Laptop, USB drives stolen from Philly election-staging site (FLASHBACK October 1, 2020)

Computer thumb drives used to program Philadelphia voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse along with the laptop of an employee from the machines’ manufacturer.

The items were stolen from a warehouse in the city’s East Falls section, city election commission spokesman Nick Custodio said in a brief emailed statement, adding: “We are confident that this incident will not in any way compromise the integrity of the election.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported the theft in the majority Democratic city, said they were stolen this week.

The laptop did not hold any “sensitive election-related data” and was not used for election programming, said spokeswoman Katina Granger, of Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, the manufacturer. She said ES&S immediately cut it off from the vendor’s network upon learning of the theft.

Granger said she was not able to address specifics about the stolen USB drives, including how many were taken and what was on them. Custodio did not answer emailed questions, including whether any of the 3,750 ExpressVote XL touchscreen ballot-marking devices used by the city might have been affected.

Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground which Trump won by 44,000 votes in 2016, with Hillary Clinton winning Philadelphia by a 67% margin, or 475,000 votes.

Election security expert Eddie Perez of the nonpartisan OSET Institute said Philadelphia voters’ confidence in the integrity of the election demands on transparency from officials that is so far lacking: “This is supposed to be a secured facility,” he said, “and apparently neither the county nor the election vendor adequately protected these sensitive assets. Why not?”

Granger of ES&S said the companies’ USB devices use multiple levels of encryption and are “married” to single voting machines during programming. But Perez said that it’s so far unclear how far along Philadelphia

More info:

A Stolen Presidential Election in the Nation’s Election Fraud Capital
FRONTPAGE ^ | 11.10.20 | Daniel Greenfield
Posted on 11/11/2020, 10:15:01 PM by malach

In October, someone got away with a laptop and USB drives full of encrypted data at the warehouse where Philadelphia’s voting machines are stored.

Philadelphia city officials swiftly assured voters that there was nothing to worry about because all the data was encrypted. Meanwhile a local reporter was able to enter the warehouse and stroll around the voting machines without anyone in the warehouse stopping him. Others had noted that accessing the USB slot for the voting machines was surprisingly easy.

But there were bigger problems at the warehouse than that. The serial numbers on the voting machines didn’t match election records. In a familiar story, officials blamed clerical errors.

And there were a whole lot of errors.

The new voting machines had been incorrectly recording votes. In a previous election, Northampton County voters who voted Republican suffered a “weird technical glitch” in which votes cast for Republicans instead went to the “instructional text box”. The manufacturer blamed the problem on “human error” and claimed that it only affected some 30% of machines.

Northampton County, one of the bellwether counties, was said to have flipped for Biden. The margins in some key precincts were between “a handful to hundreds of votes.”

There were problems with 366 of the same model of voting machines in Philly.

According to the manufacturer, voting machines only accept “certified and approved USB flash drives containing encrypted data”, which had apparently been stolen before Election Day.

The same month that the laptop and USB drives were stolen, elsewhere in the state, an elections judge in Allentown was charged with, “insertion and alteration of entries in documents, and prying into ballots”.

(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...

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