Saturday, November 7, 2020

Let's Be Clear About That Michigan "Computer Glitch"

The computer glitch that was found to have turned 6000 Trump votes into Biden votes in Michigan.  Software that's used in 47 other Michigan counties, not to mention pretty much all the states with miraculous vote changes for Biden.

That was not a computer glitch. That was a programming decision. Whether that was some sort of programming error, which seems highly unlikely, or if it was deliberate cheating I don't know, but I highly suspect deliberately bad software.  Let's face it; adding integers is just about the easiest thing to get a computer to do (and if you're thinking of adding votes as floating point numbers, go back to school).

Let's get one thing clear.  Computer "glitches" cause a system to fail, or cause it produce random-looking outputs.  They can even possibly reboot the system.  If it's good software, it gives some sort of indication that something bad happened.  If it changes the results of a count, or moves it to another candidate that's something else. 

Part of my perspectives on life come from being an old enough graybeard to have worked on computers in the 1970s, when you programmed by toggle switches on the front panel, and a single chip microprocessor was the highest of high tech.  At the time, I was working as a technician in a company that made industrial process equipment used in things as diverse as commercial chlorine gas production, to Hershey's chocolate factories, to nuclear power plant controls.  I was also taking my first programming classes at the time.  The engineer teaching programming at night to college juniors was quick to point out a computer error would be to print absolutely gobbledygook instead of the nicely formatted output you wanted, not accidentally changing your bill or bank balance. 

The class and real life came together at my day job to give a lesson in hardware failure vs. software error that was so vivid I recall it now, over 40 years later.  The company started producing computers to control the peripherals they made.  This was 8085 based (kids, ask your grandparents).  Like most computers of those days, its serial output to a printer was done through a chip called a UART, or a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter.  After regular production test, the systems would be put into a burn-in chamber to run for a few days at 50oC.  We went through a problem where the UART chips would fail in burn-in; instead of printing a neat little summary of the number of times it had run each test in the sequence, and the total time it had been on, it would print a few lines of random text.  It was something like this (from memory - any similarity between this and the actual text it spit out is a slim chance):
##############$$$$$$$$$$$$##################$$$$$$###########S**********###$$$########A####@@@@@@@@@US#######%%%%%%%%%$$$$$$$$$$$$$A#########$$$$$$$$$####G*******E############
If you look at that closely, you'll find the only letters in the printout spell 'sausage.' Of course, that's a purely random event and makes just about as much sense as saying votes for one candidate really belong to the other candidate, but it does a good job of showing the difference between a hardware failure and software ... feature.  

For obvious reasons, I began to call this the sausage failure and every time one of our computers started showing the sausage failure, replacing the UART fixed it. 

What I'm saying is if the computer "glitched," it would have done something far more random looking and easier to detect than moving votes from Trump to Biden.  That's no glitch.  It's a software feature. 

A clip I originally got from Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum goes better than anything else I can think of to wrap this up (you do read her, don't you?).



EDIT 1045 AM EST: to add a relevant link to 90 Miles From Tyranny.  If true, the software in question is called Dominion; it's used in every major swing state.  The DC Lobbyist is an aide to Nancy Pelosi.  Also see the link from McThag to Benford's Law which shows a way to determine if the added votes are mathematically likely to be real.




51 comments:

  1. The media's use of the word "glitch" is deliberate. It is intended to make us believe this was an unintended minor error. It WAS NOT. This was NOT a "glitch". This is a deliberate software function willfully written into the code to allow the system to perform a function that SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE wanted it to perform. I'll leave it up everyone else to decide for themselves who that someone was.

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  2. With you 100%, SiG! We're both old enough with this stuff to know when something malicious is going on. This had ZERO "randomness" in it.

    Your "Sausage Error" is classic! Gonna swipe that one for my lexicon.....

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  3. We non-pewter geeks call that "a feature", not "a glitch". The next two months are gonna be "sporty". Keep yer powder dry and yer head on a swivel.

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  4. In my limited experience, bad programming produces completely unbelievable results like 1,234,567,999,999,999 votes for Biden. Malicious programming produces believable results and covers its tracks.

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  5. Glitch or not your country has been taken from us, and again the "patriots" move their line in the sand back a few yards - waiting to hear from a kangaroo court, now.....
    "At this point what difference does it make?!" - HRC

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  6. Not glitch. HAMMER and SCORECARD in action. Caught by someone who knew the district and was curious.

    Judge Jeannine was just suspended (fired) because she was going to run a segment on voting fraud. Make no mistake, SiG, this is a coup.

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    1. I'm unable to find any corroborating evidence she was fired. I went to turn on her show last night and assumed it was just a "breaking news" event where they up-end the schedule because someone at the top thinks it's important. (Think "slow white bronco" chase).

      Today, I can't tell if she won't be on next week or for a while, or if she'll be back as always.

      It's funny that you see people on the left always talking about Fox as if it's conservative news. At best, they have a few conservative commentators who can be silenced at any moment. This has been the case since Rupert Murdoch's kids took over the network. The only thing they like about Fox News is the money from its ratings.

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    2. I used to watch Fox News somewhat regularly. I actually liked Megan Kelley, mostly because she is wicked smart, and the fact that she is hot didn't hurt. I still like Dana Perrino, and occasionally watch The Five. But it has gotten just too difficult to watch,since they are not even a middle of the road network, but just your typical MSM network. They even put Donna Brazile on the network, your remember her, the one who gave Hillary Clinton the questions before a debate.
      I was in our small towns vocational school, back in the mid 70's taking Data Processing. To program some of the computers we had to pull out these 24" x 24" boards, about 2" thick, and run wires, with banana plugs on each end, from like A-1 to C-7. And we had to place literally dozens of them,on each board.
      We also did a lot of punch cards, to program different things, like what they called a dollar "D" sort, which I think was a list of all the students from the county that went to that vocational school.
      Since then, it has gotten much better, going from things like auto shop, electronics, and such, to actual jobs that you could do in the real world of today. But I do not trust this election, and I fully expect that Trump will eventually win, and the left will go batshit crazy. My sister is a Democrat, quite vocal about it, and tries that old BS of how we have to draw together as a nation,and learn to get over our differences. Where was that idea over the last 4 years of, Not My President, or the Democrats starting from even before he was sworn in,to try and get rid of him, through any means possible, legal or not.

      pigpen51

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    3. And now you could quote that back as sauce for the goose...

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  7. Interesting that I too am from the 70's and at that time did Operating System design/programming/testing/etc. evolving through the years to I/T Consultant. This incident is NOT a software glitch. I can think of scenarios how this happened, but they are only conjecture without examining. For example, ANY program can be written where it changes its behavior, e.g. counting votes correctly to intentional incorrectly at a specific time (date, time to milliseconds). Hackers use this to trigger events on a specific day and time. Who is to say that the software wasn't hard coded to do this the day after normal election counting days at precisely the time mail-in ballots were to begin? It could do this automatically if coded that way, or it could do this if given an external command to do so, or a hacker could do this via a trap-door virus. Many ways to make a program count differently at a specific time or within a specific time window. Rather easy! So, who's to say some HUMAN didn't do this? Can it be determined? Yes. Logging of any human interactions with the running program would capture this. Also, comparing the original software with the running software would identify any variation of in code indicating hacker tampering. Certainly the FBI and NSA have the skills to determine validity of software and hacking. Whatever the result, people would then have peace in their lives again rather than questions, doubts, and a conspiracy theory the rest of their lives. Someone needs to investigate what really happened and be completely transparent. WE the PEOPLE have a right to know. It's the American voting integrity that is at stake, not who won or lost. I could care less about that. But potential corruption must be investigated. How about running the same batch through again, but setting the date on the computer to election day. Different results would imply hacking scheme as indicated. Another scheme could be base on the identification of the source, e.g., normal electronic voting ballots versus mail-in ballots. Surely, some human entered the batch source manually! Enough is enough...I certainly can't examine from here. And I'm retired and really don't want to dig through modern day programming. But, don't we have experts in the FBI. I would require the FBI and NSA to both investigate and do so independently to rule out corruption there too.

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    1. While I find your idea of the software being hard coded to cheat based on the system clock really good, I don't trust either the FBI or the NSA to do that investigation. The FBI has been running a coup against Trump for four years and suddenly they're going to be honest?

      The problem with doing forensic software analysis is that there's a hard deadline coming to certify the election and it's going to take time to do this through legal channels. And what happens if the Supreme Court finally hears the arguments in two years and the verdict is that the election was corrupt and stolen? Can they scrap it and order a do-over, or award the presidency to Trump after two years of Joe, the Ho, the squad and George Soros? Suspend all elections until every precinct in America works like, well, Florida and has its final results within an hour of the polls closing?

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    2. I'm strongly in your camp, don't get me wrong. My conclusions are based on your conclusion that the coup has been going on for ages and unfortunately there is little we can do about the corruption other than prevent it in the future. I'm very open to any idea that can work. I also agree re FBI and NSA, thus I suggested INDEPENDENTLY. I should have said with private sector consultants he uncovering of anything would be useful. However, I agree that this would be a project that will take many years after this lost election. It's unfortunate and makes me angry. I am very grateful of what Trump has done for America AND the world. But, again, unless We the People change things in the next 4 years, our children will be forever lost to who-knows-what. Proving any corruption to this election is of value whenever it can be accomplished. I can only move on in a way that I can; encouraging the experts today to real in any corruption, and, for the sake of our democracy and children, DO SOMETHING about the indoctrination in our schools. The other matter for future is getting the ignorant people out there to understand what the party name of "Democratic" DOES NOT IMPLY democracy and any other part is against it. I really feel the name is an inhibitor and the ignorant vote that way when they obviously can't understand the economy, immigration, etc. Do what we can not and fight the election. That has low probability satisfaction in getting resolved before January. We need some kind of proof. But, we also need to realize that the Republican machine has been sleeping for decades. There is much more to address than this election.

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    3. I agree that we need to change the education system. That's part of why we have so many ignorant people who don't understand economics or even the English language.

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    4. I knew we were in trouble when they started worrying about making everything 'equal', and doing away with the grading system, and worrying about 'feelings' rather than making kids learn proper English, how to read, and how to think critically.

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  8. SiG, you are right on the money with your experienced take on what a "glitch" is all about. The media, idiots all, simply parrot what they are told and have no idea.

    Rich - Yes the problem could be evaluated, investigated but what we have seen over the past four years has amounted to a "so what?" Nothing will happen, in my opinion. But what frosts me, and I've seen this many times over the past few days is that "It's the American voting integrity that is at stake, not who won or lost. I could care less about that."

    That misses the whole point of the past four years and that is the Coup. And beyond that is these cretins gaining power again means the finishing of the fundamental transformation of America. Voting be damned. The result matters because this is a one-way ticket to oblivion. Best people stop "hoping" and coloring their words with rosy dreams. There is a war on. This is not a democratic dispute between citizens.

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    1. The Transition Integrity Project, the Indivisible Group, Shutdown DC and I honestly don't even know how many other leftist groups openly talked about doing things like stealing the election, but it's been pretty much talked about since Bush/Gore in 2000. If not from the '90s.

      And your last paragraph (like the comment I posted after you wrote this) is the root question. What happens next? I can't imagine this being looked at by forensic programming experts, even if there's some police agency we can trust to do it (unlike the FBI), in time to make a difference. How does an election get changed, once it's declared official? Is it even possible? Let's say the Supreme Court gets the case and agrees it was fraud. And then what?

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  9. Watching this video is "How to destroy your confidence in the voting system in one hour". Short story: the system is NOT isolated from the internet, it is interconnected and NOT dispersed as advertised, there are multiple vulnerabilities that allow vote manipulation at multiple points in the system. Catching vote alteration almost has to be done in real time, and the presenter shows it happening in an actual election case. He also addresses what we've seen happening in the opening stages of the 2020 presidential election vote.

    Our voting system is a critical national security issue, no longer a risk. Failure to do deal with this issue will seal our doom.

    I do not know the presenter in this video, so I have no vested interest in offering this for your examination. But my 40+ years developing, designing, and evaluating complex systems tells me this person knows whereof he speaks. What he offers ring all too true. Read 'em and weep.


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ficae6x1Q5A&ab_channel=CDMedia

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    1. Listen, everyone, with the usual disclaimers that I don't know this presenter, either and I'm taking it more or less at face value, it's worth the hour to at least keep this in an open tab and listen to it.

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  10. I'm as acient as SIgraybeard, Also cut my teach on 12bitters and 8008
    on up to the lastist 32bit SOC.

    Programing [hardware/firmware, or using input] is work that required meticulous work to prevent errors and extensive testing to verify it really did work.

    Most cheap ass software is done oversees in "shops" and the quality if often abysmal and testing is worse.

    So any assignment of deliberate is likely more a QC lapse unless the nominal operation requires user input and then, well, we can't QC the user.

    Despeite being techie... No talk to it boxes like Alexa, mechanical locks and all that. and cars more than 5 years old. A lot of the gizmos are neat but the security and failure modes suck to the maximum possible.

    Eck!

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  11. As Facebook is now blocking the Gnews Benford's Law voting fraud piece (try it; it prevents you from sharing the link), I've done a post on it as well.

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  12. Connecticut in 2014 (and later times and places) showed conservatives won't obey additional gun registration. But is there anything else conservatives won't obey? The apparent desire to live a normal life while the electricity is on seems to be compressing the inevitable rebound to liberty into a shorter, sharper shock.

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  13. With things like this massive election fraud, especially if it is allowed to stand, there is no point in pretending we are still a country of laws. Scratch that - there is no point in pretending we are still a country.

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  14. A small counter-anecdote; on rare occasions, a glitch can produce a reasonable-looking result, if you don't look too closely.
    Way back in high school, when dinosaurs yet roamed the datacenter, I did an independent-study project for 5 credits. Came report-card time, I found 13 credits on my record.
    Now, either somebody mistyped "5" as "13", or... a bit got flipped.
    I'm pretty sure, though, that the extra 8 credits hadn't mysteriously disappeared from other people's records.
    Couldn't happen today, of course. Not with ECC memory (everyone uses that for critical applications, right? Right?), data audit trails (right?), and all the other modern techniques for data-integrity protection that the implementers of high-tech voting systems may perhaps have heard of.

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    1. I guess it depends on lots of things, but certainly flipping the "8 bit" from 0101 to 1101 gets you there. Also, the fact that no keyboards have a "13" key means nobody pressed one key, just the wrong one.

      Left you with a cool story, though!

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  15. I'm right there with you - starting with an Altair 8080 with toggle switches to enter the bootloader. Later moved to a 6805, but my favorite was the RCA 1802 with 16 general purpose registers, programmed in Forth.
    The 6805 sent output to a Teletype 33 which would occasionally skip a character. When we first brought up the machine, it was supposed to print " Im Alive". What came out was "I'm Alve" , so from then on we called it Alve.

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    1. The machine I worked on with the toggle switches, to load the boot loader and then use the paper tape reader, and all was an early DEC. State of the Art!

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  16. I've not been in computers quite as long as you, but I've been at it well over 30 years. This is not a glitch. This is deliberate tampering meant to ensure that a given candidate won this election.

    And yeah, no Alexa or anything similar in my house. I have a lot of high tech in the place, but the things that I count on are not connected to anything save the thing they control. Would that my children would understand the message.

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  17. Imagine weighed election pathways in the software and storing vote numbers as floats. Then only display vote totals with 0 decimals. Imagine the fun you could have with that.

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  18. Hmmm... apparently there were some last-minute software updates? I wonder if it's possible to send a software update that does its thing, in its own way, and then updates itself to do something different henceforth (or just automatically reverts to the previous version after having done its job).
    I presume the source code for the software is all very secret, and unavailable for public scrutiny?

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    1. That video from WalkingHorse up above says some really scary things. Virtually all of the software is online all the time, and the servers it connects to while people are voting are all over the world. This program, Dominion, is in Germany (IIRC - might be wrong). Could the software save a copy of itself, update, restart, change votes and then uninstall itself? It seems like it's possible if hardware and software are both designed to allow that, with the disclaimer that I'm not a software pro. I've never tried to do something like that, but that just doesn't mean much.

      The people who wrote that software - all of it - have just "volunteered" to have their systems tested by the best professionals and annoyed hobbyists in the world.

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    2. I'll bet the FOSS people could give them some tips.....

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  19. What if Trump wanted out? Think about it.
    My epiphany yesterday came from reading blogs and comments for years by people smarter than me. What is it you say? History has never been proven wrong. All Republics have failed. I will fight like hell with nothing left to lose to protect my family but in the end God is in control and I take solace in that thought daily.

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    1. IIRC, not only do all republics fail, but the average lifetime is around 225 to 250 years, just where ours is.

      I'm with you on all of that. As you say, in the end God is in control. It doesn't mean everything will be cheery and happy. Perhaps we've violated the covenant that the founders made so America doesn't get to exist anymore. I'm sure when God put Israel in bondage to Babylon for 70 years that the population wasn't happy with that and only begrudgingly accepted it. The really tough part is knowing when to fight like hell and when to say "it's God's will" and let it go. If ever.

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    2. For right now, I'm going with "fight like hell." It's possible that the Biden Harris Administration is necessary to bring about the apocalypse, but I figure when God wants to do that, he won't have to use cheating and chicanery. He'll just do it.

      When I see fraud, lying, and cheating like I'm seeing in this election, I'm thinking that's not God, that's the devil.

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  20. When 100% of the "errors" favor one side, there was no "error" at all.

    Impossible.

    If these were errors, they would be distributed evenly between the two candidates. Instead, hundreds of thousands of votes "glitched" from D to R, and in addition some 2.5 Million votes for R were announced and then deleted. All by the same software.

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  21. I understand that it would take a long time to do a forensic audit of the software and all the logs and find out exactly what happened and who did it. But as far as integrity of this election, wouldn't it be possible to do a manual recount in the suspected precincts of the battleground states? Isn't that what they did in the one bad county in Michigan to reverse the result? If that cannot be done, then we are way too dependent upon these vulnerable computer systems.

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    1. But as far as integrity of this election, wouldn't it be possible to do a manual recount in the suspected precincts of the battleground states?

      FWIW, I've seen a manual recount suggested, but don't recall a definite yes or no answer.

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    2. From what I saw, some of the more dishonest places (MA) don't save even the images of the ballots, let alone the actual ballots.

      The video I posted below is an MIT professor who ran for Congress from MA and he goes into some of that as well as his statistical analysis of these "glitches."

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  22. Anyone who knows anything about Michigan politics could spot that error or "glitch" a mile off. There are three counties in Western Michigan that might go to the Democrats: Kent (Grand Rapids), Kalamazoo, and Muskegon. Antrim County, the site of the "glitch" went 60% for Trump in 2016, and their results in 2020 were 60%+ for Biden? Nah. If that was a subtle, intended outcome, it was pretty obvious.
    There is one other anomaly that stands out this year. Leelanau County went for Biden. Leelanau is where Sleeping Bear Dune and Glen Lake are located. It is full of rich, retired people who have moved there from the ritzy suburbs of Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, and Cincinnati. It went slightly for Trump in 2016 and slightly for Biden this year. I'd take a good, hard look at that one, but it continues a trend and relates more to DJT's persona than anything else, I am sure.

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    1. According to the statisticians I posted a video of below, the logarithm they used moves votes in a pattern. As the electorate moves more Republican, the number of votes moved from Trump to Biden increases exponentially. It makes it more unbelievable on a graph, but easier to hide than if they just ran X percent across the board.

      The bigger the pie, the bigger the available theft pool, so to speak.

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  23. I worked as a mainframe computer tech in the Navy from 1988-1994. You articulated what I wanted to say far better than I could. I'm sharing this.

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  24. You would think that they could operate the scanners in a stand-alone mode, without an internet connection, right? Then hand count 5% of the ballot, and then run them through the scanner to double check the result. Then run all the rest of the ballots through and compare that to the official results from last week. This could be done transparently with observers in one day.

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    1. If we didn't have incompetent and dishonest legislators, that would be a breeze. Unfortunately, they fell for these this high tech nonsense that gave the thieves all the opportunity they needed.

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  25. This guy did a statistical analysis of the vote movements in every precinct in MI.

    But here's the craziest part, apparently our legislative idiots made it legal to shift votes this way from non-minority areas into minority areas. Since the ability to use a logarithm to move votes was already in the software, changing it to move votes under more corrupt precepts was a breeze. (Sorry about the video being a little tricky. Just use the time line at the bottom to start at the beginning and jump any place that freezes.)

    https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BdGYYjgkgQGX?t=36m25s

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    1. Thanks for the video link and a bunch of good comments. I only watched a few minutes after that 36m25s mark so far, but I'll be going back after I get a couple of things done.

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  26. The problem with these claims is that this "glitch" certainly wasn't voter fraud. I get it. I am a Trump supporter. Ive went to rallies and contributed money, but the problem in Antrim County Michigan is not voter fraud.

    The reason for this is that it was obvious. Antrim County Michigan is a solid GOP voting county with similar demographics and voting patterns to the near by counties. When I saw this reported on the New York Times Michigan results I knew it was reversed immediately.

    Doing something that is obvious IS NOT HOW YOU CONDUCT VOTER FRAUD!

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    1. Technically I think the definition is used for committing fraud on ballots, but say election fraud instead of voter fraud. The people who wrote the software certainly knew what it was doing, as the technique discussed in that MIT video "Queen Hotchibobo" linked to demonstrates that conclusively. The people who installed it and ran the election, probably (maybe?) didn't know. The people who voted were innocent victims.

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    2. I agree and have been using the term election fraud instead of voter fraud when it is on the counting side.

      I don't where in the spectrum bringing in bag after bag of something into a vote counting station after the station is closed falls. It seems to consist of both vote fraud by using manufactured, fraudulent ballots and election fraud because they were accepted and counted.

      I tried to comment a couple of days ago using name/url while logged in to Google and my posts disappeared. I am about to join the blogging world with my solution.

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    3. Well come by and drop off the name/URL of your blog, once you get it started!

      As for the nitty gritty, at least in my mind voter fraud is when the voter themselves does it. Fills out a mail-in ballot while knowing they voted in person, or something like that. The rest is election fraud. Some is the electioneer's. Some is the software they use and the forces behind that.

      That video that Queen Hotchibobo posted a few replies up seems to be worth watching for the full 70 minutes. It seems to work better if you take off the time index and just go to the beginning:
      https://www.pscp.tv/w/1BdGYYjgkgQGX

      They make a lot of good points in there about how bad the situation really is. It seems that idea of not letting those nasty voters mess up the election is deeply embedded in all of the software.

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  27. Gee, you mean the same folks that weaponized the IRS to win an election, weaponized NSA spying, the FBI, CIA and DOJ and has lied and slandered relentlessly as never before, might continue the election fraud they have practiced in every election for over 100 years? Nah. Just not believable.

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