Catastrophic “Loss of Control” Data Breach in NY Elections
May 25, 2023
A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Information Warfare (JIW) confirms a “Loss of Control” breach has occurred in the NYSVoter Database. A peer-reviewed paper of their results in a respected journal is a hard-won and “significant milestone,” according to Marly Hornik, Executive Director of the NY Citizens Audit.
The audit of the voter rolls was led by Marly Hornik and Andrew Paquette, Ph.D., Director of Research, who submitted the paper to JIW. Paquette “co-founded the International Game Architecture and Design Academy (now BUAS) in the Netherlands after a career in the feature film and video game industries. He received his Ph.D. from King’s College, London, in 2018 for a thesis on the development of expertise.”
In July 2021, Hornik and Paquette assembled a group of volunteers in New York that has grown to around 2000 individuals statewide to investigate the state’s voter registration rolls. Hornik presented the group’s preliminary findings to attendees at The Pit, sponsored by True the Vote, in August 2022.
In her recent letter to New York citizens, Hornik explains the seriousness of the group’s findings:
“Through auditing the voter roll databases, obtained directly from state and local boards of elections, we have uncovered millions of invalid registrations, hundreds of thousands of votes cast by legally invalid registrations, hundreds of thousands of votes cast by legally invalid registrants, massive vote discrepancies, and the clear presence of algorithmic patterns we reverse engineered from within the state’s own official records.
To be absolutely clear, there is no known innocent purpose or explanation for why these algorithms exist. I am told by cyber-intelligence experts they indicate a ‘Total Loss of Control’ data breach, the most severe kind of data breach recognized by our federal government. The law says it renders the affected NYSVoter database completely untrustworthy.”
New York Voter Registration Rolls Show a Catastrophic “Loss of Control Breach”
The “Loss of Control Breach” references standards published by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) that reflect the level of impact of a given information security event where data has been compromised. According to the US-CERT Federal Incident Notification Guidelines, “the document provides guidance to Federal Government departments and agencies (D/As); state, local, tribal, and territorial government entities; Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations; and foreign, commercial, and private-sector organizations for submitting incident notifications to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC)/United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).”
A “Loss of Control Breach” is a catastrophic level of “impact,” both functionally and in terms of information lost. It is important to note that the designation indicates “recovery from such an incident is not possible.”
Journal of Information Warfare: Three Experts Agree With Paquette’s Paper
Paquette submitted a paper to the JIW summarizing the findings from the NY Citizens Audit. He says it took about “six months to see his article through the review process.” It was the second journal to which he submitted his paper. The first was rejected “for political reasons,” according to Paquette.
Paquette published a substack on May 17 about the significance of the peer-reviewed paper mentioning that he has “learned more about the algorithm” since he submitted his paper to JIW. Paquette also summarized his investigation in his May 22, 2023, article for the American Thinker.
In his Substack, Paquette comments on the significance of the paper’s peer review and publication:
“The point of peer review is not to rubber stamp an article (though that may happen at lower quality journals); the point is to perform a thorough check of the article to be sure it is accurate and represents a fair description of the facts both pro and con related to the subject.
1/2