Was there a Q drop about Obama and McCain being just a placeholder when they ran for President? I can't find it.
I need anon that is good at digging and not busy to help me find out what voting system NC used in 2008. Thanks!
The New Jersey Voting-machine Lawsuit
and the AVC Advantage DRE Voting Machine
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evtwote09/tech/full_papers/appel.pdf
As a result of a public-interest lawsuit, by Court order we were able to study, for one month, the hardware and
source code of the Sequoia AVC Advantage direct-recording electronic voting machine, which is used throughout
New Jersey (and Louisiana), and the Court has permitted us to publicly describe almost everything that we were able
to learn. In short, these machines are vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks on the voting process. It would not be in
the slightest difficult for a moderately determined group or individual to mount a vote-stealing attack that would be
successful and undetectable.
In October 2004 a group of public-interest plaintiffs, represented by Professor Penny Venetis of the Rutgers Law
School, sued the State of New Jersey (in NJ Superior Court) over the State’s use of direct-recording electronic (DRE)
voting machines in New Jersey. By 2004, most of New Jersey’s counties had adopted the Sequoia AVC Advantage
full-face DRE. Currently 18 out of New Jersey’s 21 counties use this DRE.
The plaintiffs argued that the use of DRE voting machines is illegal and unconstitutional: illegal, because they
violate New Jersey election laws requiring that all votes be counted accurately and that voting machines be thoroughly
tested, accurate, and reliable; and unconstitutional, because they violate the New Jersey constitution’s requirement that
all votes count.1 The plaintiffs argued that one cannot trust a paperless DRE machine to count the vote. The defendant,
the State of New Jersey, has taken the position that enhanced physical security measures will prevent access to AVC
Advantage ROM chips, and thus prevent rigging of the voting machines.
The Sequoia AVC Advantage is a “direct-recording electronic” (DRE) voting computer. That is, the voter indicates
a selection of candidates via a user-interface to a computer; the program in the computer stores data in its memory
that (are supposed to) correspond to the indicated votes; and at the close of the polls, the computer outputs (what are
supposed to be) the number of votes for each candidate.
Ballots are prepared and results are tallied with a Windows application called “WinEDS” that runs on computers
at election headquarters in each county. Ballot definitions (contests, candidate names, party affiliations, etc.) are
transmitted to the Advantage via a “results cartridge,” which is inserted at the election warehouse before the machines
are transported (by private trucking contractors) to polling places a few days before the election. The votes cast on
an individual machine are recorded in the same cartridge, which pollworkers bring to election headquarters after polls
close. The voting machines are left at the polling places for a few days until the trucking company picks them up.
We were given access to a Windows computer running WinEDS that was capable of reading and writing cartridges,
but we did not have the source code of the WinEDS application, which appears to have been written by another
company and sold or licensed to Sequoia.
Appel had previously purchased five surplus AVC Advantage 5.00E machines from a county in North Carolina.
Halderman and Feldman reverse-engineered the hardware and parts of the software of these machines in 2007 [11].
From 2004
Computer Loses 4,500 Votes
UniLect gives bogus information to North Carolina counties about the capacity of the company's electronic voting machines, and some voters' picks go ignored as a result.
https://www.wired.com/2004/11/computer-loses-4500-votes/
JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA – More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board.
Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.
"That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.
In a letter to county officials, he blamed the mistake on confusion over which model of the voting machines was in use in Carteret County. But he also noted that the machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots.
"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.
County election officials were meeting Thursday with Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections, and did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
This isn't the first time that North Carolina experienced this problem. In early voting for the 2002 general election, touch-screen voting machines made by a different company, Election Systems & Software, failed to record ballots cast by 436 voters.
The company said the problem was a software glitch that caused the machines to believe the memory cards were full when they actually weren't. Like UniLect, ES&S claimed that the machines flashed a warning to voters telling them the memory was full but it did not prevent voters from continuing to cast ballots, something that critics say any voting machine should do.
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This year's lost votes didn't appear to change the outcome of county races, but that wasn't the issue for Alecia Williams, who voted on one of the final days of the early voting period.
"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.
Two statewide races remained undecided Thursday, for superintendent of public instruction, where the two candidates are about 6,700 votes apart, and for agriculture commissioner, where they are only hundreds of votes apart.
How those two races might be affected by problems in individual counties was uncertain. The state still must tally more than 73,000 provisional ballots, plus those from four counties that have not yet submitted their provisional ballots, said Johnnie McLean, deputy director of the state elections board.
Nationwide, only scattered e-voting problems were reported, though roughly 40 million people cast digital ballots, voting equipment makers said.
Kim Zetter contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/clinton-foundation-donor-list/