OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
No bio...
User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
24d ago
Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable.
You think so, but what odds do you want to give on the password for the laptop being a shared admin password that 20+ people know?
I have unfortunately seen a lot of stuff like this while working in IT. There was one school district that stored all parent passwords in the clear on a csv file.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
There's his CCP ties, but I don't think Americans care. Unless he's the perpetrator of a snuff film, I don't think anyone gets shocked anymore.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
Yes, sorry. Fixed now.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
Day II can be found at https://youtube.com/live/uahoqdJVc0Q?si=Wu_ZZXF5fR-U8Cx2. There was no day III.
That is the trial courts opinion. I disagree with the judge on the following:
First, there are things that are touched on in the trial that the judge did not allow to be tried. Specifically, there were issues with ballot chain of custody and seals being broken, that in the pre-trial the judge forbade any line of inquiry on. When you listen to the trial recording, you can hear witnesses occasionally mention the seals not being present, but the judge did not permit this to be investigated and does not include it in any of his own rationale. If it was included, it provides another mechanism than voter suppression to affect the election results.
Another thing is that very little time was allowed to investigate and present the case. This isn't like a murder trial that goes on for weeks. The plaintiff's expert was only permitted to review a small handful of ballots in less than a day, the day before the trial. The lawyers only had the night before the trial to assess their strategy based on the evidence the expert provided. They had 0 days to pursue leads that this investigation generated. If there seems to be gaps in their argument, then that makes sense with what they were given and does not indicate there was nothing there inside the gaps, just that they were unable and not permitted to dig further.
The last thing that isn't really explained in the judge's reasoning is that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of the election in the State of Arizona, was also the Democratic nominee for this election. If the Plaintiff is correct, Katie Hobbs directly benefited from the problems in Maricopa County. The Judge writes at the beginning of his opinion that "this Court must presume the good faith of their official conduct as a matter of law" without including any consideration of cui bono.
Now onto the matters of fact. The Judge ignores some of the most credible witness testimony, that of Clay Parikh, because the Judge decided that:
If the ballot definitions were changed, it stands to reason that every ballot for that particular definition printed on every machine so affected would be printed incorrectly.
This is the judge's own opinion on a technological matter. This is not something a witness testified to. I do not know the judge's technical expertise, maybe he became CompTia A+ certified in his spare time. I don't know. I do know some of the expert witness credentials though, and Parikh seemed very competent and very confident.
And Parikh gave two possible explanations for the 19inch issue. One was someone with admin access to the laptop attached to the printer changing settings, one was someone changing the settings on the Election Management System. The judge, in his own technological opinion, ruling out the definitions in the Election Management System (maybe someone made a duplicate definition, and set those to 19 inch, and some ballots were printed out under the duplicate definition and some not), does not rule out an admin changing printer settings, and that this itself could not be an accident because the printer settings were controlled via a script.
Even the things the Judge admits is pretty damning from a "fraud happened here" perspective, but did not supply evidence of violations of the very limited topics the Judge allowed inquiry into. For example, he does not deny that there is evidence that "Runbeck employees were permitted to submit about 50 ballot packets of family and friends into the ballot stream improperly." He claims that this evidence is countered by Maricopa County Election officials being there to supervise and not reporting anything of the sort, but that is equally evidence of Maricopa County officials not paying enough attention to catch fraud or being participants in the fraud. There is a huge element of "We investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing" here.
Lastly, Richard Baris is a poll director who testified to the statistical unlikeliness of how few votes were counted in this election.
Indeed, to the extent that a range of outcomes was suggested by Mr. Baris, he suggested that – with his expected turnout increase on Election Day of 25,000-40,000 votes the outcome could be between a 2,000-vote margin for Hobbs to a 4,000-vote margin for Plaintiff.
He also testified that anything that impacts election day specifically will have a disparate impact on Republican voters who are more likely to vote on election day than vote early.
What my take away from this is, even if Maricopa County is just incredibly incompetent at running elections, this incompetence is indistinguishable from fraud significant enough to sway an election. And if that's the case, how on Earth can we claim that the government is run by the will of the people?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
27d ago
Sorry, it's taking a while to type up the other testimony. Responding to your points, supported by the expert witness testimony:
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Error rate is high though expert was not permitted to see every ballot. Witness was provided a sample of 348 from 6 vote centers, 50 of them had been rejected due to being printed incorrectly. He could see the same, very visible error, on other ballots he was not allowed to inspect ballots on. This error could not have been machine error. It was 100% intentional, would need to have been inserted by someone running a script on the printer from a secure laptop or by someone from the Election Management System setting the ballot definitions.
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Maricopa is a mixed county, with a substantial number of blue and red precints., you can layer by party majority. There is a voter suppression issue, where if this happened in primarily red areas it could be considered voter suppression due to extended lines. If this happened primarily in blue counties, it could have been a way to force the ballots into "duplication" where ballots could have been triplicated, quadrupled, etc.
One witness, Steve Richner, testified that they don't count the number of ballots they transport to main tabulation center (where all the rejected ballots would go.) They count them at the main tabulation center, but not at the voting center. This is a vulnerability.
If it is proven to be intentional, (and the expert witness is very sure), then what is the intention? The only reason someone would intentionally cause a wide spread printer/tabulator error is to affect the election in some way. Maybe they were trying to throw it in favor of Kari Lake! But with the testimony at hand, I don't think it's possible to say that there was no significant, widespread fraud.
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It was determined that it could not have done accidentally. The expert explained that security protocols on the print spooler and the Election Management System mean that it would need to be done intentionally or with willful negligence. All the ballot definitions are tested before the election.
Information Security Officer witness testimony begins around the 2 hour mark. (the 8 minutes before this was boring stuff establishing his credentials as an expert in root cause analysis and other things.) Honestly, the whole hour is worth listening to, but I will type out my best, though incomplete, transcript.
He reviewed the FOIA publicly available information, and then was permitted to examine ballots the day before the trial from 6 vote centers. The ballots had been re-tabulated for the recounts, and Maricopa county was unable to "map them back" so chain of custody "system of record" was broken when he did his inspection.
Plaintiff lawyer: "Were some of the ballots that you inspected duplicated ballots?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir, some of them are.
Plaintiff lawyer: "And what is a duplicated ballot?"
Information Security Officer Witness: Duplicated ballots are when there is an issue with a ballot and it cannot be read through the tabulation system. Therefore it is duplicated, and that duplication is then run through the system.
And is that duplication then the ballot that is actually tabulated and counted?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir, the way the process works is that the original ballot needs to have the duplication ID, which Maricopa did. The part where they failed in the statue is that the duplication ballot is supposed to be easily relatable ot the original ballot. They could not find the duplicate ballot that was tabulated.
So you inspected the original ballot that was duplicated?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes sir
And your understanding of Arizona law is that the duplicate ballot and the original ballot are supposed to be maintained together, physically?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes that's a EAC requirement. [EAC is US Elections Assistance Commission.]
And the duplicate ballot which was the ballot that was counted, was not there?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir, it was not.
Out of the 348 that were set aside, how many were printed from a ballot on demand printer?
Information Security Officer Witness: [lengthy answer, I'm not typing it all out, ended by] 48 of those existed because there was a 19 inch image of a ballot printed on a 20 inch paper.
It's your testimony on inspections of these ballots, that you determined that there was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch ballot paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes that is accurate.
How did you determine that it was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: These ballot images are a PDF file that is stored with configuration settings, which is created on the EMS, in this case EED. That application creates the style, the definition. It is loaded on the tabulator, how it is evaluated when the image is created. That is a print job, to use the common term, that is sent to the printer.
And how did you determine that it was a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch paper?
Information Security Officer Witness: I can determine that 100% of the ballots are projected, because the mechanics of aprinter, the feeds are not always accurate. On the 20 inch ballots you can see the same borders of the image. On the 20 inch ballots you can see the corners in the feed. On the 19 inch ballots you can see the corners well within the margins.
Did you physically measure the ballots?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes I did, with a ruler
Given your experience and training with electronic voting systems for 9 years, can you tell what the cause of a 19 image being projected on a 20 inch paper would be?
Information Security Officer Witness: Yes, there are only two ways it can happen.
Can you tell the court the two ways?
Information Security Officer Witness: One way is by changing printer adjustments, making the printer settings override the image file. The other is through the application side. If so, there would have to be a 19inch ballot definition.
Where does that definition reside?
Information Security Officer Witness: Based on the testimony, it was on the laptop that was connected to the printer, the print spooler, that controls the print jobs.
Is there any way, in your opinion, for a 19 inch ballot image to be projected on a 20 inch ballot by accident?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir. Because the setting in the configurations in the procedures that are used, cannot allow that. These are not a "bump against the printer, and the settings change." I reviewed the evidence, and the printers are configured via script. This takes away the human error of someone mis-coding the instructions on the printer.
Is it permissible to have two different ballot definitions in the same election with respect to the ballot image?
Information Security Officer Witness: No sir. If you have two different styles, you are assessing them differently. That can also produce forgery, there is only supposed to be one ballot style per voting options (people in same regional election).
What effect would a 19 inch ballot image projected on a 20 inch piece of paper have when it is placed in these vote center tabulators?
Information Security Officer Witness: It would cause it to be rejected. According to Dominion's documentation, they perform hundreds of checks on the physical paper ballot that is inserted. They state that it can reject the ballot for incorrect margin. It causes a paper jam issue. A tech, Aaron Smith, reported that these same errors occurred in Maricopa county during the election - there were paper jams errors, and when he examined there was no paper.
What is your understanding of Mr. Smith's role during the 2022 election?
Information Security Officer Witness: He followed every procedure he was instructed to follow. He put a good solid effort forward to resolve the issues, it finally came to the point he could not resolve the issues according to the procedures and he requested a replacement tabulator, which happened to be misconfigured.
Witness is asked about his printer experience. He goes into his extensive experience with printers, including solving security issues with top secret printing.
Do you have any concern about the security of the ballots given your findings yesterday?
Information Security Officer Witness: If it is ok with the court, I have to answer this in two ways. First, I observed that ballots were being put out and sampled. I observed more improperly imaged ballots that were not inspected that were there. To answer the question, those should be secured. I handle everything from physical security to accrediting buildings for classified information storage, I have been a classified courier. As a forensic investigator I understand everything about chain of custody. And what I will say is, the facility, and security, and chain of custody at the buik and tabulation center is highly inaccurate and those ballots can be tampered with.
Information Security Officer Witness: For example, security seals were only placed on the boxes that we inspected, and that was due to the court order.
On the cross examination:
I believe you testified that you examined some ballots that had been duplicated, and you testified that the duplicates were not kept next to the ballots?
Mr Jarett said that it would take them a week to try to find them.
I am running out of space and time tonight. Tomorrow I will try to cover the next witness. Sorry this project is taking a while. I did not want to be the person who drops a long video without a written summary/transcript, but making things takes time.
One of the things most astonishing to me is how little concern is given this. The Plaintiffs are reminded that they only have 6 hours to present their case. The judge says that he "doesn't want anyone burning the midnight oil on this." This is a case that could change who the Governor of the State is and the judge doesn't want it to be given significant time.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
@Turbulent_Singularity I'm going to try to get the timestamps of the video for what are the most significant parts (I like listening to court recordings while doing other things but that doesn't mean that everyone else does.)
At 1:04:49 Maricopa County uses Ballot on Demand Printers. Both the printers and ballot readers are calibrated together. This election, they were calibrated for a 20 inch ballot.
Most important quote: "What would happen if a ballot was printed out of a Ballot on Demand printer at the vote center, if it was printed with a 19 inch ballot on a 20 inch paper, and run through the tabulator?"
Election's Director answer: "I can't answer that because we did not test for that because all our ballets were 20 inch."
Then at 1:20:00: "You recall that there were issues with ballots being rejected on November 8th, 2022, Election day, correct?
"Do you recall tabulators rejecting ballots at at least 70 vote centers during Election Day?"
Election's Director Witness: "Yes, I recall that there was about 70 different vote centers that we sent technicians out to to change printer settings at because our tabulators were not reading those ballots."
"Would a disruption such as experienced - would you agree with me that there was a disruption on November 8th, 2022, on the election?"
Election's Director Witness: "I would say that we had some printers that were not printing ballots dark enough to be read in by tabulation. Voters had legal options to participate with voting, so I do not count that as a disruption."
"Did you hear of any reports of wait times over 60 minutes?"
Election's Director Witness: "Yes I did."
"What is the target wait time in your model, do you know?"
Election's Director Witness: "On average, half an hour."
"Did you ever become aware of multiple reports at various voting centers where wait times exceeded 2 hours?"
Election's Director Witness: "Our data shows some locations approaching 2 hours, but not exceeding it."
"If a 19 inch ballot image was put on a 20 inch paper, in the 2022 General Election, would that be a failure of your election process?"
Election's Director Witness: "If that would happen, which I don't know how it would, yes. It would have been a mistake."
Next edit will be a while, but I will type stuff up for the printer specialist witness when he comes up.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
You are correct, I misremembered because there was an attempt at suing the Obama campaign but it didn't go anywhere (probably because they weren't as involved.)
The Heritage foundation link is a database of election fraud that was proved in court. It's not an exhaustive list of all suspected of credible election fraud. It is very, very hard to put a case together that a whole state's election should be overturned because of the sheer numbers involved. If you look at one precinct, one race with fewer than 5,000 ballots, you can keep the scope of your investigation narrow and focused. If it's not just one county, one precinct cheating, but several, each not enough on its own to swing the race, but cumulative, there is a lot more to prove.
That said, I thought the Kari Lake trial did a good job and I was convinced at least. Here is a link if you would like to watch it: https://youtube.com/live/qsaOvV55XWM?si=JvRMpDKvsRvHOFhv&t=240
You can filter by fraud type by Election Overturned to see cases where the fraud affected the results of the election. Here is one in 2020 that found 3/4 of absentee ballots were not valid.
I want to note that this is a database of election fraud that was proved in court. It's not an exhaustive list of all suspected of credible election fraud. It is very, very hard to put a case together that a whole state's election should be overturned because of the sheer numbers involved. If you look at one precinct, one race with fewer than 5,000 ballots, you can keep the scope of your investigation narrow and focused. If it's not just one county, one precinct cheating, but several, each not enough on its own to swing the race, but cumulative, there is a lot more to prove.
That said, I thought the Kari Lake trial did a good job and I was convinced at least. Here is a link if you would like to watch it: https://youtube.com/live/qsaOvV55XWM?si=JvRMpDKvsRvHOFhv&t=240
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
If you click the Heritage link in my comment above it has documentation on over a thousand proven instances of recent (last 30 years) voter fraud in the US leading to over a thousand criminal convictions and overturning dozens of (generally local) elections. I think my priors are better supported than yours.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
28d ago
RE: the worker stealing money analogy:
For me the analogy breaks down at the beginning. Republicans have always accused Democrats of fraud. Florida has a few counties that are notorious for it. Chicago is notorious for it. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
Let's say a CEO knows that employees sometimes waste time on their phones or talking about non-work topics, and that this cuts into their bottom line. Sometimes the company has bad quarters, and some grumbling is given to the employees getting paid to chatter. A few of the more egregious examples get written up but not much happens.
Then the company has a year where everyone works from home. There are many more reports of employees doing errands during normal business hours, more reports of overtime than usual, time card irregularities. The business has a horrible year and ends Q4 with a loss.
Is it reasonable for the boss to think he's being taken for a sucker?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
Trump didn't try to postpone, cancel, or otherwise take control preceding the 2020 election. There was an opening for it - a historic pandemic that lead to the erosion of many other liberties. If there was ever a time when someone could have tried to push boundaries like that, it was then. He posted some things on Twitter about worrying that it would be insecure. But he didn't direct the Federal Lawfare forces to push the issue.
I also think that outstaying the 2 term-welcome is such a taboo in American's minds, that it is unthinkable for anyone to break it. Few Trump supporters want him to be in office longer than two terms, and Trump would see it's unpopular and so he won't do it.
If that counts too much towards, "Trump would be a dictator if given the chance (but his own base won't give him the chance.)" then I think that the bar is set in a position that would trip most politicians. If there wasn't an Amendment forbidding three terms, Obama probably would have run again. FDR actually did run again, defying convention. The Executive has expanded in power with every administration for decades. 90% of presidents have the dictator spirit within them. We were only graced with 1 George Washington in our nation's history.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
However, that doesn't change the fact that, despite not having those protections, there hasn't been good evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in past US elections (at least in the modern era), and that no one before hand questioned the actual outcome of the election, even if there might have been a few gripes here and there.
Little known fact - Obama would not have become the Democratic Presidential Nominee had four people in his campaign not cheated in the primaries.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
29d ago
If the reason I am so sure is that I have video evidence of fraud, I would post that to the world as well with the same MSM reaction.
I mean, there was a video of a precinct pulling out a box of ballots that had been covered by a table cloth after sending away all observers. A month later, a reporter reviewed the video footage and insists that the box was legitimate and that there is "no evidence of any wrongdoing."
I think even with the official story there is obvious wrong doing - particularly sending away all observers and then deciding to continue counting without waiting for the observers to return. But is that wrong doing significant enough to sway the election? Probably not this specific instance. But how many specific instances are needed before it might sway the election?
Of course, no one was so kind as to leave a genuine smoking gun, a video confession in the midst of the act. There were a great number of times poll workers violated local election rules, and these instances are as proven as it can be outside a court of law. But without being able to investigate these, it is impossible to know if these actually turned the election.
And if the statistical anomaly is strong enough by itself, I'd do a fireside chat that is amounts to a powerpoint presentation on "here is statistical evidence of fraud", and if it really is strong enough, then the MSM will either be forced to report on its strength, or their contortions trying to debunk it will be obvious to everyone, winning the public to your side.
Your assumption that the "public" would rally around any given evidence of fraud is laughable. This is a close election. Everyone either voted for the other guy or didn't vote at all. Everyone is either motivated against accepting evidence their guy actually lost, or politically disengaged.
I'm assuming you voted for Biden? Imagine if you saw a video of someone "cleaning up unclear ballots" to favor Biden. Instances where neither candidate was selected or both candidates were selected by accident, and every time the poll worker filled in the Biden bubble and erased the Trump bubble. Do you think that the average Biden voter, upon seeing this, would say, "That's F'd up! I'm going to share this with everyone I know and protest that Trump should be the rightful president?"
Of course not! They would justify it to themselves as just a lone wolf that couldn't affect much, or that "they voted for a Democrat for senator, of course they meant to vote Biden!" They certainly wouldn't amplify the video.
What about those who don't have a horse in the game? Well, they were too focused on whatever it is that people who don't vote focus on. Imagine not caring about politics. Crazy stuff.
Trump voters really were convinced by the videos and accounts going around, so much so that upwards of 70% of Republicans still believe the election was stolen. Having this group of the public on his side did pretty much nothing for Trump besides get him into even more trouble once they decided to try a riot for themselves.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I was unfavorably compared to Kamala Harris on a customer call. (I was typing and talking at the same time and started to say word-salad.) I think people mostly avoid talking about politics when out in groups, but it is on people's minds.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I thought the same as you but today I heard a recording of him talking in 2014. I think his vocal pattern is just like that, regardless of cognitive decline.
The figure that I'm most interested in would be something like, "What is the least amount of money someone needs to live a respectable life this year?" Something like the poverty line, except instead of just looking at basic needs it looks at how much someone would need to spend to live according to the regulations and societal expectations we are subject to. This number would be widely different between someone who bought their house before 2010 vs someone who is renting or bought a house more recently. There are a few categories that could be evaluated separately, like lifestyle to be a respectable DINK in a big city, lifestyle to be a family of four in a suburb, etc. The interesting thing would be to pick a lifestyle and stick with it for a decade, seeing what the minimum amount a family could spend to stay in that lifestyle over time. That is what people think inflation is tracking, or wish inflation was tracking, based on how people reference inflation in arguments.
Someone has been tracking "Average Household Expenditures" which seems like an ok, if imperfect proxy for what I have in mind. https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/top-line-means.htm.
| Year | Average Household Expenditure | Percent Increase |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | $57,311 | - |
| 2017 | $60,060 | 4.79% |
| 2018 | $61,224 | 1.93% |
| 2019 | $63,036 | 2.95% |
| 2020 | $61,334 | -2.70% |
| 2021 | $66,928 | 9.12% |
| 2022 | $72,967 | 9.02% |
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I have seen many reports of more dead bodies that have not made it into the official statistics yet. I predict the number will be around Katrina levels, and have put my money where my mouth is, for what it's worth.
This video is one of several that, when I add things together, present this picture: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ag-hb45J6MQ?si=PBOIVJo6TvLyLZir
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Update: The North Carolina National Guard has taken credit for the Rotor Wash incident. https://x.com/NCNationalGuard/status/1843780336616124896
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Would you like to use https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2024&basin=atl when the report becomes available?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
Then why don't you vote for a third party that aligns further with your preferences? People like to be a part of a movement, they want to have a good chance of winning instead of "throwing their vote away."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1mo ago
I wasn't clear enough on what my complaint was. It bothers me that there were helicopters that were not being used. Not being serviced, not being loaded, not in the air, nothing. In a situation like this, helicopters are too valuable to waste on a runway.
We are lead by accountants who will say, "I diverted X helicopters to the crisis," but never give a thought to how they are used to accomplish a goal.
This article is from a historian who thinks Trump is fascist. He points to these specific things:
I think this is all kind of ridiculous, and if these four items are the mark of Fascism, then I could easily make a comparison to the Democratic party.
DEI, Affirmative Action, celebrating immutable traits over individual accomplishment, etc.
Which party would like to give power back to the states on issues like school choice, abortion, etc? And which party in contrast has been encouraging centralized power? Which party wants to remove the electoral college and pack the Supreme Court the minute they lost control of it?
Which side wanted vaccine passports and to shut down "non-essential businesses?" Which side is currently arguing for price ceilings?
Which side is currently prosecuting a politician under "novel legal theories?" Which side has been calling for censoring political opponents on social media?
It seems to me that Fascism (and in the downstream, Nazi-ism) has features that has always been acceptable in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Being able to compare your political enemies to Nazis is just a matter of who has control of the talking heads at this time.
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