Who counts your vote?

The Wallingford town clerk, Barbara Thompson, said Tuesday her office discovered that no votes had been recorded in the state election reporting system from the Yalesville Elementary School, one of nine polling places in the 90th District of Cheshire and Wallingford.

Gwinnett County, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, has faced a day-long delay in reporting a crucial batch of votes due to a technical problem as the presidential race in the state hangs in the balance.

In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

City Clerk Patricia Little explained that a volunteer feeding absentee ballots into the AccuVote machine noticed an automated vote tally on the machine had not been changing with each new ballot. Ward 5 officials notified Little of the potential issue, estimating that the vote count was off by about 100 votes.

“All I can tell you is Dominion – the company that installed the voting machines – did an update overnight and caused a glitch in the system, and therefore the machines were not working”

All major manufacturers of voting systems in the United States are working with us to explore ways to incorporate ElectionGuard into their systems.

The Secretary of State’s office this week certified the latest release of Hart InterCivic’s Verity® Voting system.

Pursuant to my appointment by the Texas Secretary of State as a voting systems examiner under TEXAS ELECTION CODE § 122.035, please allow this letter to serve as my report concerning the above referenced examination. I, along with the other statutory examiners and staff from the Secretary of State’s office, examined the Democracy Suite 5.5 voting system presented by Dominion Voting Systems (“Democracy 5.5 System”) on January 16 and 17, 2019, at the offices of Elections Division of the Texas Secretary of State in Austin, Texas.

Upon the request of Dominion Voting Systems Inc. (Dominion), the Department of State’s Bureau of Commissions, Elections and Legislation (Department) scheduled an examination for October 15, 2018 of the Democracy Suite 5.5 voting system.

Some voters have said their straight-ticket ballots have switched to candidates in the opposite party, but the company that makes the machines said they don’t do that and have been used in the last nine election cycles without any problems.

Hart said it offered a less-expensive proposal that doesn’t appear in the scoring documents, even though it was demonstrated to the selection committee. Election Systems and Software, the losing vendor that filed the official protest, also said it offered alternative proposals that were millions of dollars cheaper, but weren’t scored in the bid review.

The Venezuelan government reported false turnout figures for its contentious election over the weekend, announcing a tally that had been altered by at least one million votes, a software company involved in setting up voting systems for the country said on Wednesday. “We know, without any doubt, that the turnout of the recent election for a National Constituent Assembly was manipulated,” the company, Smartmatic, said in a statement.

After a disastrous November election, Denton County is planning a complete return to paper ballots. The move is in part a response to voter distrust of electronic voting machines.

To all residents of Denton County: Your election last month was such a disaster that when we review what happened in total, it’s a wonder your county leaders haven’t demanded an immediate investigation by an outsider.

Sequoia Voting Systems was a California-based company that is one of the largest providers of electronic voting systems in the U.S., having offices in Oakland, Denver and New York City. Some of its major competitors were Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) and Election Systems & Software. At the time it had contracts for 300 jurisdictions in 16 states through its BPS, WinEDS, Edge, Edge2, Advantage, Insight, InsightPlus and 400C systems.

Contrary to initial reports, votes were miscounted for both local and national candidates, in different ways is different localities. At first, Smartmatic technicians claimed that the problem was because the ballot paper used for the testing was thinner than the real paper to be used on election day. When this was disproven, the official explanation from Smartmatic was that the compact flash cards were improperly programmed.

Two years after being shown the door for its role in an election that local officials would just as soon forget, voting machine maker ES&S is once again overseeing the system Sarasota County residents will use to cast their votes. ES&S’ purchase earlier this month of Premier Election Solutions means the company will now provide the voting machines, software and services to 68 percent of the precincts in the United States.

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) acquired Premier Election Solutions on September 3, 2009. ES&S President and CEO Aldo Tesi said combining the two companies will result in better products and services for customers and voters. The sale did not affect the Brazilian division.

Efforts to date have not succeeded in determining the ultimate owners of Smartmatic or the extent to which Smartmatic and the Chávez government of Venezuela have influence over U.S. elections through Smartmatic’s control of the software that counts votes for Sequoia voting machines. Sequoia steadfastly maintains that the 2007 Sequoia management buy-out “completely eliminates Smartmatic’s ownership, control and operational rights of any kind in Sequoia”.

Also killed in the accident were the pilot, Mario Jose Donadi, a convicted drug-trafficker in both the United States and Venezuela; Smartmatic employee Eduardo Ramirez and two residents of the home that was struck by the falling aircraft at about 10 a.m. Monday.

A former technician who worked for Hart InterCivic — a voting machine company based in Texas — has alleged that his company lied to election officials about the accuracy, testing, reliability and security of its voting machines. The whistleblower says the company did so because it was eager to obtain some of the approximately $4 billion in federal funds that Congress allocated to states in 2002 to purchase new voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (aka HAVA).

In a letter to the Chicago Board of Elections, Chairman Langdon D. Neal, Alderman Burke is reported to have “expressed surprise” that Jack Blaine testified under oath in the 2006 Chicago hearings that “software components from the Sequoia system were developed in Venezuela [including the critical component of the Sequoia systems – the HAAT] and that ‘the Venezuelans have access to the Sequoia code.’”Burke reiterated his dismay that Jack Blaine furthermore admitted that he could not answer whether or not Hugo Chávez was a Smartmatic shareholder

In 2006, Diebold decided to remove its name from the front of the voting machines for strategic reasons. CEO Thomas Swidarski announced he would decide in the beginning of 2007 if Diebold stays in the election business.[4] In August 2007 the company changed its name to “Premier Election Solutions” (“PES”).

Nearly 13 percent of voters in Sarasota County picked candidates in other races but did not choose a candidate in the House race. More than 35 callers to Common Cause’s voter hotline left messages Tuesday saying the e-voting machines appeared to leave off a vote for Jennings on their summary screens, said Ben Wilcox, executive director of Common Cause Florida. In neighboring Manatee County, just 2 percent of voters did not cast a ballot in the congressional race.

It is undisputed that Smartmatic is foreign-owned and it has acquired Sequoia, one of the three major voting machine companies doing business in the U.S. According to a Sequoia press release in May 2006. Sequoia voting machines were used to record over 125 million votes during the 2004 Presidential election in the United States. As we confront another election, Americans deserve to know that the Administration has made sure that any foreign ownership of voting machines poses no national security threat.

Diebold and ES&S, will count (using BOTH computerized ballot scanners and touchscreen machines) about 80% of all votes cast in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software. Voter advocate Bev Harris alleged Tuesday that managers of a subsidiary of Diebold, one of the country’s largest voting equipment vendors, included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records.

Dominion’s system mixes electronics and paper, combining an analog paper trail of each person’s vote with the advantages of quick, digital tallying. Its optical scanning technology is widely respected but American clients, at least post-Florida, looked on Dominion’s use of paper as quaint. “That was not seen as sexy,” Poulos says.

Sequoia Pacific’s Regional Manager, Phil Foster, and their regional sales executive, Pasquale (Rocco) Ricci (also owner of New Jersey-based Independent Voting Machine Services), were indicted for paying out about $8 million in bribes to Louisiana Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler.

American Information Systems acquired the Election Services Division of Business Records Corporation and was reincorporated as Election Systems & Software, Inc. in December 1997. At the time, AIS had about 750 customers and BRC had around 1200, where each customer was typically a county election office. As a result of this merger, ES&S became the largest voting system vendor in the United States.

The Complaint alleges that Hudson, a former Sequoia salesman, together with three former officers of Sequoia, engaged in a fraudulent scheme to inflate the revenue and pre-tax income reported by Sequoia in its periodic and annual reports and financial statements that were publicly disseminated and filed with the Commission. Sequoia is a Nasdaq-listed company headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts, engaged in the design, manufacture and service of fault-tolerant computer systems.