Global Election Management System

Global Election Management System (GEMS) is the election management system for Premier's AccuVote OS and AccuVote TSx voting machines. It provides an interface for setting up an election (defining candidates and races), programming it onto the voting machines, and tabulating results from the individual machines. GEMS can transmit data to/from the voting machines through removable AccuVote memory cards or over a network (dial-up or local intranet). The program is a Windows NT-based successor to Premier's VTS application, an EMS for the AccuVote that runs on Unix.

As it controls the election for an entire jurisdiction, GEMS is an enticing target for election tampering. It contains a host of vulnerabilities that make it easy to manipulate election results, even on a large scale, and hide the evidence. Many computer scientists have concluded that this is the result of GEMS being poorly designed. However, the evidence actually shows that GEMS was purposefully designed to allow local insiders to rig elections.

Suspect elections

2006 Pima County RTA

Main article: 2006 Pima County RTA election

2010 Shelby County TN

Main article: 2010 Shelby County TN election

See also

• Jeffrey Dean

External links

• Working copy of GEMS: 1.18.17
• GEMS user manuals
  • Revision 12.0 published 2005/04/21 - for GEMS 1.18.24
• DU thread by Bev Harris on the accounting fraud capabilities of GEMS
• More info on Fraction Magic
  • Docket #548 (2008/12/10) of the Avante International Technology, Inc. v. Premier Election Solutions, Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems case: "Defendants plan on using the expert testimony of Mr. Bakker to assist their defense that Plaintiff's patents at issue are invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) because the invention was in "public use" more than one year prior to the patent application. [...] The prior use now at issue occurred in California in 2001. According to the parties, California voters approved Proposition 218 in 1996 to amend the California Constitution to limit property tax levies without voter approval. The 218 procedure differs from typical election procedures in that ballots are mailed to entities and individuals who will be affected by the proposed tax levy. The ballots are weighted proportionally to the entities' financial obligations. In 2001, the County of Sacramento sought to increase assessments on land owners for lighting and other safety amenities. The County contracted with Global Election Systems, Inc. ("Global"), to assist in tabulating the ballots."
  • Long Beach Post, "Explaining the PBID’s Controversial Weighted Voting Process", 2012/08/15
  • Descriptions of Fraction Magic in email correspondence with Bev Harris during July 2017
    • "I think it is likely that a utility was created by an insider and passed around to selected middlemen. However, others could make their own utility. Probably would if they are sophisticated in elections. This could produce variants in how skillful the execution is. Customers for such a service would want to hire the precise guys who perform reliably.
      
      To be clear it does not flip votes. It reallocates portions of votes. There is a simple vote flipping built in function that even I was able to find and use. But that only causes totals to flip between candidates. Fractional reallocation is different. Picture a graph of precinct results. It has peaks and valleys depending on precinct demographics. Fraction magic can produce a graph that mimics the peaks and valleys but slightly adds or reduces to make the curve look the same while fixing an end result as desired. As new votes flow in it continues to tweak the allocations to make sure the percent stays the same."
  • Bloomberg, "The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete", 2016/09/26
  • Bev Harris, "Fraction Magic - Detailed Vote Rigging Demonstration", 2016/10/31 - includes footage of Bev Harris and her partners at Black Box Voting trying to obtain the computers from the Shelby County Election Commission following the 2010 election
  • "Let Me Vote! Count My Vote! Voter Suppression & Election Fraud Forum 9/17/18" - has Bennie Smith give a demonstration of Fraction Magic
  • Truthout, "11,000 Votes May Be Missing in Florida Congressional Race" by Lulu Friesdat, 2018/11/13: "In a 2017 congressional briefing, Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, said, “Hacking a national election in the United States would be, well, shockingly easy.” At the same congressional briefing, James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, shared that his organization had been hired to research what techniques would most likely be used in such a scenario. He described the method of choice as one where candidates’ votes are redistributed unequally. The votes of one candidate are assigned a fraction of their actual value, while another candidate receives a larger allocation. “The payload that most of these guys are interested in would be a tabulation manipulation feature using fractionalization and decimalization which weighs the vote,” James Scott said. “It gives every vote a certain weight. And … that way, it looks completely legitimate.”"
  • 2003 Democratic Underground post suggests that the weird 18181 repeated vote counts in Comal County TX are evidence of applying fractions to vote totals
• AccuBasic technical details
  • "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter" by David Wagner, David Jefferson, Matt Bishop, Chris Karlof, and Naveen Sastry, 2006/02/14 - notes that AccuBasic scripts "can read a few other internal values as well (such as the date and time)" and are "theoretically capable of computing any computable function", indicating that more sophisticated vote rigs which do things like act differently for test mode and the actual election are possible on the AccuVote
  • Black Box Voting forum post explaining AccuBasic files, which are .abs in source form and .abo in compiled form
  • Black Box Voting forum post showing an example AccuBasic script with integer and string operations
  • Guy Lancaster, "Accu-Basic Developer's Reference Manual", 1999/12/16 (archived copy)
  • cvs.tar containing the source code for GEMS and Ballot Station