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Written by: Daniel Xie

The coronavirus outbreak, and the response of various countries to the outbreak, has led to fear that specific leaders and political organizations will take advantage of the crisis to consolidate authoritarian power while whittling away democratic rights. A topic that has been seldom talked about with regards to the creeping authoritarianism is the fact that attempts to weaken democracy and consolidate authoritarian rule don’t just come from government policies, but may also come through tampering at the ballot box, particularly through machines and technology used to record election results that could easily be exploited by external sources to favor one candidate over another.

Diebold Machines and Election Fraud against the Sanders Campaign

The controversy surrounding voting machines and electoral fraud has been a constant issue in the United States, particularly with regards to Diebold voting machines. On March 5, 2020, an election integrity whistleblower, Laura Chamberlain, exposed on the Hard Lens Media show voting fraud tied to the 2016 and 2020 democratic party elections. The whistleblower interviewed by Hard Lens Media stated that in 2016, she had caught many instances of election machines in Chicago flipping votes from Bernie to Hillary, particularly those of early voting machines. And in 2020, things have only gotten worse according to Chamberlain, with newer machines tied to the Canada-based Dominion Voting Systems being installed in Chicago that are able to carry out electoral fraud more effortlessly then the machines that they’ve replaced.

Chamberlain points out that Dominion Voting Systems have QR codes on paper ballots with regards to early voting machines in Chicago and Suburban Cook County. While the early voting technically uses paper ballots, these paper ballots contain either a barcode or a QR code that is scanned by the machine to process the results. Machine tabulation relies on the barcode or QR code, and no one, not even the Chicago Board of Elections, can check what’s in that QR code independently of the dominion machines. Nor can smartphone apps read what’s in the barcodes and QR codes. Chamberlain suspects that this is a recipe for further election fraud carried out against Bernie Sanders, with the DNC taking advantage of any flaws associated with the QR codes to ensure Sanders’ defeat.

If what Chamberlain is alleging on Hard Lens is true, then this has not been the only time the DNC resorted to fraud to undermine a second Bernie Sanders insurgency. In Iowa, an app designed for the purposes of ballot counting malfunctioned as polls closed in Iowa. Despite Sanders leading various polls in the lead up to the Iowa caucuses, the caucuses themselves concluded with Pete Buttigieg leading Bernie Sanders by one delegate after a chaotic election night. Buttigieg’s delegates would eventually pledge themselves to Joe Biden following the suspension of Buttigieg’s campaign, allowing the establishment to carry Iowa despite Bernie’s initial successes.

While the reason for the delay in the Iowa results emerging was attributed to a software error, various Bernie supporters and other leftists believe, with reasonable justification, that Shadow Inc, which was backed by pro-democratic dark-money and staffed by various figures associated with the 2016 Clinton campaign, sabotaged the Iowa primaries in order to prop up an establishment candidate.

The role of voting machines in electoral fraud is not an incident solely isolated to the 2016 and 2020 elections. In 2006, HBO broadcasted a film titled Hacking Democracy, created by Robert Carrillo Cohen and directed by Simon Ardizzone. The film documented irregularities that Americans experienced with electronic voting systems during the 2000 and 2004 US elections, particularly electronic voting associated with Diebold voting machines. The film investigated and exposed backdoors and flawed integrity and within Diebold machines that makes them vulnerable to vote tampering carried out by outside sources, with a focus on vote tampering in Volusia County, Florida.

Hacking Democracy exposed two key methods by which Diebold machines can be tampered with:

Editing Microsoft Access databases containing the voting totals. These databases could be opened by normal means outside of the voting program without a password. In jurisdictions where Microsoft Access is disabled, the Visual Basic program can be used to tamper with the voting totals
The use of a method known as the “Hursti hack”, named after Harri Hursti, a hacker that has revealed the security flaws within Diebold machines that make them susceptible to electoral fraud. The Hursti hack involves the rigging of the Diebold optical scan to add “minus votes” to the ballot count of one candidate. This results in candidates losing votes from their voting total, and opens the door to their opponent winning by way of election fraud.

In response to the security flaws exposed by Harri Hursti, as well as the HBO documentary, Diebold Election Systems sent a letter to HBO claiming that Hursti, in showcasing the flaws of Diebold machines for the documentary “had no idea what he was talking about”, and that the hacking was a sham. This was despite the fact that a special report by scientists at UC Berkeley, commissioned by California’s state department, has confirmed the authenticity of the Hursti hack.

The controversy surrounding Diebold voting machines, and Diebold Election Systems’ attempts to suppress any revelation of electoral fraud associated with their machines goes back even earlier. In September 2003, a large number of internal Diebold memos, dating back to 1999, were posted to the BlackBoxVoting.org web site. These memos, archived on the “Diebold Memos” website, alleged mismanagement combined with electoral fraud carried out in the 2000 elections through Diebold machines. In response, Diebold shut down the website with a cease-and-desist letter as revealed in chapter 15 of the book Black Box Voting.

While Diebold machines were not specifically invented by Dominion Voting Systems, in 2010 Diebold Election Systems (re-named Premier Election Systems by that time) was bought by Dominion Voting Systems, which sought to use Diebold to expand the reach of its operations across the US. In seeking to expand the reach of Diebold across the United States, Dominion Voting Systems further compromises American elections, putting elections across the nation in further risk through the proliferation of machines that could be easily tampered with for the purposes of electoral fraud.

As of 2016 dominion machines have served 70 million voters in 1,600 jurisdictions and that just last year. In 2019, the state of Georgia selected Dominion Voting Systems to provide a new statewide voting system for the state starting in 2020. It is safe to say that the threat to American elections presented by Diebold machines has only increased in the 10 years since Dominion Voting Systems first acquired Sequoia Voting Systems.

The Hidden threat to Canadian Democracy

America is not the only country in which Diebold machines are used for ballot counting. In Canada, Dominion Voting Systems functions as the country’s largest elections systems provider, providing ballot tabulation and voting systems for Canada's major party leadership elections, as well as their provincial elections.

While Canadian Federal elections, along with most provincial elections, use hand-counted paper ballots, Ontario and New Brunswick have started to implement machines distributed by Dominion Voting Systems; Ontario would start the use of Dominion's tabulator machines in the 2006 elections, while New Brunswick used Dominion's 763 tabulator machines in the 2014 provincial elections.

During the 2014 New Brunswick elections, problems emerged around the reporting of the tabulator counts and the accuracy of the results reported. Consequently, Elections New Brunswick suspended the election results with 17 ridings still undeclared. After calls by the People’s Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives to call for a hand count of all ballots, recounts occurred in seven New Brunswick ridings that upheld the initial results of the elections. Dominion would blame the delay on unapproved software being used to count ballots.

The fact that Dominion’s software for counting ballots could be tampered with by unapproved software, combined with their 2010 deal buying all Diebold voting machines while never addressing similar issues within Diebold machines, does not bode well for the health of Canadian democracy.

As previous incidents in America have shown, technology tied to Diebold and Dominion Voting Systems has been exploited for the purposes of electoral fraud time and time again. In a hypothetical situation where even more of the voting technology associated with Dominion is introduced in Canada, the flaws within Diebold could potentially be exploited by establishment and far-right politicians to stifle progressive voices within the left wings of the NDP and the Green Party, and prevent a possible leftist insurgency challenging the status quo at all levels of government in which voting machines are used for the purposes of counting votes.

As both Canadian and American societies suffer under a pandemic that has no end in sight while confronting the legacy of racism driving their police forces, the population may begin to look for solutions rejected by both the neo-liberal establishment and the far-right. In the wake of growing radicalization and discontent, electoral vote fraud may be an attractive option for defenders of the status quo to shut off any challenges from the left.

A scary future is ahead

The machines and technologies deployed in counting the vote during elections by Dominion Voting Systems, have proven to be a hidden threat to democracy. This is because these machines, regardless of the intent of the companies involved, have software flaws that have been exploited to ensure that candidates challenging the status quo are shut down; the results of this rampant electoral fraud being subsequently passed off as part of a genuine democratic process. Given that Dominion has also expanded the reach of its technology in its home country, we could potentially see liberal and conservative politicians carry out electoral fraud as a means of shutting down leftist challengers within the Green Party and the NDP, as well as potentially the use of these dirty tactics by the establishment wings of the Greens and the NDP against more progressive internal challengers.

Canadians and Americans must demand a complete audit of the software of Dominion’s voting machines and the role said software plays in perpetuating election fraud, while pushing for a return to using paper ballots in elections. Accountable and auditable ballot methods must replace voting machines with flawed software that makes rampant fraud possible.

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