Made an account just to reply to this. I do specialized programming work for Kofax Capture, KTM, etc that deal with managing scanned documents. Good documents have little indicators to help OCR align the page for recognizing characters or check boxes. I find it very hard to believe a “glitch” like this would ever happen.
Now I can’t speak for ballot software but in the suite of Kofax software you set certain thresholds for OCR to pick things up and there’s a lot of testing that’s involved with tuning everything in to give accurate readings. The indicators to align the page are a main contributor and I know ballots have these on them. And especially for an election I know for a fact these will all be highly accurate.
I’ve written many pieces of software that read zones for tens of millions of documents and storing what it picks up in databases and there is no way in hell that faults like this would ever be allowed into production.
Thank you for your reply. Can you please give me your take on what one of Binney's NSA associates, Kirk Wiebe, has to say on the subject of a "supercomputer" system called the HAMMER, which had an exploit application called SCORECARD which in Wiebe's own words, "was designed with the express purpose of changing vote totals on the fly, meaning not preloaded anywhere in a computer, but actually targeting the recordings of precinct data upward to the state level over the internet." I really appreciate your response and your past technical experience can be really useful in evaluating some of these things. Here is the link to the video of Wiebe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M03P_yqBIds&t=7s
I don't know anything about HAMMER or SCORECARD, I can only speak from my experience with Kofax software. I will say however, that when processing documents they're put into classes. The hierarchy of documents starts from a document, then a document class, then a batch class. So basically you have a batch of document classes that are collections of documents.
When processing these documents there's multiple "phases" I guess you could call them. And one of the final stages is something called the "validation" step and this is when users/scripts validate the information the software picks up from a document is accurate. And in this step you can have things called validation scripts where you can most definitely change values based on any criteria you want. For example one of the most common issues is dates. Most people with programming experience will agree that dates are a very annoying format to handle especially with how many formats they're written. I frequently write validation scripts that will change date formatting to be the correct format before exporting it to a database. Or for example if you have some sort of check box and you want that to be stored as a T or F value in a database you could easily write an if statement in the validation script that says if this box is checked we will say it's a True boolean value and we'll insert that into the database.
Once again I'm only speaking from my experience with writing code for Kofax's document management software suite. And my boss would never let faults go through to production.
Also if you go here you can download the kofax capture developer guide and it'll have screenshots in it showing what the zones are and validation scripts
Thank you very much for sharing your experience. It would be really nice to hear from you again as the information you are providing will be very important to circulate to others. I will relay this info to Kirk and Bill, but if you have any questions you would like to ask them, I can relay them if you want. Again, I really appreciate you sharing this information about Kofax and ballot processing.
I'm not trying to validate any of the HAMMER or SCORECARD stuff I'm just trying to say with my experience in document management software I guess it's possible
Made an account just to reply to this. I do specialized programming work for Kofax Capture, KTM, etc that deal with managing scanned documents. Good documents have little indicators to help OCR align the page for recognizing characters or check boxes. I find it very hard to believe a “glitch” like this would ever happen.
Now I can’t speak for ballot software but in the suite of Kofax software you set certain thresholds for OCR to pick things up and there’s a lot of testing that’s involved with tuning everything in to give accurate readings. The indicators to align the page are a main contributor and I know ballots have these on them. And especially for an election I know for a fact these will all be highly accurate.
I’ve written many pieces of software that read zones for tens of millions of documents and storing what it picks up in databases and there is no way in hell that faults like this would ever be allowed into production.
Thank you for your reply. Can you please give me your take on what one of Binney's NSA associates, Kirk Wiebe, has to say on the subject of a "supercomputer" system called the HAMMER, which had an exploit application called SCORECARD which in Wiebe's own words, "was designed with the express purpose of changing vote totals on the fly, meaning not preloaded anywhere in a computer, but actually targeting the recordings of precinct data upward to the state level over the internet." I really appreciate your response and your past technical experience can be really useful in evaluating some of these things. Here is the link to the video of Wiebe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M03P_yqBIds&t=7s
I don't know anything about HAMMER or SCORECARD, I can only speak from my experience with Kofax software. I will say however, that when processing documents they're put into classes. The hierarchy of documents starts from a document, then a document class, then a batch class. So basically you have a batch of document classes that are collections of documents.
When processing these documents there's multiple "phases" I guess you could call them. And one of the final stages is something called the "validation" step and this is when users/scripts validate the information the software picks up from a document is accurate. And in this step you can have things called validation scripts where you can most definitely change values based on any criteria you want. For example one of the most common issues is dates. Most people with programming experience will agree that dates are a very annoying format to handle especially with how many formats they're written. I frequently write validation scripts that will change date formatting to be the correct format before exporting it to a database. Or for example if you have some sort of check box and you want that to be stored as a T or F value in a database you could easily write an if statement in the validation script that says if this box is checked we will say it's a True boolean value and we'll insert that into the database.
Once again I'm only speaking from my experience with writing code for Kofax's document management software suite. And my boss would never let faults go through to production.
Also if you go here you can download the kofax capture developer guide and it'll have screenshots in it showing what the zones are and validation scripts
Thank you very much for sharing your experience. It would be really nice to hear from you again as the information you are providing will be very important to circulate to others. I will relay this info to Kirk and Bill, but if you have any questions you would like to ask them, I can relay them if you want. Again, I really appreciate you sharing this information about Kofax and ballot processing.
I'm not trying to validate any of the HAMMER or SCORECARD stuff I'm just trying to say with my experience in document management software I guess it's possible
But this is a "glitch" we know about.
Could there be others?
Or was it "glitching" to switch 6000 GOP votes to Dem votes?
Don't forget, people, that's actually a 12,000 vote swing.