Election Software Company Could Intercept and Change Ballots Without a Trace
Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis | The Free Press
The Free Press has previously reported, Scytl, a Barcelona based e-voting company will be counting votes in 26 states. They will be doing so through something called the Federal Overseas Voting Program or FVAP. FVAP is a program designed to allow military personnel and other overseas Americans to vote in their home districts seamlessly through electronically delivered absentee ballots.
Intercepting and changing these ballots, as well as voting electronically on behalf of service people that have no idea such a thing is happening, is something that Scytl is uniquely positioned to do because of their cellphone spyware sister company, CarrierIQ. These stolen votes, distributed throughout jurisdictions across the country, could become a critical component of any scheme to defraud the 2012 presidential election. By means of changing a relatively small number of votes, and laundering those stolen votes in the correct places, the net effect would be a near silent theft.
The Columbus Dispatch reported on Sunday, October 21 that in Ohio, “The campaign of Republican Mitt Romney plans to station Election Day Task Force members to record the name of every voter who walks through the door and feed it to a ‘national command center’ database in Boston as part of an unprecedented high-tech get-out-the-vote effort.”
Sources at Smartech, the company responsible for stealing the election in Ohio in 2004, revealed to Free Press journalist Jill Simpson that the next man in the middle attack would be launched by Scytl from its US headquarters, a location in suburban Virginia that was formerly owned by its managing director, Hugh Gallagher, and seems to serve as his private home. We believe it was Hugh who watched from the windows as our investigators photographed the home.
Scytl is not the only election related business that has been run out of Mr. Gallagher’s seemingly crowded residence. Since 2004, some shell company called Election Training Inc. has called some part of Mr. Gallagher’s 5-bedroom home its headquarters. A phone records check on Election Training’s number yielded us something called Election Systems Acquisitions and Management, also at the same address, allegedly founded in 2002 but listing Scytl as its website. Scytl entered the US elections market on January 11, 2012, when it announced its acquisition of Tampa based SOE software. SOE software is election management software that specializes in internet voting and election results reporting in 900 jurisdictions in 26 states. What exactly Elections Systems Acquisitions and Management did for the decade preceding this event is at best obscure.
On September 28th, the day after the Free Press published the address and photo of Scytl headquarters, their vice president for media relations and governmental affairs, Michelle Shafer (See Why are legal scholars dismissing election fraud?: Manufactured skepticism and exit polls) of Austin Texas, filed an official change of address form with the United States Election Assistance Commission. In just 24 hours, in the middle of a presidential election, Scytl USA miraculously relocated to Baltimore, Maryland.
Scytl’s new address is a virtual office at 400 Pratt Street in Baltimore, purchased cheap. A quick web search determined more than a dozen other companies, including three law offices, a parking garage company and a web marketing firm are all crammed into the same suite at that location, making it perhaps a more cramped facility than Hugh Gallagher’s basement. Our investigators determined this on a visit there where they found no-one willing to talk about Scytl at that location, nor willing to discuss the kind of virtual office services offered. Perhaps the staff necessary for counting the votes of America’s 2.6 million servicemen and women had not had a chance to relocate from Hugh Gallagher’s couch (maybe they were in his garage?) to Baltimore.
Scytl is also going through with its plans to promote internet voting and has additional plans to allow voting from smartphones.
