Why the FRA Calls for Resignations of Top Election Officials

Florida Republican Assembly Asks Byrd and Matthews to Step Down

Why? The reasons are very simple. Florida’s top two election officials, Secretary of State Cord Byrd and Director of Elections, Maria Matthews, have allowed insecure elections and show every intention of doing so again in 2024, the most crucial election in our nation’s history.

There are three areas of proof.

FIRST, the security checks on the voting machines are substandard. They have not been updated for 19 years. Today’s technology is far more advanced and therefore we don’t face the same security threats as we did 19 years ago. Cord Byrd thinks that this is just fine.

SECOND, Byrd has declared that local county election officials, the 67 Supervisors of Election, may not perform hand counts either for initial totals or for purposes of audits of the machine counts. They are forbidden. Don’t you dare look for inaccuracies, vassals! Instead of the counties telling the state who was elected, it appears the private election system vendors will be telling us all who won.

THIRD, when asked about the certification of citizenship of the voters, Byrd said that only the federal government had such information and there was nothing Florida could do about it. However, in 2012, the FL Dept of State published a press release that the state had received a commitment from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide access to the national citizenship database. When usage records for this citizen database were requested from DHS, you can see that there were ZERO requests to this database. That also matches the county filings that show nearly 100 non-citizens are ever removed from the voter rolls statewide each year.

Does that look like they are serious about finding and removing illegal immigrants from our voter rolls?

The Florida Republican Assembly (FRA) wants to get to the bottom of it, and will.

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Kris Jurski, the VP of Election Integrity of the FRA has worked with the top machine security analyst in the country, Clay Parikh to learn the depth of the substandard machine certifications performed each year. In their Rumble interview Dec. 7, which followed the annual ethics committee meeting in Tallahassee, Parikh made it clear.

In the Dec. 7 Ethics Committee meeting in Tallahassee, Byrd made it clear that his department was TOTALLY RESPONSIBLE for ensuring that ALL voting systems used in Florida are secure per Florida Statute 101.5605. Per that statute, the Department of State developed the “Florida Voting System Standard Form DS-DE 101.” The problem is that the standard was created at the end of 2005, shortly after the first digital tabulators were introduced in Florida, and NEVER UPDATED IN OVER 19 YEARS!

The way Florida does elections has drastically changed since the creation of this standard. For example, electronic poll books were introduced in the state in 2012 and they were never added for certification.

Both the technology and cyber security standards have changed dramatically since then, as new technology is brought online. The favorite rebuttal to this is that machines are NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. Have you heard that one before? Yeah. Anybody who talks to any state official about elections has heard it. They hasten to assure you that our election networks are “protected by the AIR GAP”.

The facts on this are, however, that voting systems ARE connected to the internet. EVEN THE MACHINE VENDORS CONFIRM THIS. If, however, you’d like to take Florida’s election officials at their word, then that would mean that their understanding of their machines is decades outdated.

Recall when, in 2012, a very protected nuclear facility in Iran was burned to the ground by a highly sophisticated cyber-attack. A cyber “worm”, “Stuxnet” had attacked the facility and was spreading all over the world as versions of the code were altered and deployed. This shook the cyber world, and continued to stun the nations as USB drives containing the malware were found being sold as new on Amazon and eBay! This malware was very hard to detect.

In response to the exponential annual increase in cyber threats, the military and companies ranging from billion-dollar global corporations to local mom-and-pop stopped allowing personal devices such as laptops and mobile devices to connect to protected networks as well as forbidding the use of USB “thumb drives”.

Florida, however, as per the FL Department of State guideline, has NO RESTRICTIONS on USBs or the use of personal devices on election system networks. The “thumb drives” are a key part of the so-called “air gap protection”.

The improvements in mobile networks from 2005 to the present, have been vast. The wireless connection “dinosaurs” of 2005 was so slow that they were not considered a serious threat. It wasn’t until 2008 that 3G wireless became mainstream, and at the same time, cybersecurity became exponentially more complex. Shouldn’t Florida’s election security standards be brought into the modern world??

Even if you’re still ok with the way things are now, and you are willing to wait for Tallahassee to implement up-to-date standards for security checks, what about this?

When FRA checked with the Florida Division of Management Services, which is legally responsible for ensuring all state agencies are following the most up-to-date cyber security standards, they found that all departments are required to report any issues of data breaches. The Florida Auditor General found 393 data breaches reported across the state, yet not a single annual report was even filed from the Department of State. Admittedly, cyber security is a moving target. There are documented issues everywhere; no one is immune. Yet not one of the required annual cyber security reports ever gets filed from the SOS’s office.

The FL Auditor General has also been warning the Secretary of State’s office of their lack of compliance with HAVA and with IT standards SINCE 2006. And nothing changes. NO reports are ever filed, and no issues are even recognized or corrected. The Department of State completely ignores state agencies and Florida Statutes.

See why FRA asks that Byrd and Matthews are derelict in their duties and should step down?

Then there is the issue of the Supervisors of Elections in the counties. Per Cord Byrd’s presentation on Dec 7th, 2023 to the FL Ethics Committee, they are expressly forbidden from doing any hand counts to audit the machines. Except for the rare recount, the SOEs - elected by the people - can only print out the reports from the voting machines and certify them without any other common sense security checks.

The State officials overseeing Florida’s elections are APPOINTED and do not answer to the people yet the local SOEs - who are ELECTED and accountable to the people - are being controlled by an appointed state bureaucracy that is not directly accountable to the people

There is a bill in the House, HB 359, that would give local election officials this simple discretion - to hand count whenever they feel the need. This could be used to preside over small precincts where less than 100 ballots are being cast or in spot checks to count in parallel to the voting tabulators. SOS Byrd is against it, saying that the current state of affairs is the way it should be now, with no hand-counts allowed.

In reality, no law is necessary for spot audits since SOS Byrd does have the authority, as well as a duty, to help local SOS protect their local elections. Forbidding the locals from doing anything outside of running the voting computers that are so poorly scrutinized is telling.

Last but equally important, is the question of verification of a voter’s citizenship, where Byrd said that there was nothing the state could do. When FRA researched the issue, they found that in 2012 the FL Department of State signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to get access to their SAVE System which would help the state and local SOEs check for citizenship.

When FRA checked with reports from the Department of Homeland Security, this system was rarely to never queried at all. So they sent out a press release back in 2012 saying we are using it but never bothered even checking since then.

VRMOA_Voter_Registration_MOA_2019_05_03_DHS_Seventh_Production_2018.pdf

SOS Cord Byrd has only had this position for the last 2 years, so let’s not forget about a more permanent fixture in Florida elections, Maria Matthews. Appointed by Jeb Bush, she has been working at the Divisions of Florida elections since the late 90s.

However, when FRA asked the state, Maria Matthews who directly runs elections under Secretary of State Cord Byrd has no oath of office on file with the state of Florida. All of the issues documented above happened under her watch.

If she was being promoted by Jeb Bush for her experience during the hanging chads, you think you would see a wider focus on security and process improvement.

Instead in recent memory, Matthews’s office watched the wild inflation to the voter rolls through the 2020 election. Her office completely ignored official findings of the Red Belly Rd incident.

OH! Don’t forget that it was Maria Matthews who, in 2018, gave a training presentation to the local motor vehicle departments showing an electronic Voter Registration form that failed to ask if the person getting registered to vote was a US Citizen.

In the same training presentation, Matthew encouraged driver's license agents to allow EVERYONE TO REGISTER TO VOTE. Mr. Jurski came into contact with this ridiculous rule when he was getting his Venezuelan wife a valid driver’s license. After presenting all the green card information for her to obtain a legal driver’s license, his wife was offered a voter registration form.

When he asked the FL driver’s license agent, why she offered a voter registration form when she just gave his wife a non-citizen driver’s license with a green card, the agent responded, “We have to give this form to everyone.”

Can you imagine how many people simply filled out the voter registration forms not even knowing what it was other than being asked to fill it out and sign it because they don’t understand English?

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Back to the very beginning here…WHY DID the Florida Republican Assembly ask Byrd and Matthews to resign?

The answer is blatantly clear. Florida voters deserve better.

By Kat Stansel
Substack - Kat’s Meow