from CVRs. This will eliminate the ability to reconcile votes processed with votes reported to the state and MSM.
Below is a chart from Fulton County, Georgia showing how voting data flows from the time a voter votes to the time when results are reported to the state and the media. What was found is that in the middle box below where the voter data is consolidated before going to SCYTL and then to the state and MSM, there was the potential for data manipulation of votes.
By comparing the CVRs to the data provided to the state and MSM results of the election, results can be validated. This hasn’t occurred to date.
By eliminating this ability, which is what is recommended by Halderman, this reconciliation control, the only reconciliation between the locality to the state and MSM results is eliminated.
