Back in early spring when I was running for a leadership position in Wake County GOP, I discovered that the party was planning on using an electronic voting system designed by CardinalGPS, a shadowy political consulting firm founded by Johnny Shull and based in Wake County. I was concerned for several reasons:
- There is no audit trail with electronic voting.
- Unlike with paper ballots, it is very easy to commit election fraud; just tinker with the code. We have to take the word of whoever is running the software that everything is fine.
- The managing director of CardinalGPS is Amy Mulligan, and her mother Karyn Mulligan was running for the Vice-Chair position in the election (some have reported that Amy Mulligan now owns CardinalGPS). Talk about a conflict of interest!
- Given these points, I was worried that if the slate opposite Mulligan’s lost, many party members might believe the election was stolen.
As a candidate, I had access to county delegate emails, so I mounted a public campaign for paper ballots by emailing everyone and encouraging them to email the Chair and Vice-Chair of the county party. Wake GOP eventually backed down and used paper ballots at their convention last March. Everyone who lost (including yours truly) accepted the results, because we used paper ballots.
I thought about pushing the state GOP to use paper voting, but due to conflicts I could not attend the convention. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the chaos from afar. But I must admit, I never dreamed it would be this bad! According to reports:
- The CardinalGPS voting app kept crashing, over and over again. It would kick people out in the midst of voting.
- From a colleague who is a tech expert: “My guess is TCP/IP software stack crashed with so many sessions at once. That could mean that some votes got counted twice some didn’t get counted. That is exactly what some counties reported.”
- You read that correctly: apparently there were multiple counties that had more electronic votes cast than delegates! That right there is enough to invalidate the election.
- Because of the CardinalGPS snafu they ran out of time and never elected a Vice-Chair!
Not surprisingly, many delegates cried foul and now think the election was a sham. Who can blame them? There is no way to prove that Michael Whatley really won the election.
John Kane, who lost the election for head of the party, has a good video here: https://rumble.com/v2ttp5o-ncgop-convention-update.html. He is asking to look at the source code, but there is no guarantee that the code they will provide was the code used at the convention.
Kane is missing the point and is not asking the right questions.
Why did NC GOP pay CardinalGPS to develop an electronic voting app when trusted third-party solutions, such as Election Buddy, already exist?
I’ve heard reports that the party paid $300k for the app. And this is not a one-time fee – the app and server software need to be constantly updated for security. This seems like a tremendous waste of money, even if the app had functioned properly.
Why did they choose CardinalGPS, a political consulting firm whose revenue stream depends on staying in the good graces of NC GOP, instead of a neutral tech firm?
CardinalGPS focuses on North Carolina elections; it’s how they make their money. If NC GOP told candidates “Don’t use Cardinal,” the business would disappear overnight. CardinalGPS doesn’t have the tech background to develop a secure and stable voting app, as evidenced by the chaos at the convention. So why choose them over countless more qualified tech firms?
It’s difficult not to conclude that NC GOP wanted an app that they could completely control. And they wanted a software vendor that would do ANYTHING they requested (and keep their mouth shut about it), such as designing the software to allow the state leadership to rig party elections.
In a way I’m glad this happened because it shows that electronic voting is a terrible, terrible idea. And I’m certain we’ll be able to use paper ballots in the next leadership election. If you’re an NC Patriot and reading this, please reach out to me. It’s never too soon to get organized for the next convention.
What surprises me is the silence of the Wake County GOP leadership. We have the largest number of Republicans in the state, and a majority of our county delegation voted for Kane. You would think they would be calling for an investigation into the CardinalGPS fiasco.
Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Karyn Mulligan holds the number two position in Wake GOP leadership, and her daughter runs CardinalGPS.