Unmasking Twitter & Election 'Black Boxes'
Elon Musk's move to acquire Twitter and restore a neutral platform ahead of the midterm elections could also shine a spotlight on "black boxes" that tabulate votes.
Preserve your "black box" source code, Twitter. And you too, election software vendors.
Tesla pioneer Elon Musk's winning, $44-billion bid for Twitter – and the left's freakout about his intent to restore the platform’s political neutrality –- could be a paradigm shift for free and open debate, and election software that counts the votes.
Breaking open Twitter's "black box" source code would allow America and the world to see how Big Tech can suppress content that counters its progressive worldview. Millions more would be able to understand how Big Tech puts its thumbs on the scales of election outcomes.
(See Twitter's suppression of the New York Post, Hunter Biden's laptop, The Big Guy, that raised serious questions of influence peddling and national security.)
A similar paradigm shift may be at play with a federal lawsuit that seeks to "prohibit the use of electronic voting machines in the state unless and until the voting system is made open to the public."
Unless the vendors open their "black box" code they use to tabulate votes, the suit argues, the election software and machines must come out of Arizona.
"Forty-three percent of American voters use voting machines that researchers have found have serious security flaws including backdoors," according to the lawsuit by Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and Mark Fincham, a Republican state representative running for secretary of state.
Their federal complaint seeks to confirm that the source code ("black box" technology) is secure from manipulation or intrusion.
Corporate media in league with Democrats are ignoring the lawsuit, which names Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Maricopa County's board of election supervisors and Pima County's board of election supervisors as defendants. Finchem is Hobbs' political opponent.
The two state election boards have refused to cooperate with audits that would prove their oversight of the election was as great as they claim.
The preliminary injunction filing lays out detailed facts about the vulnerability of election networks in the state and the country – which both sides of the political aisle have been warning about for years.
Unless and until election software vendors allow a neutral review of their “black box” source code, where algorithms can be triggered to manipulate votes, "logic and accuracy" certifications are meaningless.
As experts have argued for years: the keys to the election are in the source code.
For these reasons, the lawsuit contends, the software they rely on to tabulate results was wrongly certified in Arizona and must not be used in the 2022 midterm elections.
Dominion’s DVS 5.5-B voting system “is substantially similar to the 5.5-A system that twice failed certification in Texas," the complaint says.
"These systems are potentially [not secured], lack adequate audit capacity, fail to meet minimum statutory requirements, and deprive voters of the right to have their votes counted and reported in an accurate, auditable, legal, and transparent process.
"Using them in the upcoming elections, without objective validation, violates the voting rights of every Arizonan," says the pleading, which Constitutional expert Alan Dershowitz is also advising.
The complaint is a compendium of the layers of complexity that bedevil many states' elections networks since Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) two decades ago.
"The issues have been with us ever since HAVA was foisted on the nation," the lawsuit adds. For example, in 2006, “a team of computer scientists at Princeton University analyzed the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, then one of the most widely-deployed electronic voting platforms in the United States. They found malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little risk of detection.”
Every year for over two decades, hacker conferences tee up every major election software vendor in use in the United States, and then proceeds to hack them in short order. Mother Jones magazine, not a MAGA-friendly publication, was all over it — before 2020.
The complaint recounts a former security advisor for the Obama administration and organizer of the DEFCON Hacking Conference, who was asked in 2017, “Do you believe that right now, we are in a position where the 2020 election will be hacked?” He answered, “Oh, without question. I mean the 2020 election will be hacked no matter what we do.”
The "black box" issues are especially acute in Arizona, which are best explained with an analogy that goes like this:
If Arlington County in Virginia, a reliably Blue suburb of Democrat-dominated Washington, suddenly flipped in 2020 for President Trump by a few thousand votes, amid evidence of illegal absentee ballots put through with no signatures, over 200,000 absentee ballots with zero chain of custody — and clear evidence the election network was hacked, voters and election integrity advocates would probably not let it go without an investigation.
The most extensive forensic audit in the nation’s history of the 1.2 million votes cast in Maricopa County in 2020 – most of them absentee -- showed that someone accessed the network remotely before, during, and after the election.
The county's board of supervisors admitted they had no control over the tabulation software of the vendor, Dominion Voting Systems.
Dominion refused to hand over administrative-level passwords to the auditors so they could review the election’s network logs. The audit also showed that somebody logged in over 30,000 times — right before the start of the audit — which wiped out critical election files.
Arizona's Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich (who is also running for the U.S. Senate) has indicated in a letter to the Senate President Karen Fann that he expects to bring criminal charges as a result of the audit findings.
Other audit findings from Maricopa County’s election network include the following:
Operating systems lacking necessary updates;
Antivirus software lacking necessary updates;
Open ports on the election management server, allowing for possible remote access;
Shared user accounts and common passwords;
Anomalous, anonymous logins to the election management server;
Unexplained creation, modification, and deletion of [election] files;
Lost security log data;
The presence of stored data from outside of Maricopa County
Secret content not subject to objective and public analysis.
Plaintiffs Lake and Finchem appear to be done waiting for Brnovich to act on the evidence in his possession for over six months.
Their complaint says electronic voting machines cannot be deemed reliably secure and do not meet the constitutional and statutory mandates to guarantee a free and fair election.
“The use of untested and unverified electronic voting machines violates the rights of Plaintiffs and their fellow voters and office seekers, and it undermines public confidence in the validity of election results."
In Colorado, database experts have already documented how votes were manipulated in two precincts in the 2020 and 2021 elections.
Dominion Voting systems, the secretary of state's office, the attorney general's office, even state GOP officials, have not addressed the findings. And the media is ignoring it or writing misdirection plays.
In Georgia, the non-profit election integrity group VoterGA has produced extensive evidence of problems in Georgia’s voting database, such as missing ballot images from 2020, all after a consent decree that Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger negotiated in secret that gutted signature-match rules on absentee ballots in 2020.
But perhaps most important: Georgia's recounts after the 2020 election – and the runoff, have yet to add up.
No one has reviewed election software vendor Dominion Voting Systems' source code. Nor has anyone investigated why the vendor was allowed to shove a last-minute update into Georgia’s election network in violation of the 90-day “safe harbor” provision of certifying machines.
The movie "Rigged2020.com" features facts and research about the $400 million that another Big Tech oligarch, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, shoveled into the nation's elections by way of "grants" in 2020. They overwhelmingly went to Democrat districts. In Wisconsin, progressive activists being paid by those grants were allowed to actually handle ballots. All of this is still being probed.
According to the "Rigged2020.com" producer David Bossie, Comcast, Facebook, and DirectTV have refused to allow ads promoting the movie.
President Trump is also in the movie. And they don't like him. So they have decided to suppress free speech and block the movie's promotion.
Twitter, YouTube, Google – all of the major social media and tech platforms, have forbidden and censored any discussion of the irregularities, proven fraud, and unexplained vote irregularities in the tabulation databases in battleground states.
Musk's Twitter bid and intent to open source Twitter’s algorithms that manipulate information flows in the "digital town square" signal a shift toward breaking down these “black boxes” and re-asserting neutral platforms where the public can argue over the issues of our time, free of Big Tech’s censorship.
The Arizona lawsuit is looking for a similar remedy to protect the other pillar of a free society: a secure and fair election result.
It is asking to open the "black boxes” that tech uses to tabulate results. Otherwise, the court should follow the advice of tech experts who say get rid of the “black box” technology, remove the machines and go back to paper ballots. #