by Michael Robinson | Uvalde Hesperian; Photos by Robinson
Forensic IT and cybersecurity expert Mark Cook of Colorado and Realtor Jarrett Woodward of San Antonio presented a detailed presentation to the Uvalde County Commissioner’s Court Monday, July 10th claiming the electronic voting machines Uvalde County is using and the current voting and tabulation process of votes being cast at the ballot box and mail in ballots are vulnerable to manipulation by the electronic voting system itself. They also made the claim that the current voting system used by Uvalde County Violates the Texas Election Code. Mark Cook has been traveling with an electronic voting system demonstration speaking to citizens and county officials throughout the state.
Also speaking on the agenda item was Emma Trimble, a resident of Uvalde. “I want to make it one hundred percent clear. I am not accusing nor even mildly suggesting that there has been any known or intentional fraud or wrongdoing in the election process in Uvalde, Texas. She continued saying, ” I am concerned about the electric voting process, I think it is unsecure, and we have two speakers here today that will give you the information you need. I pray, it is our prayer, that there is a higher court than this court and it is the Court of Heaven,” Trimble said.
Several citizens voiced their concerns during public comments on their concerns about the vulnerabilities of our current system imploring the County Commissioners to act on the recommendations by Cook and Woodword. However two citizens opposed making any changes to the current system with Democratic Party Chairman of Uvalde County Carlos Lopez claiming those wanting the change were doing so with political motivations.
“If the election results aren’t in dispute, what’s the purpose of this meeting? I’ll tell you what it is: It’s to sow fear and doubt in our election process,” Lopez said.
“I saw, a few years ago, half our country saying there is a problem with the system and half of our country saying there wasn’t a problem with the system. I knew both could not be true. I wanted to find out what the answer was myself. I dove in to determine what was actually going on,” Cook said.
“The voter registration system is the first component of our election system. It’s a database of names and addresses and they don’t necessarily tie to a voter is what I have found. So you can have extra entries in that database that don’t tie to a voter but that allows a record to vote,” Cook said.
Cook claimed that voter registration systems can be hacked and data can be added into the system. He went on to say that in some cases, election officials and states are allowing third parties to manage the voter registration system database. According to Cook, the state has access to it but they don’t manage it.
Cook also claimed that under the contract between the voting system company and the counties using the system, the software code in the system is not accessible and cannot be viewed.
Voter validation system
Cook claims the current voter validation system is flawed. ” He stated he has seen in Maricopa County, where the signatures on the ballots do not match the signatures on record. He went on to say that ordinary citizens, not forensic signature analysts, judge whether a signature on a ballot is authentic.
Election Reporting System
Cook also claimed the reporting system between the County Elections Office and the Secretary of State is vulnerable to 3rd party manipulation.
“A lot of clerks think they hand their reports off to the Secretary of State. In my research, I found out that even though the clerks think it’s going to the Secretary of State, in a lot of cases in a lot of states, secretaries of state are outsourcing to a 3rd party company. And one of those companies is Scytl…and Clarity Elections, an American subsidiary to Scytl,” Cook said.
County Commissioner John Yeackle said, “The actual manual voting system that we have, at least at the moment what we currently have, is about as secure as what you are going to find in Texas.”
Cook answered by saying that many counties are using ERIC which handles all the voter data bases in the state of Texas even though many counties are using different voting systems.
Jerrett Woodward then spoke about requirements of the Texas Election Code citing specific chapters claiming the Commissioner’s Court is legally obligated to follow partining to electronic voting systems.
Uvalde County Elections Administrator Melissa Jones Bradham
Uvalde County Judge Bill Mitchell then called on The Uvalde County Elections Administrator Melissa Jones Bradham to address the Court,
When asked by Commissioner Ronnie Garza what roll the Texas Secretary of State play in inspecting and approving our current voting machines,
“They approve the certification of the machines in order for them to be sold in Texas to Counties to election offices and counties. It’s pretty technical, it’s pretty above my head about what they do. They do penetration testing.They do not just software testing but also physical testing of the machines. They get together a team of cybersecurity experts, election law experts.”
Garza asked, ” Does our current system, the equipment hooked up to the internet during the elections?|
“No. They don’t have the ability to be hooked up to the internet. They have no remote access,through any radio frequency ability.and they also don’t have the ability to be hardwired.”
Bradham went on to say that voting machine equipment must be manufactured in the United States under Texas State Law.
County Commissioner John Yeackle asked, “They still are generating paper ballots, correct?”
“The system that we have is called the Ballot on Demand System. So it prints a paper ballot and that you can hand fill in the bubbles. We also have the ballot marking device. Which you would go up to a machine, You would make your selections on the screen and then it prints the ballot and you can verify your selections before you feed in into a ballot scanner,” Bradham said,
Yeackle said, “In other words to corrupt our system, one would have to have physical contact with a piece of that hardware…”
Bradham said, “Every single piece of the process, you’d have to be able to hack into every physically…”
