Voting Machines NEVER Use Workarounds....Without Good Reason
Special Conspiracy Theorist Edition
Red Hats, White Hats, Black Hats and Asshats (most of you),
If you are reading this, apparently, I have not convinced you that Election Machines are worthy of your trust just as much as say…..90’s era Major League Baseball. Look it up….Dopes.
Today’s topic will focus on a technical term called “Workaround”.
Normally, changes to any certifiable election machines are handled with a “change management” process so that the certifiable election machines stay certified. I have written extensively about it here.
But, apparently, in certain cases a highly trustworthy, typically Serbian programmer in Serbia nonetheless, describes in a “customer support” ticket what “workarounds” are totally 100% allowed on certifiable election machines. Examples of the “certified workarounds” MAY include:
Hope
Waiting longer
Changing modem settings
Uninstalling and re-installing software
Re-re-re-readjudicate
Re-re-re-regenerate election files
And so on and so forth etc…OK?
I don’t expect MagaDonians to believe me so when you are done napping on your fabulous pillows, please read it yourself.
If you navigate to the Sheriff Dar Leaf’s X account, you will find files which contain emails with the complete context.
https://twitter.com/SheriffLeaf
https://x.com/SheriffLeaf/status/1769758994120274040
Further deprogramming on these topics can be found in Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4 and Part5 and many more posted on my substack.
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[To Bad, So Sad…]
When generating election files, EED warns that the EV tabulators do not have modem settings. This warning is misleading because we actually do not want those tabulators to have modem settings, since they are not transmitting. The validation should be smart enough to only warn for those tabulators that have either the results transmission or configuration ping (or both) enabled. It seems that it currently doesn't account for cases where there is more than one MBS with different settings. The problem for us is that this validation process can take 20-30 minutes, so you can't just kick off election file generation and come back in 14 hours. You must wait for this warning dialog to pop up and click OK to continue (but sometimes you forget to do this and when you come back later, expecting to be in Ready for Elections, you are so sad and disappointed to see this dialog instead). As a workaround, we simply attached the modem settings to all ICP2s, even non-transmitting EV ones, to avoid seeing this warning.
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[Simply WAIT….]
Adjudication client not responding when loading next ballot Workaround …… Add workaround: Method 1: Simply wait - do not close the hanging clients. They will eventually recover and receive ballots. If you close the clients, the process starts all over again, and the wait will be longer. If possible, restart the Statistics service - do not restart the entire server, any other Adj services, or any non-admin clients. Note: If you are on a clustered EMS environment, see instructions below for how to restart the service. Method 2: This should speed things up, but it may be too onerous - it involves restarting the Statistics service and clients in a specific order, and cleaning queues….
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[Reinstall software during an Election?]
Batches stuck in adjudication. Workaround ……When we have identical MSMQ on two or more machines, the following are the steps we used to execute: Uninstall MSMQ on ALL affected machines. Restart machine. Install MSMQ. Restart machine Release & Renew IP: As an extra step to clear and renew DHCP address pool. i. OPEN Command Prompt as Administrator on EMSADMIN01 and EMSADMIN02 Client machines. ii. Command to run: ipconfig /release. Wait for command to execute iii. SHUT DOWN EMSADMIN02 client machine.
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[Re-re-re-adjudicate]
Add workaround: 1. Run the Adj Activity log 2. Save the Activity log as a PDF 3. Search the PDF for 'Write-in Accepted As-ls'. Once the unresolved write-ins are located, the county follows the standard procedure for readjudicating that ballot (batch).
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[Regenerate election files]
Ballots are being presented in Adjudication with an overlay on a blank side of the ballot. Add workaround: To-Do: 1. Update DCF option to save both sides of ballot. 2. Regenerate election files for ICC. 3. Re-deploy ICC election files to respective ICC workstation.
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[Negative Value Contests]
Batches stuck in adjudication - contests have negative values in contest manifestation Workaround ….Add following content: Troubleshooting batches with negative values contest It may happen that when the ballot contests were created as regular contests and styled to render 'blank' on the ballot that an error occurs later when Adjudicating them. These contest are needed for creating appropriate ballot types.
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[Hope]
We have made fixes that should hopefully prevent this from happening, but in case they do, people could follow the instructions ….. For large elections (thousands of batches) or elections where most ballots (around 80% or more) are being adjudicated, the system can become overwhelmed by the amount of updates it needs to send out to clients. When this happens, clients may appear to hang waiting to receive a ballot, and the DVS Statistics Service (on the server side) may become overactive, using all the processing resources available on the system.
Elections ballots run and re-Re-rerunning of batches while system resources are overloaded. Sounds like elections are run on hope-its-good-enough mathematics