“You must be looking at the 486 tabulators,” he said.
“Thanks for that intelligence, but I need information.”
“Those are the central tabulators. Don’t worry about them machines. They will give the same result as the precinct tabulators did on election night, hahahahaha.”
“How’s that?”
“The 486 is just a jacked-up version of the model 48 precinct tabulator, you know, the ballot scanner that voters see. But under the hood, they are the same. Same logic board, same patch.”
“So as long as we stay with the scanned images, we don’t care about an audit.”
“That’s right.”
“And what if someone calls for a risk-limiting audit of the paper ballots?”
“Hahahahaha!”
“A serious answer, please.”
“So, they run the paper ballots through the same tabulators running the same patch they were running on Election Day. They get the same result.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear, Navid.”
Navid is still the man!
Governor Norton gave a 5:00 PM press conference in Tallahassee, along with Secretary of State Shelley Hughes, who administered the elections, and Attorney General Craig Romero. The three of them comprised the Elections Canvassing Commission. It was a stacked deck from the start, Granger knew. Norton was explaining why the State had asked the counties to take their time in compiling the initial vote tally. It was a tortured explanation that immediately made Granger sit up, because clearly something was going on that Norton wasn’t saying. He repeatedly made reference to chapter 102-141 of State election law as justification for the decision of the Commission to hold back on certification.
“Are you watching this?” Granger asked Johanna Weaver down in the Lauderhill Mall. “What in the Sam Hill is chapter 102-141 of State election law?”
“Hold one, sir. Let me get to a more private setting.”
The lawyer put Granger on hold—dead silence over the muted line—then reappeared to the sound of a truck grinding its gears.
“So. Chapter 102-141 governs the duties of the county canvassing boards,” she said. “Basically, what the governor is saying is that he is deferring to the counties to tell him when they are ready to send in their final count.”
“Why would he do that?” Granger said.
“He isn’t saying why. He’s just slow-rolling this.”
“I don’t like it.”
“By law, the counties actually have until noon of the twelfth day after the general election to certify their results. They are supposed to send in an ‘official’ tally four days after the election, but under 102-141 they can delay that for just about any reason.”
“He must know something,” Granger said. “You need to find out what he knows.”
Granger made another call to Governor Tomlinson.
“Time isn’t our friend,” he said. “We need to push hard to certify now.”
The governor’s fund-raising team had already launched a Florida Recount Appeal. Granger suggested they transfer an additional $400,000 cash payment to Reverend James Dupree to step up his Tallahassee protests. “Every Democratic talking head on every show in the country needs to repeat that twice in every sentence,” he said. “‘Certify now!’ That’s our call sign. I don’t care if people get tired of hearing it. Certify now.”
“Certify now,” she said softly. “I like it.”
Wasn’t it sweet irony for them to be calling the law to their side, Granger thought. It was time for him to head down to the poolside bar.
47
Gordon Utz was fighting a rear-guard battle against his boss, elections supervisor Lisa Rasmussen. Absent any serious election-day mishaps, and with no candidates or voters filing complaints, she saw no reason why they shouldn’t convene the board of elections to begin the process of certifying the Maryland election results.
On a lark, he called Jason Barber, his counterpart on the Montgomery County Board of Elections, and spelled out the discrepancies he had found between the actual vote count and the pre-election polls, as well as the unusually low re-elect numbers of Grady Jones in Baltimore. He also mentioned the statistically impossible numbers from the early voting sites. Barber liked to call himself a graduate of Hacker U, the Chaos Computing Club at the College Park campus of the University of Maryland. He was one of the elite, masters of the digital universe.
“Dude, like, we are secure. We’ve got protocols.”
“So what do you think happened at the early voting sites,” Gordon said.
“What do you mean what happened?”
“How is it that when you remove the votes from the touch-screen machines, every single early voting site comes up with the identical percentage of votes for Congressman McKenzie?”
“What are you talking about, man? I’ve got numbers all over the charts.”
“I don’t mean numbers of votes. I mean percentages. McKenzie got 73.4 percent—exactly 73.4 percent—from the tabulators in all eleven early voting centers.”
“Impossible.”
“I agree. Take a look.”
Gordon could hear him clicking on his keyboard and assumed he was pulling up the numbers. Then the clicking stopped, and Jason groaned.
“Oh man, this can’t be happening,” he wailed.
“That’s exactly what I was saying. So why did it happen?”
“It’s a fixed percentage—an algorithm.”
“Only possible answer. And where do the tabulation algorithms come from?”
“Dominant Technologies.”
“Right again. Every time they make an update to the software they send out a patch. The last patch they sent out I received on September 29, and you installed sometime between then and October 2. Right?”
Jason didn’t answer.
“Right?” he asked again.
“I can’t believe this,” Jason said finally.
“I’m glad you’re starting to agree with me.” Gordon laughed.
“Dude. Like, you don’t understand. I must have fallen for it.”
“Fallen for what?”
“The last patch.”
Jason went on to explain what had happened. Around three weeks ago, he had received an email from a guy at the Dominant Technologies state support division, with a link to the most recent patch.
“You mean you clicked on a link in an email from a guy you didn’t know?”
“Hey. It came in over the VPN. The guy had the correct naming protocol and digital signature.”
“Did you actually check the signature hash?”
“Dude, like, would you ever do that? To email coming in over the VPN?”
“Hey. I’m not blaming you. Just tell me exactly what happened.”
“So the link reffed the Dominant Technologies FTP site—”
“You mean, something that looked like the Dominant FTP site.”
“Yeah. And there was a whole list of patches, and they all matched up to the earlier ones we had installed, except for the newest one right on top. So I downloaded it and installed it onto our machines.”
“Okay. So that patch must have included the tabulation algorithm that affected the early voting sites. Now we need to see if they had a similar algorithm for Election Day ballots. We need to rip open that patch and go over it line by line.”
Barber called back a half-hour later with more bad news.
“I found the email. It came in on October 24. It was so close to the election I figured they were trying to be helpful by reaching out to us county techs directly.”
“Does the guy who sent it have a name?”
“Eric Figueroa. But the link is dead.”
“How about the disk image from the backup drive?”
“Already checked. Wiped. Dude, like, with a c
loth. Hahahaha.”
Damn, Gordon thought. These guys were good. They must have inserted a rootkit deep inside the system that contained a routine to wipe the backups whenever they were called. If you were going to steal an election, better not to leave any fingerprints behind.
He asked Barber to try a cold exfil of the operating system from one of the early voting tabulators, although he didn’t give it much chance of success. If the hackers were as good as they seemed, they would have coded the algorithm to erase itself if anyone attempted to debug it without the correct permissions.
The only way they were going to catch them was by a manual audit of the paper ballots. But Lisa Rasmussen would never go for that. The results of the election were not even close, so what was the point?
That’s why this hack was so brilliant.
48
Marcie had made herself at home in Annie’s townhouse in Urbana. It was Friday night, and she knew the two of them were still hungover from the election, so she called Annie and offered to make dinner.
“Let’s just make it an evening,” she said. “You two need some comic relief. I promise I won’t stay too long.”
She made them meat loaf with a mix of ground pork, veal, and lamb with a mushroom cream sauce, and it was to die for. Gordon brought several bottles of old vine Zinfandel. And, as promised, Marcie kept them laughing for several hours.
“This morning when I left the house, I placed my Remington 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun right in the doorway. You know the one, right, Gordon? You learned to shoot skeet on it.”
“Right, Mom.” He rolled his eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking, honey. Just wait. So I left six cartridges next to it, propped the door open, and went out.”
Annie nearly choked on her wine but did her best to hide it. She had heard this one before.
“While I was gone, the mailman delivered the mail, Mr. Schumacher’s son from across the street mowed the lawn, just about everybody in the neighborhood walked their dog, and cars stopped at the stop sign in front of the house.
“When I came back an hour later, I checked on the gun. It was still sitting there, right where I had left it. It hadn’t moved itself. It hadn’t killed anyone. It hadn’t even loaded itself.”
“I know you like guns, Mom,” Gordon said. “Your meat loaf is great, too.”
“But Gordon, don’t you watch TV or read the newspapers? My gun was supposed to have killed people! Committed mass murder! All by itself! I must have the laziest gun in the world! Don’t you know that the United States is the gun murder capital of the world? My gun didn’t kill anybody!”
Gordon still didn’t get it, and Annie couldn’t stop from chortling.
“Gordon, you’d better get rid of the spoons in the kitchen,” Marcie said. “I’ve heard they’re supposed to make you fat.”
Later, once the wine took the edge off his battles in Annapolis, Gordon started to explain what had happened with the election. Lisa Rasmussen had wrapped him in knots. Legally, there was no way he could call for a recount in CD-8 where Nelson Aguilar had lost inexplicably to Congressman McKenzie. And yet, he was convinced that the vote had been rigged by malware injected into the voting machines through a patch sent from the manufacturer or someone impersonating them.
“And by an extraordinary coincidence, the same manufacturer, Dominant Technologies, supplies voting machines to all of the states that Governor Tomlinson flipped this year. Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona. And a few others she won by bigger margins than anyone would have thought. How do you like that?” he said.
“What’s a patch?” Marcie asked.
So Gordon explained. All the voting machines used a standard commercial operating system, just like any computer. But because the machines were proprietary to the companies that sold them, only those suppliers—not the software giants—could send out security updates or “patches” to protect them from known viruses and other glitches. What if, under the guise of sending a security patch, the manufacturer sent out a sub-routine that altered the way the voting machines tabulated the votes and did it in such a way that no one would ever see it?
“That would make the Russia collusion look like a tea party in a doll house,” Annie said.
“Which it was, by the way,” Gordon added.
“You said Dominant Technologies. Right, dear?” Marcie said.
“Yes.”
“That’s the same Dominant Technologies that’s based in Dayton, Ohio?”
“How do you know that, Mom?”
“Because everyone on my Facebook knows how evil they are. Didn’t you know they were bought out by Richard Foreman Hall in 2017?”
“The Richard Foreman Hall?” Annie asked.
“The one and only. Billionaire hedge fund investor from San Francisco. Big Democrat donor. And all-around scumbag,” Marcie said. “He not only wants to take Trump down. He wants to take America and all of our friends down. He has spent billions of dollars around the world to undermine pro-American governments and support socialists and Antifa and all kinds of anti-American groups. This man is seriously evil.”
Gordon gripped his forehead with a hand. His mom came up with such weird information at times, most of it from Facebook. Normally, he didn’t pay it any attention.
“You’ve heard of this guy?” he asked Annie.
“Oh, yeah.”
“And this is for real, not the fever swamps? Like he owns Dominant Technologies?”
“That’s pretty easy to confirm,” she said, getting out her phone.
Ten seconds later she showed him her screen, with the Dominant Technologies investor information webpage.
“Look here, under institutional investors.”
The link showed that the hedge fund owned by Richard Foreman Hall controlled 23.5 percent of Dominant Technologies stock, and that a Hall crony sat on the DT board.
“I’d say that would give them the inside track,” Annie said.
“So conceivably, Hall—through his nominee on the board—could get the company to hire someone who might do something contrary to the company’s best commercial interests,” Gordon said.
“But that something would be virtually invisible,” Marcie added. “How would anyone figure out what he had done?”
“So there would be no risk,” Gordon said. “Or little risk, at any rate.”
“And if anyone ever found out, they burn the guy. Or he just disappears.”
“Expendable.”
It was perfect, Gordon thought.
But he had one advantage over Richard Foreman Hall: He knew the name of the someone who had sent the patch. Or, at least, he knew the name that someone had used on an email. Now he had to document what the patch had actually done.
“You should go to the FBI,” Annie said.
“No way!” Marcie almost shouted.
“Why not?”
“Are you kidding? After what they did to our president? Who can trust the FBI?” Marcie said.
“Mom’s probably right,” Gordon said. “I’ve gotten no help from them so far. And every time I’ve gone to them, bad things have happened.”
He had to pursue this alone. Quietly. With little talk on the phone or by email. He had to assume that any electronic communication could be monitored.
But was the FBI really interested in him?
Hard to believe.
49
Officials in Phoenix, Arizona, completed their canvas over the weekend and declared Governor Tomlinson and Senator Bellinger the winners of Arizona’s eleven electoral votes. That put the Democratic Party nominees at 297 electoral votes, if you included Florida.
But without Florida—which Governor Norton still refused to call—they were at 268. If Florida went to Trump, he would win re-election in a squeaker: 270-268.
Gr
anger made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, pounding out the party line.
“There is just no way the president is going to win Florida,” he told CNN’s Keith Cobb. “We are ahead by more than 186,000 votes, just over two percent. Frankly, I don’t understand why he insists on putting the nation through this type of trauma all over again. He’s just a sore loser. It’s time to certify now.”
On Fox News Sunday, he ridiculed Florida governor Kirk Norton. “I don’t know where the governor learned his ‘rithmatic, Benjamin. It must have been that fancy law school he attended. This election is nowhere near the margin of error. It’s time to certify now.”
Former Obama White House official Jarrett Herr introduced Granger’s segment on This Week with an attempt at irony. “And so once again, the fate of America hinges on how a handful of officials in Florida decide to count the votes. Here’s the president tweeting just an hour ago:
@realDonaldTrump: The great state of Florida is right to take its time to make sure every legal vote is counted. I have instructed the Dept of Homeland Security to provide every assistance Governor Norton might require to determine the accuracy of election night vote counts.
“What can the president possibly be talking about, Mr. Granger?”
“That’s a great question, Jarrett.”
And while Granger played along with the effort to ridicule the president, he was actually very worried by the president’s words and his actions. How could Trump possibly believe he could beat a 2 percent lead by his opponent, the same margins, by the way, Tomlinson had racked up in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania? And why was he focusing on Florida and not any of those other states? Could he possibly know something? Suspect it?
He was still puzzling over Trump’s odd behavior the next morning when he got a call from Congressman Hugh McKenzie.
“We have a problem,” McKenzie said.
He explained that his Republican opponent had just filed a petition with the Montgomery County Board of Elections, demanding they conduct a machine recount of the paper ballots using tabulators brought in from other Maryland counties.
The Election Heist Page 17