The British Conservative Party, at present in Government, uses in its election organisation a company which owns one of the largest election services companies SCYTL – exposed as using “deficient” voting software, open to manipulation and the altering of votes cast.
SCYTL’s parent company PARAGON runs the Conservative Party shop and did the party’s election printing at the last election. A local agent described the company’s involvement to me:
All of the Conservative literature we used during the election was prepared, printed and delivered using Paragon systems and companies. The training materials include “Votesource” user training. Votesource give access to voters details.
SCYTL is a Spanish company which develops voting software and hardware. Its slogan is “innovating democracy”. It has systems in place in the USA, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Malta, the EU and Ecuador. Its subsidiary Civiti (formerly OpenSeneca) focuses on “civic participation services”. Controversy has dogged the company and its systems.
IN SWITZERLAND SCYTL’s system has been criticised as overly complex, difficult to audit and not sufficiently transparent. Researchers from the University of Melbourne, Université catholique de Louvain, and the Open Privacy Research Society reported in March 2019that they discovered a deficiency in the code that would allow the system’s operator to alter votes undetected. Swiss authorities disallowed the use of Scytl’s e-voting system in the Swiss referenda of 19 May 2019, and it has not been used since.
IN AUSTRALIA an internet and telephone system developed by SCYTL for those with disabilities was found to have during the 2015 election deficiencies which could be used to manipulate votes, violate ballot privacy and subvert the verification mechanism.
IN NORWAY A flaw in SCYTL’s cryptography was discovered in 2013, and 0.75% of all voters managed to vote twice in 2013, once online and once in a polling station. (Such double voting was one of many features of fraudulent voting in the US Presidential Election)In 2014 Norway abandoned Scytl’s Internet Voting project, due to security failures.
THE MAINSTREAM PRESS USED TO EXPOSE VOTING SYSTEM FAILURES
CNN in the USA many years ago exposed the fraudulent nature of voting systems used in Venezuela, (now used in the USA) as did the New York Times. In the UK the Guardian was particularly critical of these private sector businesses conducting election voting and vote counting. “They think they are above the law” said the Guardian in April 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/us-voting-machine-private-companies-voter-registration
They went on to question the role of those companies:
“The corporations that run every aspect of American elections, from voter registration to casting and counting votes by machine, are subject to limited state and federal regulation.
The companies are privately-owned and closely held, making information about ownership and financial stability difficult to obtain. The software source code and hardware design of their systems are kept as trade secrets and therefore difficult to study or investigate.”
Strange what could not be trusted over the last 20 years according to the mainstream media should now be unquestionably trustworthy. While the left wing MSM used to attack the voting systems and reliability of counts, today they term all criticism (backed by voluminous evidence) as “unsubstantiated” and “without proof”. The Guardian would not say today what it said in April 2019:
“No matter who owns them, voting machines are more vulnerable to insider malfeasance than any other sector of the election industry” …
And reading that article today there is not one objection from Democrats then which the mainstream media would not today attack (in the mouth of a Republican) as “unsubstantiated”!
The electoral system, like the constitution of a democracy must be beyond reproach. When it becomes the subject of politically biased manipulation then Democracy itself is in danger.
ELECTORAL FRAUD IN BRITAIN
While using far more secure vote counting rules than the USA, there has been much electoral fraud in Britain in recent years – mainly in the Labour Party and among immigrants. In 2016 the police concentrated their anti fraud activities in 16 areas:
Hyndburn, Burnley, Blackburn, Oldham, Kirklees, Calderdale, Bradford, Pendle, Walsall, Derby, Peterborough (where a convicted and jailed vote rigger Tariq Mahmoud played a prominent part in Labour’s by-election victory in 2019, campaigning with the Labour Party Leader Corbyn), Birmingham, Slough, Woking and Tower Hamlets – all areas with heavy concentrations of immigrants.
The British Conservative Party should be tackling this scandal now (by tightening ID requirements and reducing postal voting to those ill or out of the country) – not tying itself to such a controversial company as PARAGON and its SCYTL subsidiary.
