“He wants to run the numbers from the Montgomery County early voting sites again, zeroing out the votes from the touch-screen machines. It’s just a hunch for now. But he thinks that will give him data he can use to get to the next step.”
“Oh come on, AB. How long are we going to let this thing drag out? Nelson’s going to look like a sore loser if he doesn’t call McKenzie to congratulate him. McKenzie beat him three to one in Montgomery County, for crying out loud! It’s time to end this thing and keep our powder dry for the next time. Nelson is now a former congressional candidate who waged the best campaign ever against McKenzie. He can hold his head high.”
“He’s right,” Aguilar said. “These numbers are so big…. Unless we have something absolutely solid, I’ve got to concede.”
“Our people are going to be devastated,” Camilla said. “You can’t concede, jefe.”
“Yes, I can,” Aguilar said. “And if Gordon comes up with something solid, I can also say later that new information has come up to make me withdraw my concession.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Annie said.
Young Brady swung by the campaign office shortly after three, once school had let out. He had slept less than the rest of them, getting up at 6:50 AM to make his 7:05 AM bus, and was still running on adrenalin.
“Everybody knows what happened last night,” he blurted out, pointing to the whiteboard with the election results. “Every kid in my school knows something fishy happened. All their parents voted for you, Dad.”
“Not every one of them, chico,” Aguilar said.
“Just about!”
School had been tough that day. Brady found himself replaying the movie of election night all day long, starting with the moment of victory shortly after the polls closed and the first results were announced, and then the stunning reversal when McKenzie jumped ahead.
“The election was hacked!” he said.
“We don’t know that, and you shouldn’t say that to your friends until we do.”
“But Dad, there is no other explanation. You know that’s true!”
Annie gently pulled him aside and took him into her office. She felt badly for him and wanted to offer him some consolation.
“You know, I have a friend,” she began. “He works for the State Board of Elections, doing their IT. He agrees with you that the election was hacked. But he can’t prove it, either.”
“Everyone knows those touch-screen machines can be hacked,” he blurted out. “I could write the program in half an hour if I wanted.”
“I’m sure you could—and I’m glad you didn’t,” she said, trying to get him to laugh.
“I bet those FBI types aren’t helping, either,” he said.
“Actually, we haven’t heard from them since before the election.”
“What does your friend think?” he asked.
“He’s got a theory,” Annie said. “He thinks it’s got to be either the touch-screen machines or the precinct tabulators.”
“To hack the touch-screen machines, you have to gain physical access,” Brady said. “That’s actually the hardest part. An eleven-year-old kid can write the script—two of them actually did at DEFCON two years ago. Once you’re in, you change the tabulation algorithm, and because the machines are daisy-chained, it spreads to all of them almost instantaneously. But getting access to the machines, that’s something else. That would take, like, real criminal intent.”
“It’s crime enough, Brady, to change the vote count, don’t you think?”
“What I mean is, like old-fashioned criminals. People that break into banks, not cyber. That’s not what hackers do.”
“The other option is the precinct tabulators. Gordon says that’s a lot harder.”
“Aren’t they air-gapped?” Brady asked.
“You mean, separated from the internet? Yes.”
“So somebody would have to be inside the air gap. That means it’s probably somebody in his office or on the Montgomery County board of elections. That would be, like, whoa. Super criminal. Isn’t that what the FBI is for?”
“The FBI likes to chase Russian ghosts,” Annie said. “And teenage hackers. But you’re right. That would be, like, super criminal. It’s hard to imagine McKenzie doing such a thing.”
“Well, yeah!” Brady said. “He’s a politician!”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Your dad is a politician, too.”
“But he comes from the real world. McKenzie is entitled.”
“What makes you say that?
Brady swept the question aside, already onto the next thought. “Did you pay any attention to his social media campaign? I don’t think he’s got a computer guy smart enough to carry off an SQL injection behind a VPN. That’d be quite an exploit.”
Hmm, she thought. That’s exactly what Gordon said. She liked this kid and didn’t want to see him get hurt.
“I’ll let you know what I hear,” she said. “But don’t go snooping around. You don’t want to be drawing attention to yourself.”
44
Gordon Utz didn’t have much time to work on his theory of what might have gone wrong on election night. He had twenty-three county supervisors of elections to deal with, plus Baltimore City, and they began trickling into the main election center in Annapolis at 8:00 AM that morning. Each came trailing a Republican and Democrat election judge, and several bag carriers—or more accurately, ballot-box handlers, entrusted with the sealed and numbered ballot boxes from each county. The supervisors themselves carried the memory cards from the 2,162 ADA-compliant touch-screen machines, one per precinct and early voting site, which Gordon and the IT team would tabulate separately, as well as another 2,162 USB drives from the paper ballot tabulators. The county IT guys had already uploaded the tabulation files and the PDFs of the ballot images for the second time over the state board of elections VPN earlier that morning. These, too, would be tabulated a second time using special auditing software, not the county tabulators.
Redundancy was key to election security. If you could reproduce the same results on different equipment, you could feel confident in releasing the results to the public. They operated under the general principle, inculcated to election officials all across the country over the past eighteen months by roving DHS security teams, that anything driven by software was vulnerable to hacking. Conversely, it was statistically unlikely that two separate, air-gapped systems would be hacked in the same way. That was the message Lisa Rasmussen put out on the BoE website that morning in the latest edition of her “Rumor Control” feature. Over the past four years, Maryland had taken extraordinary measures to upgrade and modernize its election systems, so citizens could feel confident in the election results.
But Gordon didn’t feel confident in the results. Nor did he feel confident in confiding his doubts to Rasmussen. He needed more to go on than just the early voting stats or the Aguilar campaign polling data. He needed hard facts, hard evidence of a breach.
By 4:00 PM, his team had completed the audit, and the re-tabulated state-wide results matched those uploaded over the VPN on election night, except for the DRE machines in Baltimore—naturally. There, a surge of individuals not appearing on the voter rolls had voted provisionally on the DREs, and inevitably their votes got commingled with those of legitimate voters.
“So you’re saying it was fraud?” Lisa Rasmussen objected when he raised the issue with her privately.
“Yes.”
“Are you blaming the Baltimore city supervisor of elections?”
“I’m not blaming anybody at this point. But those votes should have been walled off until we could verify the identities of the voters.”
“Did it change the results of the election?”
“No,” he admitted. “It just made Grady Jones look somewhat less bad.”
“Excuse me?”
>
“Without those votes, he was at 59.3 percent. With them, he topped sixty percent. Sounds better to say you were re-elected with over sixty percent of the vote, doesn’t it?”
“That is not sufficient reason for me not to release the official results. Unless, of course, you’ve got other problems.”
Gordon caught himself. “No, ma’am,” he said finally.
When he got back to his office, he pulled up the spreadsheet of the Montgomery County early voting centers he had set up last night and, using the new data sent down this morning, separated out the DRE votes from the paper ballots that went through the tabulators.
Once again, the numbers jumped off his screen.
At all eleven early voting centers, McKenzie won exactly 73.4 percent of the paper ballots. Regardless of the number of votes cast, the percentage remained constant. That was statistically impossible. With the touch-screen votes included, McKenzie’s percentages varied from a low 62 percent in Wheaton to a high 78.2 percent at the Silver Spring Civic Building, both of which were Aguilar’s home turf. What did that mean, Gordon wondered? He made a note to conduct a logic and accuracy test on the DRE machines from Silver Spring, but if they had been hacked, it was likely the hacker would have written his RAT to deactivate and erase itself after the polls closed. That left the stunning results from the Dominant Technologies paper ballot tabulators. Someone or something had breached the VPN and injected the fixed percentage result, taking advantage of the tabulator’s ability to count fractional votes. But how? He himself had downloaded all the patches and updates from the manufacturer and posted them to the counties over the State’s FTP site, itself protected behind a VPN. No one he had not personally authorized could get into the network.
He checked the access logs and found nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the IT guys at the twenty-three counties and Baltimore City had downloaded the patches within twenty-four hours of his notification that they were available. He sent out the last one on September 29, he saw. No one had actually accessed the State’s FTP site after October 2—except for the failed attempt to penetrate it he had taken to the FBI.
There had to be something with that last patch, he thought. There was no other logical explanation.
45
Eight people were shot dead on the streets of Chicago over election night, two of them children under the age of fourteen. It was just another night of random gang violence in the Windy City, but the ballroom of the Langham Hotel looked like the aftermath of a high school prom, littered with red-white-and-blue streamers and overturned chairs and the brightly colored husks of thousands of balloons, stuck in gooey clumps to the floor. There were so many champagne corks lying about that one member of the clean-up crew, Estelle Estaban, tripped and broke her leg. But while Chicagoans celebrated the election of the Illinois Governor to the highest office in the land, down in Lauderhill, Florida, angry crowds had gathered waving large envelopes. They were chanting, “Count our votes! Count our votes!” Many of them carried Tomlinson/Bellinger signs. They were trying to drop off vote-by-mail ballots the morning after, but the deadline had been 7:00 PM on election night.
Under Florida law, county boards of elections had four days to report official election results, and Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade County officials were in no hurry to rush the canvassing. Memories of the 2018 election recount were still fresh, and everyone was hoping the election night results, which showed Governor Tomlinson winning by a 2.1 percent margin, would hold so they could avoid the messy process of recounting the paper ballots by hand.
The Reverend James Dupree, who ran a nation-wide voter registration group on behalf of the DNC, had mustered around 300 demonstrators in front of a stately government structure in Tallahassee. The open esplanade had no shade, and the late morning sun made Reverend Dupree’s dark forehead glisten with sweat as he exhorted his followers.
“Certify now!” he coached them. “Certify now!” they chanted.
They wanted the state supervisor of elections to announce the official results, which everyone knew meant that Governor Tomlinson was now the president-elect.
“Call the vote!” the Reverend urged his supporters. “Call the vote!”
“Call the vote!” they echoed.
Up at the Yulee Government Center, Catherine Herrera, supervisor of elections for Nassau County, was on the phone with Milford Gaines, her colleague in Okaloosa County in the Florida panhandle. Like her, he was not an IT specialist and had a healthy distrust for the security geeks. Whenever they told him their system was 100 percent secure, tight as a drum, his nose told him they had a problem. A former Navy SEAL, he was used to things blowing up on calm days.
“It’s just not possible, Ford,” she said. “There have been no indicators that John Rutherford would come in at anything less than seventy percent, and zero reason why Trump should have lost ten percent of his support in this election.”
Both of them had done their 100 percent audit run early that morning, and in neither county were there any discrepancies between the precinct vote tallies from election night and the retabulation.
“Remember, we are just retabulating what the computers have in their memories,” Gaines said. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
“What do you mean?”
“We are tabulating the ballot images, not the actual paper ballots.”
“But the images were created by the ballots. I mean, they are the scanned images of the ballots.”
“Right. But they are electronic images. When the voter puts his ballot into the scanner, the software in the machine generates the PDF file. And so our tabulators are merely recounting those same software-generated ballots, not the actual ballots themselves.”
“I knew we had to talk,” she said. “I knew something was wrong but couldn’t put my finger on it.”
Florida law only required a recount of the paper ballots if a race was decided by less than one-half of a percentage point. With the unofficial results showing Governor Tomlinson winning by 2.1 percent, that was not the case. But it also gave the county supervisors of elections twelve days to certify the results, and wide latitude to do their own examination of the tabulation of the ballots to determine if it was accurate. This procedure was generally called a “risk-limiting” audit, and meant choosing at random 2 percent of their precincts, breaking out the paper ballots, and feeding them into the precinct tabulators again.
“That’s not going to help,” Gaines said. “If the tabulators gave us a bad result first time around, they’re going to do the same thing if we just repeat the same process. We need new tabulators, from another state.”
“How are we going to do that? What’s the justification?”
“There is none,” he said. “In my former life, we called it extreme ownership. You are in charge, you take responsibility. Two of our guys wrote a book about that. If need be, you can ask for forgiveness later.”
Each county supervisor of elections office had a discretionary budget reserved for post-election audits and recounts. Normally, they wouldn’t have to dip into it this year because of the apparently clear result. But they resolved to break into the piggy bank. Gaines knew where to go.
“Nebraska,” he said.
“Why Nebraska?”
“Melissa Black down in Miami-Dade brought in tabulators from Nebraska for the 2018 recount. Let me give her a call.”
It was their best shot. The clock was ticking, Herrera knew.
46
When it became clear that Governor Norton wasn’t going to immediately certify the election results, Granger ginned up the party apparatus. Calls went out to teams of lawyers who had signed up during the campaign and were on stand-by for just such an eventuality. By the close of business on Wednesday, the day after the election, Granger had lined up some 200 volunteer lawyers to accompany him down to Florida and hired the venerable Washington, DC, whi
te shoe law firm of Myers, Ogilvy, Pantazis, and Pugh to lead the legal effort to get Florida to certify the results.
Granger flew down to Fort Lauderdale early Thursday afternoon and set himself up on the top floor of the Ritz Carlton on Beach Boulevard, where he had requested a suite overlooking the Intracoastal and the city, better to keep an eye on things. He’d be damned if he was going to hunker down in the cramped sweaty headquarters of the Broward County election office in Lauderhill. It was located in a mall, for crying out loud! He resolved to avoid the pool and its magnificent bar that at nighttime appeared to be suspended over the Atlantic until he had a better grip on the recount process. As things turned out, he wasn’t going to be spending much time at the pool.
The Trump campaign predictably followed suit and sent teams of lawyers to Doral, where the Miami-Dade canvassing board met, and to Riviera Beach in Palm Beach County, in addition to Fort Lauderdale. The Trump effort was led by Trump’s personal attorney, Ivo Silander, a former federal prosecutor who had put away terrorists and big name mobsters. Granger knew he was a formidable opponent and found it mildly amusing that Trump had put him up at his Doral golf resort. He could have gone to the Trump Sunny Isles beach resort, but then Trump would have had to shell out hard cash, as it was independently managed. And why not Mar-a-Lago? Maybe Trump had already rented all the guest suites. For all his love of bling, Trump remained Scottish to the end.
On Friday morning, Granger settled down to watch the canvassing boards, which he did in turns, by calling the chief Democratic lawyer sitting with the election observers and getting him or her to turn on their cell phone video. What surprised him the most was the inactivity. They had just one more day to complete the election night vote tally and no one seemed in a hurry. The tabulators they had set up were much larger than he had imagined. Propped up on long desks, they dwarfed the election staff. For now, no actual ballots were in sight. The counting was going on electronically, inside the machines.
“Tell me that is a good thing?” he asked Navid. “And what in the world are those gigantic machines?”
The Election Heist Page 16
