08/14/2008
"I care a lot more about the process than I care about the victory."
Stephen Spoonamore has a rather impressive resume as a computer security expert (and the last line of the resume is funny).
He's a Republican. He worked on the 2000 McCain campaign, Bloomberg's campaigns, and Giuliani's campaigns.
He thinks that electronic elections are completely fraudulent, and that every national (and many state) elections between 2000 and 2006 were stolen by Republicans.
After this snippet of video from an interview with Spoonamore about electronic voting fraud, I've excerpted parts of the transcript of the entire interview (download PDF). If you're interested in viewing the full video interview, you can watch it in 8 pieces on YouTube, or find it at Velvet Revolution (scroll down the page to "GOP Cybersleuth"; you'll need Windows Media Player).
And there's a lot of material in a previous post on this subject.
S - Global Elections systems, a group out of Texas, was pushing these back in 1998. I first became aware of it and actually wrote a short letter encouraging people to not use these in 1999 before the 2000 election debacle. What happened in 2000 is, all of a sudden you had a number of electronic systems fail during that election the Volusia County incident in which 16,000 votes suddenly vanished and then reappeared and several uncertified cards somehow ended up in the system, also a Diebold system. That sort of got lost in the hanging chad debate in Florida, however, there's a very strong argument to be made that the 2000 election was electronically stolen and the hanging chads were just a distraction.
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S - ...in some of the optical scan machines, where again I have been able to take a look at the codes, some of the cards are capable of taking a negative number. Now as a programmer, this is a very interesting question. Generally you try to make a code as elegant, clean and simple as possible for security. There is no reason at all, if you have zero votes and then you add votes from that point going forward - maybe ten thousand votes is the maximum they can run on a machine - that makes sense. Cards should have a range from zero to ten thousand, so there is no reason in the world a negative number should ever be able to exist on a voting card. And yet, in all the voting card code that I've looked at Diebold has a negative field that allows for a negative number to be entered in a vote total. Why? Why would you want to steal votes? That way you can start with a card that has negative 100 votes for somebody then it takes them 100 votes before they even get back to zero.
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S - ...I have a very strong understanding of statistical analysis. The way we actually find credit card fraud - here's a horrible fact that people are not gonna wanna know. About two and a half percent of the transactions on the global credit card network happening right now are fraudulent. Two and a half percent. That's a statistic that we are constantly battling with. When a fraud group, when a group that is doing a particular credit card scam moves into an area and begins working actively to fraud cards, we start to see statistics rise above the background level then we send in work, figure out who it is and try to break out the gang. Statistical analysis of one or two percentage points is how all computer hacking is detected. If you look at the case of Chambliss, that's ridiculous, the man was not elected. He lost that election by 5 points. Max Cleland won, they flipped the votes. Clear as day. Everybody was shocked by it. There's been numerous vote flips by this point. I do not believe George Bush won. I believe Kerry won, and I'm a member of the GOP. But I want to make it clear, we need to live in a place where your election is actually reflected in the vote. I want my candidate to win, but if my candidate loses, I care a lot more about the process than I care about the victory.
I - So this is not a partisan issue?
S - It shouldn't be. This is a fascist issue. People who don't want voting and want fascist control, but have people think they're voting. I mean, people forget the fact that there was voting in Hitler's Germany. Guess what? He won with 90 percent of the vote all the time. There was voting in Saddam's Iraq, and guess what? Saddam won the vote all the time. Well, did they win? Was that actually the will of the voter? Was that the way the votes were even cast?
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S - There is no system, electronic in the world that cannot be hacked. I've spent my entire life building or hacking electronic systems. There are entire companies dedicated to "ethical hacking" if you want to call it that. There is no system in the world, none, that cannot be hacked. If you give me the team of my choice of 8 people, in 1 week I will get any piece of data you want in the world. End of discussion.
I - Well then how do you secure such a piece of equipment?
S - You don't. You use paper ballots.
I - Ok, um...
S - I can't make it any clearer than this. You cannot have secure electronic voting. It doesn't exist.
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S - You must have paper ballots. Once you have a paper ballot, once you have generated a hand generated paper ballot is the best. It's cheapest, it's easy, it's fool proof, it's secure. The truth of the matter is that's still how things are done in the electronic world as well. Once you have generated that, you can validate how many ballots you have, who signed into a registry book, how the entire process is moved forward and you can go back and audit and check if there is any kind of dispute. You then have accurate elections.
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I - Many people who are denying problems, they're saying well oh, these are just democrats signaling alarms...
S - I'm a Republican. I'm a Republican, I worked on Giuliani's campaign, I worked on Bloomberg's campaign, I worked in John McCain's campaign. I've been a lifelong member of the party. This is not a democrat-republican issue. This is not a partisan issue. This is a democracy issue. If you actually care about a constitutional democracy in which each person votes, that vote is validated, and the people who end up in office are reflected on the basis of the way people voted, you care about this issue. If you don't want people to vote, if you don't want people's vote to count and if you want to rule without owning it by a mandate then you are very supportive of DieBold.
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I - Is it a republican issue? If what you say is true, who wants to steal the elections?
S - I certainly know that in old statistical information it seems that in every single bizarre circumstance where exit data, where polling data, informational data swings, it has all been in favor of republicans, but not the sort of republicans that I want to see in office at all. These are people who lie and people who cheat. That is not the conservative way. Conservatives conserve things. We are respectful and we are constitutionally based. You know what the real problem is? People do not want to believe that people want to steal elections in this country. I've done extensive work over the years for voting monitoring overseas, if we had a variance in the exit polling of even 2 percent of what was actually tabulated, which is exactly how the Orange Revolution came about in the Ukraine. We would be in there, explain to people something is wrong. We have had numerous selections in this country now, in which where you use Diebold elections systems machines, and what happens with the vote is way off - 5, 10, as much as 12 percent - from the exit polling and the actual survey. These statistical numbers are impossible and the problem is Americans do not want to believe that we have people stealing our elections. And they must come to the realization there are people in this country who want to steal elections and we must stop them.