Voting software - should it be public?

[Douglas Cragoe]

Here in Los Angeles county the new VSAP software is supposed to be released to the public in some manner this year. I doubt the registrar will release very much, despite what is supposed to happen. When we had the old InkaVote system the registrar wrote to me that nobody could see the source code of the system or system details because that was a security risk. This was for a system that resided on an old PC tower in a locked up room with no internet access. So what was the security risk? All I could surmise was the security risk was from his own staff and the county IT experts who maintained the system.

Brad Friedman is covering the recent release of Dominion software pretty well. Is it illegal to release that software? And if it is illegal, should it be? If so, then secret software is counting votes in the U.S. protected by the legal system.

Brad in his recent 8/12 post: "The far-right newspaper Washington Timespublished a gob-smacking story on Wednesday, in which a cyber expert hired by Lindell himself to examine and explain the super-secret 37 terabytes of data --- said to have been captured from Internet transfers just days after the November election, revealing that China flipped millions of votes --- told the paper that the data and claims about them were illegitimate.”

So Brad if the Washington Times is far-right newspaper, can you give me the name of a far-left newspaper?

How about the name of a far-left ration station? Would that be KPFK, the one that has your show? After all KPFK has a regular radio host that is a communist. Seems to me like that’a sign of a far-left radio station. I listen to KPFK in the car because it’s sometimes more interesting that more mainstream stuff. Pacifica (the network with KPFK) has a long list of communist stuff in the archives, going back to the 1960’s.

Bradblog from 7/26 regarding the excessive cost being charged for a recount of an election proposition in Long Beach:
"Why the change in pricing? Thanks to Vote Centers, ballots cast across L.A.'s county of some 4 million voters, are not sorted by precinct, even though state law requires that recounts be done by precinct.” Thanks for bringing that up Brad. This is true and why nobody gives a damn about this violation of the state election code is a mystery.

From what I can tell, there is no other large county in California that takes all the voted at polls ballots and puts them into batches and then never separates them out by precincts for recounts. Ray Lutz tells me in San Diego they do the 1% manual count using precincts for ballots cast at precincts, and uses batches for the 1% manual count for ballots cast at voting centers. But since L.A. County has no precinct voting anymore it may be the only county in the state that is completely going against state law. From what I’ve been told, all the other large counties collect ballots in voting centers and then separate them out into precincts for the required 1% manual recount and likely other recounts.

-Doug Cragoe