Vindication: Whistleblower Confirms Election Systems Do Allow Election Results to Be Manually Changed
Last fall Joe Hoft published a story exposing a clause in BPro/KNOWiNK’s contract with the state of Oregon which explicitly states:
“The System shall allow the County Elections Staff to override the results, if necessary.”
The article was widely shared online prompting a “fact check” article to appear in USA Today “debunking” the claim that election officials can manually override election results. They claimed the feature referenced in the BPro/KNOWiNK contract only allowed election officials to “manually update unofficial vote counts on election night in case of failure by the automated system…this action has no effect on the certified results.” (https://joehoft.com/shocker-knowink-systems-allow-election-staff-to-override-election-results/)
After coming across Joe Hoft’s article, a Texas election official with direct knowledge of ES&S and Hart election systems reached out under condition of anonymity to confirm that the functional capability to override official election results does indeed exist in the systems the whistleblower is familiar with.
The whistleblower relayed personal knowledge of a time in her county when official election results were manually overwritten because of a mistake that was made in setting up the election. In typical fashion, several races in that election flipped between election night and the next morning after the manual overrides were put into the system.
The whistleblower was very concerned about the improper processes that compound potential for error when the manual vote adjustment feature is used. They also said that there is no good reason to have that feature in the system.
The whistleblower stated that this feature could be used by anyone with or without official access to the system:
“Anybody can hack into it, and it would be undetectable. Anybody that has a password – you know how these counties are. You create a password ‘123456.’ It’s ridiculous. It’s not just president or federal – some local person could say, ‘Hey, Brother-in-law Election Administrator, why don’t you add enough votes to get me over?’ Do you think these radical election officials wouldn’t use that to their advantage?’ “
“The software is scary complex. You have so many potential points of failure. This opens the door wide open to fraud.”
To further confirm the feature exists in voting systems, the whistleblower provided the page in the ES&S User’s Manual that explains how official election results can be manually overridden:
Excerpt from ES&S User’s Manual for “Manual Results Entry”
Sorry, USA Today, not only can “unofficial” election night reporting provided by BPro/KNOWiNK be manually overridden, but so can the official election results in the tabulation system itself.
The only way to tell if results have been manually overridden is to check the cast vote record or ballot images – records which are increasingly harder and harder, or even impossible, to obtain.