The Election Heist

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

  “Sure, boss,” said the Crocodile. “I’ll believe that when the Chesapeake Bay turns into peanut butter.”

  “I sure don’t like this,” Aguilar said finally. “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.”

  “Ha!” snorted the Crocodile. “I studied Latin like three generations ago. It’s probably the most famous quote there is, outside of the opening of Caesar’s Gaul. Who is watching the watchers.”

  “Quien vigilara a los vigilantes,” Aguilar said.

  “So did this bent FBI agent leave a card?” the Crocodile asked.

  “Actually, no,” Aguilar said.

  “If it’s the same guy Gordon saw, he’s like a deputy assistant director or something,” Annie said. “Pretty high up.”

  Aguilar was puzzled. Why would the FBI resort to such trickery with him, a mere congressional challenger? Wasn’t their job to protect people such as himself, not play games with them?”

  “Look what happened to Trump in 2016,” the Crocodile said. “Nobody thinks for an instant that he rooted out all the bad apples after Comey, McCabe, Page, and Strzok.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Aguilar said. “I won’t believe that. We believe in the rule of law.”

  If the FBI really was playing this kind of game, America had become a banana republic. What was he to say to his supporters then? For the past year, he’d been preaching rule of law. He’d been arguing with families who were worried their loved ones were going to be deported that they should follow the law, and that law-breakers deserved to be punished, because without the law they were no better off here in America than they had been in Guatemala or Salvador.

  “My advice, boss, is that you hold onto that thought. Keep it to ourselves for the time being. And that all of us, especially young Brady here, go into a heightened state of alert.”

  PART II

  THE ELECTION

  26

  It’s a truism in American politics that you can find a pundit for anything and its opposite. Take Election Day weather. Some said that the high pressure zone that brought beautifully clear autumn skies to the East Coast, from Maine to Florida and into much of the Midwest would increase voter turnout because elderly voters who might otherwise be deterred by bad weather would show up at the polls. But naysayers made just the opposite argument, that the beautiful weather would deter working-age voters, in particular tradesmen and construction workers, who would take advantage of the good weather to put in a full day’s work outdoors. Or that soccer moms might neglect to vote, staying to watch their children’s outdoor sports practice. In the end, it was probably a wash.

  In today’s highly charged partisan environment, whenever the president made a comment on Twitter, you knew that most of the national media would immediately charge in the opposite direction. So when President Trump tweeted on the morning of Tuesday, November 3rd, that the beautiful weather augured well for a fair election, just about every commentator denounced him for attempting to suppress the minority vote. He and Melania flew from Andrews Air Force Base to Palm Beach International that morning on Air Force One, then drove by presidential limousine south on I-95 and crossed the Intracoastal to Manalapan Town Hall, some seven miles south of Mar-a-Lago, where they cast their votes amid a media circus. Governor Tomlinson actually beat them to the polls, casting her vote in Chicago at 8:00 AM local time.

  At Aguilar campaign headquarters, the candidate called together his staff and volunteers early that morning to pray. More than a hundred people had packed the open floor to get final words of encouragement from the candidate. They linked hands and bowed their heads.

  “God tells us that if his people will repent of their evil ways and call on his name, he will hear them and save them from destruction. Because that is what we are facing my friends—not in my race, no, but in the race for the presidency. Just as in 2016, America is at a crossroads. Do we want socialism, which means slavery of free men to the state? Or do we want to remain sovereign citizens who acknowledge that our freedoms come from God, not government? So join me in calling on our father God to save us from self-destruction. In his glorious name we pray, amen.”

  “Amen,” they said.

  Richard August, who had played a modest role in the local congressional race when he had moderated the Aguilar-McKenzie debate many weeks ago, continued his service to our nation’s democracy by volunteering as an election judge in his home precinct at the Ashbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The judges worked in pairs in every precinct, one Democrat, one Republican. August got along well with his Republican counterpart, Dick Burbridge, a math teacher at the Shady Grove campus of Montgomery Community College—and an Aguilar supporter. They both knew the rules and understood that challenges could come from any quarter. Given the heavily Democrat demographic of this part of Montgomery County, August saw his main role as providing a credible guarantee that his precinct would not engage in the type of ballot stuffing that had made Baltimore infamous in years past. “Democrats are going to win big anyhow, so let’s all play by the rules,” was his motto.

  So when he overheard Burbridge talking with a disgruntled voter shortly after 10:00 AM, Richard August came over.

  “Damn it, Dick,” the gentleman was saying. “I’m telling you. Somebody has scrubbed me from the voter rolls.”

  “Good morning, sir. I am the chief election judge. What seems to be the problem?” August asked.

  “I’m not able to vote,” the man said.

  They were blocking one of the check-in desks, and the line behind them stretched out into the hallway. This precinct had a high number of retirees so there was no drop-off in turnout after the morning rush.

  “I told him there was no one with his name at that address,” said Margie, the check-in volunteer.

  “Here’s my driver’s license. See, this is my address,” the man insisted.

  “Sir, please,” Margie said, putting a hand in front of her eyes. “I am barred by Maryland law from looking at anyone’s ID.”

  “Of course you are,” August said, all smiles and bonhomie. “Let’s see if we can fix this. Did you vote in the primary, sir?”

  “I most certainly did,” the man said.

  “So do a query under his name of the State voter database,” August instructed the poll worker.

  She typed in the name and came up blank. “How did you say you spelled your last name again?”

  “Brock,” he said. “B-R-O-C-K.”

  “And your first name?”

  “Anthony.”

  “I’m very sorry sir, but I don’t see you here.”

  “Ma’am,” Brock said. “I voted in the Republican primary.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s a different query. Let me check.”

  She retyped his information, scowled, and retyped it again.

  “Let’s have a look,” August said, moving behind the check-in table so he could see her computer screen.

  The page displayed the State Board of Elections logo, with the stylized yellow, black, and red Maryland flag. But instead of data, there was a message: “The page you have requested is temporarily unavailable.”

  “It looks like that database is currently off-line,” August said. “But that’s okay. You can vote a provisional ballot. I’m sure it’ll clear up by the end of the day.”

  Brock was fuming. “Everyone knows you toss more than half of the provisional ballots,” he said. “I’ll come back later.”

  “No he won’t,” Margie muttered under her breath.

  An hour later, the same thing happened with another Republican voter, and a half hour after that with two more. And still, the State database with the primary election results, which could have provided a back-up of the Republican registrations, remained off-line.

  “I’m going to file a report,” August said.

  “I already have,” Burbridge said,
indicating his cell phone. He wasn’t really supposed to use a cell phone inside the polling area, but given the circumstances, August said nothing.

  27

  Carroll County was Republican country. During the 2018 election, Carroll County voters re-elected Republican Governor Larry Hogan and Lieutenant Governor Boyd Rutherford by nearly a six to one margin, well beyond the 54 percent the Hogan-Rutherford ticket won statewide. The county was so heavily Republican that the chairman of the local central committee told Nelson Aguilar he shouldn’t waste his time campaigning there but should focus on the battleground precincts in Montgomery County to the south.

  Turnout had been brisk at South Carroll High School during the early morning hours, but slowed to a trickle by 11:30 AM. Normally, it would pick up from noon to 1:00 PM, slow down in the afternoon, and pick up again after 5:00 PM until the polls closed at 8:00 PM.

  Republican chief judge Richmond Hall saw a lot of MAGA hats as people parked their pick-ups and strolled into the school, and he stationed himself outside to politely inform them they had to take them off. “State law doesn’t allow any campaign material within one hundred feet of the polling place,” he told them. He knew most of these voters by name.

  Shortly before noon, he heard the familiar voice of one of the Trump supporters, apparently arguing with a poll-worker.

  “I voted Trump,” he said.

  “Sir, please don’t tell me how you voted,” the poll-worker was saying.

  “You don’t understand. I voted Trump. But when I pressed on the button to review my ballot, it said I was voting for Governor Tomlinson.”

  Hall tapped the poll-worker on the shoulder. “I’ll handle this,” he said quietly.

  He explained to the voter that this type of thing used to happen with the old touch-screen voting machines, usually with women wearing fingernail extensions. But since the state had shifted to paper ballots and scanners, it was virtually impossible. He had probably bent his ballot when he inserted it into the scanner without realizing it. “As long as the scanner hasn’t actually tabulated your vote, we can discard it and you can try again,” he said.

  He took out his key card and inserted it in the machine to clear the current ballot, which emerged a rumpled mess, then blocked off the machine until the voter had filled out a fresh paper ballot.

  “Make sure you insert your ballot holding it with both hands until the scanner accepts it,” he said. “Now I’ll just stand back while you review your ballot. If it shows up correctly this time on screen, then you press the button to cast your ballot, and you’re good to go. Second time is a charm.”

  An hour later, the same thing happened with another Trump supporter on the same machine. An hour after that, it happened a third time. Hall called up the State Board of Elections. They told him to shut down the machine for the rest of the election and place it under seal. A Board technician would examine it the next day. It was probably just a calibration issue. They would tabulate the results of that machine separately and segregate them along with the provisional ballots, so as not to contaminate the results.

  28

  And it wasn’t just happening in Maryland.

  At 4:00 PM outside Coral Terrace Elementary School southwest of Miami International Airport, an angry crowd was beginning to gather. They had come out one by one from the polling place, unable to vote, and as they began to compare stories, their numbers swelled until now more than two hundred people had formed into a sweaty mass. “Where are our ballots!” they chanted.

  This particular part of Miami was located within the 10th city commission district. It was heavily Cuban and heavily Republican. For years, they had voted for Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of their own, as their member of Congress. But today, due apparently to a glitch with the precinct printer, poll workers had run out of ballots.

  Domingo Alcazar, the chief judge, came out onto the pavement to explain that they were working on repairing the printer, but if that failed, they had already called into the County Supervisor of Elections to use a backup printer to issue more ballots. Because each election district had different local races, none of the ballots were standardized, so there wasn’t some large stockpile of blank ballots they could draw from. They actually had to be printed for each district, tallied, numbered, and sealed in numbered blocks.

  “If you come back by 6:00 PM, we’ll have the problem solved, and we’ll keep the polls open until everyone who wants to vote has had a chance to vote,” he said.

  But it was obvious that many of the working-age men and women would not be coming back. They had come to vote for the president and for their Republican candidate for Congress. But they would not make the trip twice.

  Navid turned from the bank of computer screens he was monitoring when he noticed his phone vibrate on the blue line. He recognized the number instantly.

  “Where are you calling from?” he asked.

  “The Netherlands,” Granger said.

  “Okay. Hold one.”

  Navid switched to the TunnelBear mobile app and scrolled through the list of countries they could select to host their virtual private network (VPN) until he found the Netherlands and selected it. Then he returned to Signal, which was the end-to-end encrypted voice and text application they used for all communications between them. Using Signal on top of the VPN gave them an added layer of protection. When the metadata from the call reached the NSA’s massive computers, it would show up as an encrypted communication between two phones in the Netherlands and get set aside for future decrypt, if needed—unless, of course, the NSA had flagged the IMEI numbers of their phones and put them on a watch list. That could only happen if NSA had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant against them, which they could not get without a detailed application by the Justice Department to a special FISA court, a procedure that was far less likely today after the Obama administration got caught red-handed using that procedure to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. So they felt pretty confident about security on the phone.

  “Go ahead, boss,” he said.

  “What in Sam Hill are you doing?”

  Navid was taken aback. “Exactly what we planned, if that’s what you are referring to.”

  “Miami-Dade County?

  “Oh, yeah. We win big.”

  “Well, you’d better turn on CNN right now,” Granger said.

  “Hold one.”

  Navid put his phone on mute and went out into the fish tank to look at the TV screens.

  A CNN correspondent was reporting from Miami Gardens, a heavily Democratic area of the city, where a very different demonstration was taking place from the one at Coral Terrace Elementary. Protestors carrying placards in Spanish had gathered on the sidewalk outside of a school in a sea of political signs, demanding to be allowed to vote.

  “Who are these guys?” Granger asked.

  “Heck if I know,” Navid said. “From the signs it looks like they have been organized by some voter’s rights group.”

  “That’s right. CNN is reporting that they were sent voter registration cards by an outside group and told to report to several precincts in Miami Gardens to vote, but when they got to the polls their names were not on the voter rolls.”

  “We had nothing to do with that, boss.”

  “The voter registration group apparently sent the ID cards to former convicted felons, which in Florida is now legal,” Granger said. “Also to undocumented immigrants, minors, dead people, even pets. CNN reported on one elderly Jewish guy who’d received a voter ID card in the name of Gold Fysch.”

  “Hey, what can I tell you? Stuff happens, Granger. When you’ve got so many birds in the air, somebody’s going to get poop in their eye. Hahahahaha. But I can guarantee you one thing: We’re going to win Florida, and win it well beyond the margin of error. Or recount.”

  “We’d better,” Granger said. “The t
urnout in Michigan and the Philly suburbs hasn’t been going our way.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Navid said. “That’s all going to change before the polls close.”

  29

  Gordon Utz had been prepared for problems on Election Day, but the sheer scope and frequency of the calls his office had been receiving from polling places all over the state was overwhelming. By 11:00 AM, it became clear that the central voter database had been hacked. Maryland, like many states, allowed voters to register online and to verify the status of their registration online as well. So the whole system was accessible to the hacktivists who could penetrate it using free tools downloaded from the dark web. Within forty-five minutes, Gordon had isolated the threat in cyber-quarantine where it couldn’t infect other systems and restored the voter database using a secure backup he kept on the internal server they used for all sensitive operations, including the election night vote counts and system patches.

  “We need to put out a statement,” he told Lisa Rasmussen, the State supervisor of elections.

  She had the television in her office tuned to The View. Gordon thought he detected a lingering scent of acetone—nail polish remover.

  “Have you drafted something?” she asked airily.

  “Ma’am, I’ve been a bit busy just putting out fires. We’ve got machines that are down in multiple precincts and a major data breach. The important thing is to tell people: one, that we have identified the problem with the voter registration database that prevented people from voting earlier in the day, and two, we have restored the database so they should return to the precincts to vote. We should also make it clear that we have vigorously pursued reports of defective voting machines in Carroll and Montgomery counties and have isolated those machines for further review.”