Not too little, but almost certainly too late

Tech expert to Georgia: show me the paper

The man who invented and patented the technology that lets you scan items at the grocery store, create an airport boarding pass, and generate authentication codes just blew the doors off the Georgia State Senate subcommittee hearing on elections.

Tech expert Jovan Hutton Pulitzer claimed that to the extent there were election issues in Georgia, they could be explained by simply looking at the paper ballots. And he claimed to prove in real time that the system was susceptible to manipulation via WiFi because his team had broken in and were in it at the time of the hearing.

Pulitzer basically threw down, telling a Georgia Senate subcommittee looking into voter fraud to show him the ballots, give him two hours, and he’d show them if there was election fraud in Fulton County.

I only care what that piece of paper tells us. The paper, the paper. Verify the vote, verify the vote.

[…] I can determine where ink comes from, where paper comes from, whether it was mailed, whether it was folded, the difference of a duplicated press” and a mass copier.

In the nearly hour-long presentation at a special hearing with the subcommittee (see it below), Pulitzer demonstrated the differences between the paper ballots in two different areas of Fulton County that he claims clearly differentiated between Democrat and Republican Party ballots.

A bar code was put on Republican ballots while none was put on Democrat ballots, he claimed. Furthermore, he said, the alignment cues used by a scanner to read the ballot were out of alignment on the Republican ballots but not on the Democrat ones.

If the machine worked according to programming none of us would be standing here. We’re standing here because something broke. I don’t care about the machine. I don’t even care about the code that was written into the machine. What I care about is that physical artifact. That physical artifact has material differences from district to district that should not be there. Why are they there? I’m not talking about code. That’s how this gets derailed.

He said he could tell immediately if a ballot was real or counterfeit.

You could look at every section of the ballot count even the spike and tell if that was a real or counterfeit ballot.

We will tell you instantly what came out of a mass copier versus what came out of a printer. Did a human fill this out? Did a machine fill this out? Was it mailed or was it not mailed? It can be compared against spoilage or adjudicated by number or, last but not least, we will tell you have we seen this number before. Did we see it keep popping back up?

You will see what gets run over and over and over and over again. That is the problem of why we must see – the physical ballot is the Holy Grail, the second one is the digital scan.

I’ve spent the last 24 years studying the way paper and machines and internet react. I’ve spent the last six years studying the paper reading details at the nano level. I can tell you what paper came from China. I can tell you the person who handled it was a smoker. All of it is detectable with the physical ballot.

“Look,” he told them, “this is simple.”

“I’m the guy that told the world that that little bar code can talk to the internet. Making the physical world talk to the internet world. This is as simple as scanning a loaf of bread at a grocery store. That’s your vote. You’re handing it to the checker or scanning it yourself that’s basically the polling machine.

“What is sad about this is we’re not even performing at standards expected at grocery stores. … if you complained, [the store] would have to audit it and make it right. But we don’t do this in elections?

But they’re playing hide and seek with the ballots? Why?