 Okay. I'm not a hacker. I'm not a computer programmer. I'm someone's grandma who was giggling around one day and found 40,000 files that belong to a voting machine company. Since then, I've gotten three cease and desist orders and been interviewed by the Secret Service five times. I wasn't even interested in voting. In fact, they love to trash me with this. I don't always vote. I sometimes vote and occasionally I didn't. And that makes it so that I'm not supposedly allowed to criticize what I found. But when I found, what I found I decided I will always vote after this. If nothing else, if I don't agree with any of the candidates, just to write my own name in and see if it shows up. As I began to look at this issue, I really, I knew that we were going to have a problem. Not because I have background in computers, but because I've been a professional writer for about 20 years. And one of the first things that I wrote about as assignments for corporations was financial fraud and embezzlement. And I was, I guess, lucky because in my assignments, they were very in-depth. And I met the embezzlers who look really nice. They're just regular people. You know, grandma, she's baking cookies, and then she goes in the back room and stuffs her checkbook. One guy was an Orthodox Jew, we thought. Probably not as devout as everyone thought. He would go in the back room to pray at exactly four o'clock every afternoon and steal instead. So you don't know, the point is, you don't know who it is and it happens more often than you think. And when I realized after looking into this that we were taking away the checks and balances in our voting system, there's no question that somebody somewhere is going to exploit that. So I got kind of interested in it. And over the course of the last two years, and in writing a book called Black Box Voting, I found out that this is where we're at. And I will give you some real examples of some of the recent investigations that we've done that have not been rightly reported. We found out after we were finally able to look at the software because, you know, the software in these machines is a proprietary secret which the companies say we're not allowed to see how the software works that counts our vote. Well, it's poorly designed as we've read so much about. It's also inadequately tested. They had the idea that somehow you would send it off to these magical independent testing authorities who would then give it the seal of approval and therefore it works perfectly. It takes about three, four hours to completely debunk the national certification system that can be done by making a few phone calls. They don't even use the stuff that's been tested though. What they do is they have the stuff tested and then they put something else on the machines quite often. So it doesn't even matter what they tested. And then when they get caught at using software that has stunning security flaws, they say don't worry about the flaws because we have elections procedures that would prevent them from being exploited. So we began looking at how well they follow the election procedures and found out that they either don't have the procedures they need or they don't follow the procedures they have. So we've got a bit of a problem. And Dr. Mercury is going to talk much more about the technical aspects of it. But I'm going to give you the aspects that I found working as someone's grandma driving around the USA in a rental car with my associate, Andy Stevenson. What we did after I wrote the book is we formed a nonprofit corporation. It's entirely funded by donations. And what we do is we hear concerns and complaints from consumers, which are voters, and we go there and we find out what the heck is going on. And it's really amazing. Sometimes what they see sounds very disturbing, but it's not a problem. More often than not, it opens up a whole can of worms because we do have a system that has become, I don't know if I would say corrupt, but I would say inept on a massive scale. When we talk about poorly designed software, I didn't know anything about software. One of the first things I did was hook up with another software engineer, with a software engineer, and the guy had actually built touch screen machines for a company called Vote Here. He'd been their senior test engineer, and I asked him how it works. I also sat down and read a lot of Dr. Mercury's material and talked to her sometimes. And so when we got the files, I don't know, people started coming to me and I started kind of feeding the files out to people that I thought could help me analyze them. But some of the things that were found, and some of these things, by the way, were found before this all got famous in the New York Times because there were a number of patriotic computer programmers who have never yet been recognized, but who worked as anonymous sources and published the stuff on the Internet. And much of the stuff that was published on the Internet in June of 2003 later became part of the report that was published by Abby Rubin. But these people were never getting credit for any of the work they've done. I hope that at least some of them will get the courage to step forward. There are reasons that they didn't. When you work in private industry like Microsoft, you can lose your job if you analyze voting software. But when we talk about poorly designed, you know, one of the most famous design flaws that was found in the B-Bold software is that they hard-coded the password into the code so that it couldn't be changed. And the password was really hard. It was 1111. And so last March, we went visiting, and I visited some election judges and said, have they changed that password? Well, maybe it depends on how you look at it. It might have been changed if you consider changing it to 1111. It just recently changed it. It had been identified as a security breach in 1996. They waited almost a decade to fix it. Oh! Sequoia voting systems. You see, what we found is four major voting companies. And they have had, all four have had major problems. Sequoia voting systems had its software found on the Internet, unprotected, in September of 2003. And this is one of the unsung heroes. Not everybody gets their name up in lights, but this guy is really courageous. He is about 28 years old. He found the software. He then spent about six months going broke when he analyzed it. Sequoia voting systems is the central tabulator, and I mentioned that later. It's the most high-risk part of the voting system because it controls the most votes at once. It uses visual basic scripts. And I don't exactly know what I'm talking about, so don't ask me any follow-up questions on this. But I videotape this guy showing me the stuff it does. And it has also what's called business logic contained in the program, such that during the middle of a live election you can go in and alter the source code. But it's secure, right? One of the things with Sequoia voting system software, you know, when you have a voting system, it does what you call mapping the votes. So you vote for this guy, Bob, here on the screen, and it's supposed to map over to Bob's bin inside the machine. In Sequoia's system, though, if it's a Spanish language ballot, it asks, see, do you want a vote for Bob or do you want to put it in Dan's bin? Not English, just Spanish language. I don't know why that feature is in there. The other thing that we found interesting about the Sequoia software is that if you go in and you change the business logic to, say, shave some votes or something during the middle of an election, all you have to do is close the program at hand, but you vote will disappear. But it's secure. Trust him. We don't need to look at it. It's proprietary. Back doors. We just got here today after showing an election supervisor over in Arizona where the back door was in the software. The back door and debold central tabulator, which, again, is the highest risk piece of software there is, because it's like the mothership. You go out and you vote in all these different remote locations, and it all comes into the central tabulator, but it's all added up. And it's really a nice secure feeling program when you click on the main icon, you go into the Gems program. You can't change anything. You shouldn't be able to change. That's the front door. And he was proud of it. He said, you want me to go into Gems? And I said, no, we're going to take you in the back door today. He made me stand behind some glass, so I couldn't tamper with or damage his equipment. And I said, here's what you do. You go to my computer, because it runs on Windows, of course. They're proud to tell you they don't put in the patches. So you're going, you click My Complete Queer, then you click Program Files, then you click Gems, which is the name of the program, then you click Local Databases, which are where all the votes are stored, and you pick any vote database, including the live election, and you can even do this while the election is in progress and the file is being used. And you're in. There's no password. There's no anything. And then he said, what do I do next? And I said, you type over the votes. If it says 100, you put in 200. This I don't call hacking. I call it editing and election. He was, I mean, it really is this shockingly simple to go in the back doors in the central tabulator that's used in 37 states with both the touchscreens and the optical scans. And the manufacturer knows it. After I found the 40,000 files in January 2003, about nine months later, someone leaked another set of about 30,000 files, plus some more random databases. And these were all the internal memos or email communications amongst the programmers. And, you know, I had written up on July 8th, 2003, we got a problem with this central tabulator. You can just walk right in. It's, let me tell you something. It's built on Microsoft Access. And if you have Microsoft Access on the computer, you just double click the file and it opens up and it says passwords, and then I'll list it and you can just write your own in. It says audit log, which is the big bulletproof, you know, thing that's supposed to log every event, but you can just change it. It's not automatically numbered. You can just change the numbers or erase the whole row. It has vote totals. It has the sums of the votes that gets submitted to the Secretary of State. And basically, you just open it up, look at it, and type and you're in. Now, I had written about this in July and in September somebody leaked me all these internal emails. I wondered because, you know, do you know when they came right out after Avi Living and all those guys, oh, there you do this. They never, ever repeat about my report about the central tabulator, which was much more dangerous. Well, I'll tell you why. They're senior engineers in 19 and in 2001, two years before I wrote about it, we were discussing the exact same flaw. And the certifiers, these wanted independent certifiers had found the flaw. They said, what are you going to do about this? People could just walk right in and edit the election. And they said, well, you know, we're going to put security on it. This isn't a memo dated 2001. But sometimes it's helpful to do an end run around the system. Gaston County, North Carolina, is famous for its fancy footwork. King County, which happens to be my county, is famous for it, for end runs around the loading system. So we decided not to improve the security. These memos had one security. They know it lived not everything. The thing in the Avi Living Report where he said you can put the smart card in and vote more than once. That was written up in internal memos way back, you know, two years before his report. And in it, one of my favorite quotes, you have one engineer talking to the other and he says, the smart cards have absolutely no security. If this gets out, we'll find ourselves on the front page of USA Today. They did. You know, I said we could kind of knock apart this idea that we have vaunted independent testing labs. Here's how you knock apart. You make a few phone calls. You hear it's tested at the state level. It's tested and tested and tested again. At the state level, you hear it's tested. You call them up and they say, well, actually, we just run some sample ballots through it. And if it counts in right, it's good to go. So that's not really the kind of testing I had in mind, which is a much more detailed look at it. When you contact the national testing lab, they say we can't tell you what we do. You have to talk to this guy over here at the election center. So when I called him, and by the way, his credentials for setting up training programs for elections officials throughout the United States and certifying the certifiers are that he ran a used computer resale shop, which went out of business. I asked him about that and I said, he clarifies you to be the most powerful guy in elections in the United States today. He's privately held by the way. He's not responsible to any government agency. And he said, no, we're not going to go there. He hung up on me. So I tried to call this lab. I couldn't get anything out of the lab. Found a picture of the guy, the one guy who certifies this very vulnerable central tabulator. His name is Sean Southworth. He works in Huntsville, Alabama. He looks a little bit like Joe Betafuco. And that's okay. He can be a great computer programmer. But he doesn't answer questions. And then I found out it's not just me he didn't answer questions of. He didn't answer questions of the Los Angeles Times, of the California Secretary of State. He doesn't answer questions at all about what his credentials are, what qualifies him to do this work, what he does. Well, so when we got our consumer protection group funded, Andy Stephenson and I drove down to Alabama right before the 4th of July weekend when his secretaries were all gone, walked into the video camera and got the first one-hour videotape interview with Sean Southworth. And I'm going to tell you. First of all, I said, this was Andy's question. I really like it. He said, you know Sean, the software that you certified, when an independent report was commissioned by Scientific Applications International, they uncovered 328 security flaws, 26 deemed critical. We were just having a bad day. And he said, well, I never certified that software. And I said, how do you know? And he says, well, because they found those flaws. That was his answer. So then I said, well, what can you tell me about the fact that you can put large numbers of minus votes into the voting system? Because you can. Gore got minus 16,000 votes in Volusia County in Florida in 2000. Well, he said, I don't understand. And I said, well, how about negative votes? Did you write that in your report that you can put negative votes? Because those can be used to balance the book when you're cooking the books. And he says, well, my favorite answer. This is idiotic on two levels. He says, well, I don't write about negative things because the vendors don't write negative stuff in the reports. So I explained again what we were talking about was the input of minus votes by elections officials, which the program allows. And he said, well, it's not relevant because it's not in the FEC standards. There's a set of standards created by the Federal Elections Commission in 1990, which they were still testing to up until a year ago. And he was testing things, and if it wasn't in the standards, even if it looked pretty bad, he didn't write it down. I said, well, we had another problem, Sean, in Florida where we had 4,000 voting machines and they couldn't do a manual audit of what happened because they scrambled the ID numbers due to a software glitch. What that is equivalent to in accounting is you have 4,000 invoices. You want to match them up to a corresponding 4,000 payment. It automatically numbers the invoices. Well, if your accounting software scrambles the invoice numbers, that's a problem. But yet that's what was happening with the ESNS system in Florida. He said, not relevant. It's not in the FEC standards. So I didn't write about it. I said, well, what about wireless? Do we have wireless in these machines? He says, well, wireless isn't in the FEC standards. I said, well, is there anything if it's really, really bad that you would see that you might write about, even if it's not in the standards? I would hope as an American you would be that concerned. He said, well, the vendors don't like it if I write negative things in their reports and they pay me. We're not paying him. The vendors are paying him, and that's what we get. So the certification really doesn't work. But they don't even use the certified version. One of the first things that I found when I got to this 40,000 files was for some reason there were 300 versions of the software, but only five had ever been certified. Well, it might have just been test versions or something, right? No. When I got the memos, we've got all of these engineers talking to each other while using, you know, number 114 and such and such in California, and you know it's illegal. So I'm telling you, in fact, there was a screening 115, you know, whatever that was actually certified. So they would have the screening about one thing, but a different thing was in the system. In fact, there was something in the source code that said no matter what version it was, make it read this number. So we realized that they were using stuff that wasn't even tested anyway, and then we said, don't worry about it. And the central tabulator, which is where all votes come into, you rig that thing, you rig the whole county at once, that can be up to a million votes at once. Don't worry about it because we have security programs around there, because you have to get access to it in order to rig it. I did some math. We have 3,066 counties in the United States. So at a minimum, we have 3,000 people that have access to the central tabulator. Most of them are elections officials with no computer experience. But as we began visiting, we found that they generally have between two and five more people who have access. We've got at least 10,000 people with access to the central tabulator. Forget hacking. These are people who have the password and are allowed to go sit there and type stuff in it. And I don't know what you think, but I think counting on 10,000 people to be honest maybe isn't the best idea of when the future of the world is at stake. But it gets worse. We began visiting people who work for Diebold. And some of the people in management told us that they planned to hire 5,000 temporary workers this fall. They call them contractors. What they do is they put an ad on monster.com and you jump in there and you work as a temp for Diebold and you have inside access to the voting machines including the passwords. We just went over today to Mojave County, Arizona and I asked him for a list of who had access and he gave himself and four other people from Diebold and one guy who was a contractor from Diebold. So some temporary worker that got hired off of monster.com and it works for some temp agency has access to the central tabulator there. Well, we went to San Bernardino County, California. Talked to Scott Kanopasik. Now, here's a guy who should know about security. He's spent 15 years in military security. I said, we got a public records request. We'd like to find out how many people accessed your central tabulator on March the 2nd during the presidential primary. And he said, well, a public records request doesn't apply. Why not? Because I didn't write it down. Do you have a key lag? No, I keep it in my head. Now, it kind of gave me into a back and forth, you know, why do you need to know? Well, because we want to know the names of the people that got access to the central tabulator that counted almost a million votes. I mean, do we have that right? We also have texts for the companies that come in and sit. In Riverside, California, a bunch of citizens were watching on election night on March the 2nd. And they unlocks these two guys and plays in the county. And one of them sits down at the tabulator. Then he goes and asks a county employee for a password. And he types that in, takes a card out of his pocket, puts it in, uploads something, the status bar goes along, then puts the card back in his pocket and leaves. And the citizen said, what was on that card? And he said, it's my personal card. And then he left the state and went back to Denver. And they say these central tabulators are secure. No one can get out and think 10,000 people, the tax from the company, temporary workers, and that's just if there's no illicit access. In our county, King County, they bolted down that door and only two, they cannot open that central tabulator unless two people are present. Except that the break room is right next door and there's a ceiling tile there and it takes all of five minutes to go from one link to the other if no one's looking. Even when they do have procedures in place, they're not filing them. We went to Arkansas to investigate why Prairie County, Arkansas had 115% turnout. Which, by the way, this was in the primary where the average turnout was 20%. Sad on the secretaries of states website for six weeks, no one appeared to think it was odd. We sat down with the State Elections Director until we got an answer and we finally got the faxed answer back from the county official of Prairie County. Oh, I just gave you the wrong numbers. Now, I'm just a grandma, you know. I haven't done elections, you know, professionally like that person who had had the job for 10 years. But isn't the idea when you report a certified election result as you send the right numbers? So, afterward, then you have the officials covering your ass. Because, you see, these machines miscount. We're finding time after time after time they miscount. In June, in Alabama, they had an election. They had a result and then some more votes showed up. 300 more. And they asked, you know, well, they were stuck in the modem. We can tumbling out later. I don't know quite what it looks like. Maybe it's like hardening of the arteries and the votes stuck in there. It's an old modem. It's too much bacon. We're in the south. Bottom line here is we've been bamboozled. We've been solved this stuff. It doesn't count accurately. We now have 200 examples of elections that don't count right. Watch the web results come up on all future elections. Get screenshots. We found out that in some places, the totes go up and down and up and down. Now, how do you have a candidate's totes going down two hours later? In fact, that's why we went over to Mojave County in the first place is to ask him why we went down. He couldn't explain it and the disks that had each one of the uploads suddenly were missing and so we didn't know how they came down. But when we went to San Bernardino I thought maybe he can tell me why Mojave's votes went down. So I asked him and he said, oh, that happened here too. He said that happened because we had some leftover votes in the system when we ran the election. And then we took him out in the middle of the election. This is not how bookkeeping is done. But bookkeeping doesn't just take something out and erase it, which you have to do as a separate line item and it's called an adjustment and you have to explain what happened. Besides all of this just sloppiness we've got real human factors when we go to a computerized system that nobody seems to think about. You get these guys and in the mirror I retire and they're like, oh yes, you know, we'll have this nice special statewide voter registration system and you'll put it all on computer. What nobody thought about is when they stuck this thing on a laptop to go do some customer service, one of the many thousand attempts they hired stole the laptop which contained 1.4 million social security members but the news address isn't both those of anybody in King County. These human things and I know that many of you if you're familiar with the hacking stuff, it's the human factor that's the biggest risk. It's people who open their big mouth and tell you what the IP addresses are or they steal something or they go look in the garbage. We also, by the way, decided to check out the garbage of ESMS in Omaha, Nebraska. Now, ESMS has got all kinds of shallow types around big government folks. Right out there and in it is a touch screen and a silly touch screen didn't have a screen and we're going to put Christmas lights and dress it up and see how the city works but if you're trying to protect the elections in the United States you might want to do something about that. I guess the point I'm trying to make is trust but verify we need to be dealing with our elections officials as if they worked for us which they do. We need to expect them to show their work. If they're going to be adding up the votes, go back to Thurgood and say show how you came up with that and if you can't show me, it isn't good enough. We need to be going in and watching things happen. They have windows in their central tabulator room. Go watch. You'll be amazed at the stuff you see. And volunteer to do things like be a poll worker or an election judge and do so with a good heart to try to make the election work as well as it possibly can and use your common sense. But let me tell you when we started interviewing people with a computer background who did this the stuff they reported was amazing and I'll stop in just a second here but for example, college kid San Diego, her parents said you should volunteer. She goes in there. They never checked ID in the thousands of people they had helping. Just brought him in. He had my two hour training program and then said how many computers can you fit in your car. Sent her home with a car load of touchscreen machines which were in her house for a month. And a card encoded by the way so she could run an election I suppose in her neighborhood. I don't know if you've ever seen the little luggage tags, the little things that they give you, the seal on the default touch screens. And by the way they sent 32 million dollars worth of touch screens home with people that they never checked their ID in San Diego on March 2nd. But the seal you can trust it because it's got a seal it's this little plastic ziplock thing and stamped on it is where you can order more on the internet. Now I had her show me the webpage I couldn't believe it she goes oh it's okay to go to the internet they give you extras. I'm not kidding she saved it. I mean but they have another seal it's a paper seal. Unfortunately it's unpostured adhesive and I'm not kidding she saved it. She had it hands it to me on a piece of paper and my gingerly tea comes off sticks back on, comes off sticks back on it's black and white you can copy in the kinkos. So that's why I'm saying get involved you know we've got a pretty big mess be a good American get involved and when you see something that's really dumb report it our website is blackboxvoting.org it's going through a redo right now to be up by early next week with the new stuff but it's got ways to get involved and I know there's another organization Verified Voting.org which is specifically doing a tech watch where they're going to get a whole bunch of computer techs involved and when someone tells the press that the votes got stuck in the meeting they will have somebody who can tell the press whether that makes any sense at all. So get involved and thank you very much.