the con man

Dear Friends,

Long Coalition call today. Four and a half hours. As soon as I got off, I wrote and sent the following to our SoS office, our AG office and all members of our Legislature. We must continue to speak the truth and call out evil-doers.

In this video, President and CEO of ES&S Tom Burt touts an auditable paper trail for every vote cast. His statement is a meaningless distraction. Such a paper trail is worthless when the people it belongs to aren't allowed access to it, nor to the chain-of-custody by which it has been handled. 

In this document, pg 15, Evnen says hand counting is not only less accurate than machine counting, but adds weeks and months to the counting process. Evnen is bold-face lying. He's trying to protect and justify his expensive, multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars contract with ES&S. Hand counts are the gold standard. Evnen uses hand counts to conduct his "audits." If hand counts are done at the precinct level, which is where they should be conducted for chain-of-custody and separation-of-power purposes, they take a couple of hours max. Plus, they can be easily audited and verified by anyone and everyone, if they are simply conducted under, and captured by, a video camera.

In this video, Evnen touts only five ballot "discrepancies" in 48,292 ballots (or, to be more accurate, 579,504 ballot positions) . Assuming he's not lying like he was above, that equates to 86.3 errors in 10,000,000 ballot positions. That far exceeds the maximum allowable HAVA error rate of 1 (one) in 10,000,000 ballot positions!

Going back to this document, pg 15, Evnen says "[h]and counting encourages malicious actors to bribe, coerce, or infiltrate groups of poll workers tasked with hand counting the ballots," but he says nothing about the fact that computerized black box machine counting encourages malicious actors to bribe machine companies, machine software writers and/or machine hackers. An internet connection is not necessary to hack these easily hackable machines. The simple insertion of a USB stick will do the trick. There are other ways.

Evnen's sleight-of-hand rhetoric is designed to divert our attention away from the real issues. He's a con man. He must be held accountable.

Robert J. Borer