In the May 8th Government Operations and Audit Committee meeting, Secretary Monae Johnson was called upon to give an update and answer questions regarding the $4.5 million TotalVote upgrade.
About two sentences in, Monae Johnson says (paraphrasing), “You wanted an update, maybe on ERIC, that’s one of the questions that I’ve heard.” She then proceeds to say (paraphrasing) “Oh, we have a new amended contract where I’ve removed all references (to interfacing the TotalVote System with) ERIC.”
Committee members asked where is the new contract and why don’t we have it?
Johnson proceeds to make excuses as to why it’s not signed yet, but claims SHE FOUND the references to ERIC, and decided to have them removed.
Right. Sure she did.
ONE DAY after we dropped the 15 page complaint and Substack article of Monae Johnson’s intentions to connect our voter roll database to ERIC, suddenly there is an amended contract that no one has seen and isn’t signed yet removing all references to ERIC. What a coincidence.
Secretary Johnson admits that the TotalVote system has the ability to interface with ERIC built into the program…
and now says she will remove the references to ERIC from the contract, but does not mention if the actual capability will be removed from the system.
Why would this be a built in feature when there are now only 18 states left participating with ERIC? Who would ever know if it is turned off or on?
When asked what are we getting for this $4.5 million price tag, Election Director Rachel Soulek told the committee new modules and increased functionality were some of the upgrades included. However, Soulek listed no new modules in the SDVOTES program. South Dakota has the most modules of any state as we believe they tried them all out on us before expanding them into the market.
One of the known shocking security lapses with the current KNOWiNK TotalVote System is that:
the user names and PASSWORDS are NOT PRIVATE.
Rachel Soulek had to admit to the committee that all user names and passwords are known by the Secretary of State’s Office, and by KNOWiNK.
Any TotalVote user that wants to change their password has to call the SOS office to have them change it.
What a clown show.
Can you believe that? TotalVote may be the only system we know of that uses a “security” protocol like that. Except for electronic vote tabulating equipment vendors, of course.
Remember, this is national critical infrastructure.
**** sAfE aNd SeCuRe ****
Soulek also claimed that the Secretary of State can’t change any of the data in the voter rolls. However, Auditor Leah Anderson pointed out that when the SOS office found the non-citizens on the rolls, that those voters were removed by someone on the back end without any approval or action from the auditors. We have also caught them (someone) in several election cycles removing voter history without auditor approval.
Rachel kept on par with her tendency to lie pathologically by repeatedly denying the fact that South Dakota created the TotalVote System with tax dollars and OWNS THE SOURCE CODE.
Senator Taffy Howard and Representative Karla Lems really hammered the fact that South Dakota built and paid for TotalVote, gave it away, and are now having to pay an out of state private corporation $4.5 million for an upgrade and $400,000/year to use the program that we built and paid for to begin with?
If you aren’t up to date on our years long investigative work on Bpro/KNOWiNK/TotalVote please start with this article and visit our website for an extensive collection of published articles.
There are a lot of interesting tidbits you can pick up in the watching this section of the GOAC meeting here:
We are aware that a list of follow up questions was sent to Secretary Johnson, and GOAC plans to continue discussing this at the July meeting. It is currently slated for July 16 at 9 a.m., but may be rescheduled. We will be sure to let you know.
Thank you to those of you who emailed the committee. If you haven’t yet, please email the committee and ask them to cancel the KNOWiNK contract and bring the voter registration and election night reporting system back under state control.
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