Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Beware of Election Fraud

It has been widely reported that the FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials. Yahoo News

But much closer to home there is an ongoing lawsuit alleging illegal actions in the last Austin city council election.

"Keith Ingram, Texas Director of Elections, has recently issued rule changes that waive any requirement to store the ballot images of votes cast on electronic voting machines in Texas.  Earlier this year, a lawsuit filed by Dr. Laura Pressley contesting the election results for an Austin City Council race was heard by the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals, where it continues to be held without a decision six months following its oral hearing.
The lawsuit exposed multiple voting irregularities in Dr. Pressley's election for City Council.  Dr. Pressley, a 17-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, used legal discovery to access computer logs of the main tally computer in the Travis County election office.  There, she found the computer counted more votes than registered voters in 10 of the 12 precincts forming her district.  One precinct had 100% voter turnout, the other had all but 2 registered voters participating in an election that had only a  32% and 17% county-wide turnout in the general and runoff elections.
Dr. Pressley's legal discovery further documented that Travis County could not produce any ballot images as required by Texas statutory law to properly conduct a recount.   The computer logs further documented multiple "corruption/invalid" errors while reading the Mobile Ballot Boxes (MBBs).  MBBs are memory cards that store precinct vote tallies and images of the ballots Texas voters cast when using electronic voting machines.  These "error" alerts are a signature for election tampering / vote-hacking, and procedure requires these cards to be quarantined for forensic analysis, which never happened.
Dr. Pressley's original case was summarily dismissed by Dan Mills, a Republican judge voted off the bench in firmly Republican Burnet County, claiming she had no evidence for election irregularities.  Judge Mills further sanctioned Dr. Pressley and her legal team $90,000 for daring to contest the election, though an offer was later made to withdraw the sanctions if she withdrew her lawsuit.  She refused.
The Travis County Democrat Party has been financing the legal opposition to Dr. Pressley's lawsuit.  Their defense has claimed Travis County was within its rights to violate Texas election law through an advisory issued by Mr. Keith Ingram (a Republican) over the Secretary of State's website that eliminated the need to keep or post voting tapes at each precinct after the polls calls. This practice serves as a measure that allows the public to audit the state records, which Dr. Pressley had to sue to get.  Travis County had no argument for the lack of ballot images needed to conduct a recount, and no one specifies where a single bureaucrat has the authority to overturn Texas statutory law.
On Super Tuesday, I served as an official poll watcher monitoring the Travis County central tally computer and witnessed multiple irregularities, tantamount were the "corrupt/invalid" alerts signaled with the first batch of MBBs read by the computer.  Though I brought this to the attention of all election officials from the Clerk to the Administrator, the corrupt/invalid card was not quarantined for forensic analysis to assure a lawful election.
Now Mr. Ingram, who works for Governor Abbott, attempts to rush through bureaucratic rule changes that bury within a waiver to store ballot images--the clear smoking gun in Dr. Pressley's case, which since last February, remains without a decision from the 3rd Court of Appeals.
Is popular opinion right that we have a "rigged system", wherein Establishment Republicans work in collusion with Machine Democrats to thwart the will of the American People?   It is beginning to look that way in the reliably Red State of Texas.  Heaven forbid what is really going in the Battleground States!"  Austin Election Fraud

No comments:

Post a Comment