Why This One File Could Change the Election and You’d Never Know
This is an addendum to another article of mine.
This is a follow-up to my earlier reporting on election software changes, focused on one file, one decision, and one overlooked vulnerability that could change how votes are counted or at least, how they appear to election officials.
In September 2024, a change was quietly approved that should worry anyone who cares about election integrity.
It's called ECO 1188, and it targeted a file inside the ES&S Electionware software called configuration.ini. This file decides how vote totals are organized, filtered, and shown in final reports.. the reports that get printed out, shared with the public or election official, and used to help decide the winners of the elections.
Before this change, the system checked that file’s integrity using a method called a “hash check.”
It’s like a digital fingerprint. If someone tampered with the file, the system would know and alert officials to it. But ECO 1188 reclassified that file as “dynamic,” which means the system now skips the fingerprint check. If someone changes the file, it won’t raise any alarms.
The system will just go on, assuming everything’s fine.
Some people have claimed that all changes made to the system were tested during its certification. That since the lab that certified the changes, also certified the machine everything is OK.
That’s simply not true.
The system was certified in June 2024. ECO 1188 came after that. While there was an update to the “Scope of Conformance” in September 2024, it doesn’t include any details about testing ECO 1188 or the changes listed in it.
Pro V&V, the lab in charge of evaluating these systems, clearly stated that in their ECOs no testing was needed. That wasn’t a mistake. That was their official decision. It was signed off by EAC officials that way, too.
Pro V&V is owned by Jack Cobb, who previously managed Ciber Inc, a lab decertified after it was exposed for letting voting machine companies write the very tests meant to verify their systems weren’t vulnerable to election fraud. Read about it by clicking the article below:
Yes, The Voting Machines Were Changed & PRO V&V's Jack Cobb? His Fingerprints Are All Over It.
For more than two decades, two men in Huntsville, Alabama, have quietly held the keys to America’s voting machines.
The De Minimis Loophole.
According to federal policy. specifically list in a EAC Notice of Clarification 09-003, some changes can be labeled “de minimis,” meaning they’re considered too minor to require testing. Once a change gets that label, it can go into effect without anyone checking it. That’s exactly what happened with ECO 1188.
But calling this change minor is misleading. It removed a critical check that would have told us if someone tampered with the software.
There’s a common defense that goes something like: “Don’t worry, post-election audits will catch anything suspicious.”
That sounds good, but it falls apart when you look closer.
Logic and Accuracy (L&A) tests are done before the election so they won’t catch changes made after voting begins.
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) compare paper ballots to the official vote count. So, they won’t catch changes in how the software filters or formats the results.
And field audits? They’re inconsistent, and they usually don’t inspect the file that was changed in this ECO.
If someone wanted to quietly alter how vote totals were reported (by excluding a few precincts or changing how certain votes were grouped) they could do it by editing this file.
The raw vote data would remain untouched, but the final report would tell a different story. And because the file was reclassified as dynamic, the system wouldn’t blink.
This change didn’t trigger any alarms and that’s the point. ECO 1188 turned off one of the alarms that should have been ringing. It’s not just a technical tweak. It’s a policy failure that makes our elections more vulnerable and our trust in the results more fragile.
Some will say it’s unlikely anyone would exploit this.
But unlikely isn’t the same as impossible and what’s more important? That it could happen, or that we knowingly made it easier?
Note From The Author:
I don’t put my work behind a paywall. These stories are too urgent, too raw, too real to keep locked away.
When 90% of mainstream media outlets are owned by 6 billionaires, it’s becomes hard to know who to trust. I don’t take checks from billionaires, and I don’t take notes from PR firms. I just tell the damn story because I’m not part of the mainstream media.
My belief is that almost everyone has their angle, their agenda. The truth is usually hiding somewhere in between. And that’s what I’m chasing.
I don’t need to sanitize what’s happening. I’ll just tell it like it is.
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— Dissent ♥
It’s reports like this that are most upsetting to me, because there’s nothing any of us can DO. It reminds me of when I first heard about Cambridge Analytica and what they were doing with people’s Facebook data. I heard about that from independent underground journalists BEFORE the 2016 election, I tried to warn as many people as I could, and got nowhere. It was many months before the mainstream media started reporting on it and by then it was far too late, the election was already in the rearview mirror. Something tells me this — and anything like it — will just be the same. We are so screwed.
🇨🇦 as it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the American election was absolutely rigged fraudulent and stolen I wondered about our Canadian elections. Whenever I vote we go behind a cardboard box and the people employed in the voting station are very kind but firm about your secret ballot. Then it’s a piece of paper with your few simple choices on it a circle, which you mark an X in. After that, I really didn’t know what happened, but the polling station closes. No one‘s allowed to go out or in the candidate and or representatives are allowed to watch. There’s a lot of people watching every vote being counted and then when everything is counted, if there’s any discrepancies they start all over again Once they have a tally, they inform elections Canada from every riding, say in our recent federal elections and elections Canada let’s the media know what’s happening the early counts. Of course we have a smaller population but every polling station in America perhaps could work this way if you’re ever allowed to vote again that is God help good people in America trying to save your country.