U.S. Attorney Announces Vote Fraud Efforts

A press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

U.S. Attorney’s Office to Conduct Election Day Monitoring

CHICAGO — The U.S. Attorney’s Office will monitor the federal and local elections in Chicago and surrounding suburbs on Nov. 8, 2016, Zachary T. Fardon, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, announced today.

As part of the monitoring effort, the Office will operate a telephone hotline for candidates or the public to report complaints related to the voting process.  Assistant U.S. Attorneys and other Office personnel will monitor the hotline and be available to respond to complaints as needed.

The hotline number, staffed on Election Day only, is (312) 469-6157.

“A citizen who is entitled to vote should in no way be prevented from doing so,” said Mr. Fardon. “Our Office will act promptly and aggressively to protect the integrity of the election process.

The Department of Justice has an important role in deterring election fraud and discrimination at the polls, and combating these violations wherever they occur.   The Department’s longstanding Election Day Program furthers these goals, and also seeks to ensure public confidence in the voting process.

In addition, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will have special agents available in each field office throughout the country to receive allegations of election fraud and other election abuses on Election Day.  The Chicago FBI Field Office can be reached by phone at (312) 421-6700.

Federal law protects against such crimes as intimidating or bribing voters, buying and selling votes, impersonating voters, altering vote tallies, stuffing ballot boxes, and marking ballots for voters against their wishes or without their input.  It also contains special protections for the rights of voters, and provides that they can vote free from acts that intimidate or harass them.  For example, actions of persons designed to interrupt or intimidate voters at polling places by questioning or challenging them, or by photographing or videotaping them, under the pretext that these are actions to uncover illegal voting may violate federal voting rights law.  Further, federal law protects the right of voters to mark their own ballot or to be assisted by a person of their choice.  Violations of federal voting rights statutes carry penalties ranging from one to ten years in prison and fines of up to $250,000.

Complaints about possible violations of the federal voting rights laws can also be made directly to the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., by phone at (800) 253-3931 or (202) 307-2767, by email at voting.section@usdoj.gov,or by complaint form at http://www.justice.gov/crt/complaint/votintake/index.php.

For information as to the location and hours of polling locations, Illinois residents are advised to contact the Illinois State Board of Elections by logging on to www.elections.il.gov or by calling (312) 814-6440.


Comments

U.S. Attorney Announces Vote Fraud Efforts — 11 Comments

  1. And what about early voting monitoring ?

    Early voting turnout is very heavy, perhaps record setting.

  2. What about auditing the data tables incorporated in the GEMS software used by McHenry County to count the votes?

    What about the fact that you do not have to prove you are legally entitled to vote?

    If you say you are a citizen, you are!

    For those who do not want to believe that the Project Veritas was a reliable source for voter fraud, check out:

    http://blackboxvoting.org/

    Bev Harris is a declared Democrat.

  3. Illinois US Senator Barack Obama was nominated for President of the United States at the Democrat National Convention in Denver on August 28, 2008.

    On September 3, 2008, Senator Obama held a campaign event at the Tuscarawas (county) campus of Kent State University in New Philadelpha, Ohio.

    “But look, I come from Chicago, so, so I want to be honest.

    It’s not as if it’s just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past.

    Sometimes Democrats have, too.”

    +++++++++

    YouTube

    Obama Admits to Rigged Elections Back in 2008

    The Truth Division channel

    Published on October 20, 2016

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVNKmb6jEc

  4. **Where’s Moderate with their line of bravo sierra?**

    What line are you expecting?

    That the US Attorney is doing the same thing that the US Attorney does every election cycle?

  5. alabama?

    Did you not hear that Moderate contends there is no such thing as vote fraud?

    Try to follow the conversation.

    Why is it that everything must be spelled out for you?

  6. It’s flipping votes in Texas really bad.

    You must never ever vote straight ticket.

    It will immediately flip your vote.

    You must hand select everything to outwit this fraud.

    This stinking mess is going down big time now.

  7. FBI Phone # for election fraud for your cell phone.

    Vote Fraud # 312-469-6157, election day only, US Attorney – Dept of Justice.

    Vote Fraud # 312-421-6700.

    If non fraudulent problems are encountered, document them, report them to the blog, and contact the authorities at the polling location, and the McHenry County Clerk’s office.

    An issue is the Clerk’s office does not have a county wide system to capture all problems at all voting locations.

    Each incident should be assigned an incident number for tracking purposes.

    Such a system would allow analysis to develop corrective measures.

  8. The second # is the FBI number, 312-421-6700.

    That’s the Chicago FBI field office is not only for election day or limited to elections.

  9. Illinois Voter Registration System Database Breach Report
    August 26, 2016

    The Illinois State Board of Elections was the victim of a malicious cyber – attack of unknown
    origin against the Illinois Voter Registration System database (IVRS) beginning June 23,
    2016.

    SBE staff became aware of a breach on July 12 and immediately took measures to
    stop the intrusion.

    In the following weeks, SBE staff has worked to determine the scope of the intrusion, secure databases and web applications, comply with state law regarding personal information loss, and assist law enforcement in their investigation of the attack.

    ————-

    Timeline

    ————-

    July 12, 2016

    State Board of Elections IT staff was made aware of performance issues with the IVRS database server.

    Processor usage had spiked to 100% with no explanation. Analysis of server logs revealed that the heavy
    load was a result of rapidly repeated database queries on the application status page of the Paperless
    Online Voter Application (POVA) web site.

    Additionally, the server logs showed the database queries were malicious in nature – a form of cyber-attack known as SQL Injection.

    SQL Injections are essentially unauthorized, malicious database queries entered in a data field in a web application.

    SBE programmers immediately introduced code changes to eliminate the vulnerability.

    ————-

    July 13, 2016

    SBE IT took the web site and IVRS database offline to protect against further attack.

    Analysis of the web server logs showed that malicious SQL queries began on June 23, 2016.

    SBE staff maintained the ability to log and view all site access attempts.

    Malicious traffic from the IP addresses continued, though it was blocked at the firewall level.

    Firewall monitoring indicated that the attackers were hitting SBE IP addresses 5 times per second, 24 hours per day.

    SBE staff began working on determining the extent of the breach, analyzing the integrity of the IVRS
    database, and introducing security enhancements to the IVRS web servers and database.

    ————

    July 19, 2016

    We notified the Illinois General Assembly of the security breach in accordance with the Personal
    Information Protection Act (PIPA).

    In addition, we notified the Illinois Attorney General’s office.

    —————

    July 21, 2016

    SBE IT completed security enhancements and began bringing IVRS back online.

    —————

    July 28, 2016

    Both IVRS and POVA fully functional.

    —————

    Security Enhancements

    We concluded from the analysis of the attack that we could reasonably expect that various IVRS passwords
    were compromised.

    These passwords included those of election authorities, their staffs, internal SBE users, vendors, and web services.

    In order to ensure that attackers could not access any portion of the system with stolen passwords, we
    took the following steps:

    1. Reset all IVRS passwords in order to force users to change their password at next login.

    2. Introduced enhanced password complexity requirements (length, special characters, numbers,
    etc.).

    3. Mandated two-factor token login for all IVRS users. (Election authorities had previously been able
    to disable it for their staffs.)

    4. Added password encryption to the IVRS database so that stored passwords can no longer be deciphered, even by SBE employees.

    5. Reset and encrypted passwords used by vendors and automated web services. Ensuring that these processes continued to work was a lengthy and complex process that significantly contributed to system downtime.

    As a further precaution, SBE staff added code to encrypt URL transmissions as an additional layer of
    security against attacks of this nature.

    Finally, additional internal mechanisms were added for reviewing these and future attacks, including
    monitoring web server logs on a daily basis for evidence of attacks as well as monitoring firewall logs for traffic from malicious sources.

    ————-

    Outside Agency Participation

    As a result of informing the Illinois Attorney General’s office of the breach, the SBE was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    We have fully cooperated with the FBI in their ongoing investigation to determine who was responsible for the attack and to prosecute the offender(s).

    The Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) has been very helpful by providing web traffic
    logs and assisting with web server log analysis.

    The FBI advised that we work with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) United States Computer
    Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to ensure there is no ongoing malicious activity on any of SBE’s
    systems.

    We have provided DHS with the log files that we obtained from DoIT.

    ———

    PIPA

    The State Board of Elections has remained fully compliant with the Illinois Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).

    We fulfilled our obligation to inform the Illinois General Assembly within 5 business days of
    the breach.

    We have determined that a number of individuals’ personal information was compromised.

    Due to the ambiguous nature of the attack we may never know the exact number of affected voters.

    We can confirm that no voting history information and no voter signature images were captured.

    We are continuing to analyze the extent of the breach in order to determine the individuals to be
    contacted and will be working with the Attorney General’s office to determine the method of contact in
    order to comply with PIPA.

    ———–

    Current Status

    State Board of Elections staff continues to work to improve application and database security as well as
    determine the scope of the breach.

    The attackers continued to hit SBE IP addresses 5 times per second until August 12th when attacks abruptly
    ceased.

    We are highly confident that no data in the IVRS database was added, changed, or deleted, although the investigation is not yet complete.

    http://www.elections.il.gov/Downloads/AboutTheBoard/PDF/08_26_16AgendaAmended.pdf

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