National
News
NEW!
The New York Times
09.12.04
On
the Voting Machine Makers' Tab
As
doubts have grown about the reliability of
electronic voting, some of its loudest defenders
have been state and local election officials. Many
of those same officials have financial ties to
voting machine companies. While they may sincerely
think that electronic voting machines are so
trustworthy that there is no need for a paper
record of votes, their views have to be regarded
with suspicion until their conflicts are
addressed.
Computer scientists, who understand the technology
better than anyone else, have been outspoken about
the perils of electronic voting. Good government
groups, like Common Cause, are increasingly
mobilizing grass-roots opposition. And state
governments in a growing number of states,
including California and Ohio, have pushed through
much-needed laws that require electronic voting
machines to produce paper records.
But
these groups have faced intense opposition from
election officials. At a hearing this spring,
officials from Georgia, California and Texas
dismissed concerns about electronic voting, and
argued that voter-verifiable paper trails, which
voters can check to ensure their vote was
correctly recorded, are impractical. The Election
Center, which does election training and policy
work, and whose board is dominated by state and
local election officials, says the real problem is
people who "scare voters and public officials
with claims that the voting equipment and/or its
software can be manipulated to change the outcome
of elections."
What election officials do not mention, however,
are the close ties they have to the voting machine
industry. A disturbing number end up working for
voting machine companies. When Bill Jones left
office as California's secretary of state in 2003,
he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting
Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a
full-time job there. Former secretaries of state
from Florida and Georgia have signed on as
lobbyists for Election Systems and Software and
Diebold Election Systems. The list goes on.
Even
while in office, many election officials are happy
to accept voting machine companies' largess. The
Election Center takes money from Diebold and other
machine companies, though it will not say how
much. At the center's national conference last
month, the companies underwrote meals and a dinner
cruise.
Forty-three percent of the budget of the National
Association of Secretaries of State comes from
voting machine companies and other vendors, and at
its conference this summer in New Orleans,
Accenture, which compiles voter registration
databases for states, sponsored a dinner at the
Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
There
are also reports of election officials being
directly offered gifts. Last year, the Columbus
Dispatch reported that a voting machine company
was offering concert tickets and limousine rides
while competing for a contract worth as much as
$100 million, if not more.
When electronic voting was first rolled out,
election officials and voting machine companies
generally acted with little or no public
participation. But now the public is quite rightly
insisting on greater transparency and more say in
the decisions. If election officials want
credibility in this national discussion, they must
do more to demonstrate that their only loyalty is
to the voter.
Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series
remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.
Calif.
Joins Electronic Voting Lawsuit
September 8, 2004
California
Attorney General Bill Lockyer joined a lawsuit
Tuesday alleging that voting equipment company
Diebold Inc. sold the state shoddy hardware and
software, exposing elections to hackers and
software bugs.
California's
Alameda County also joined the false claims case,
originally filed by a computer programmer and
voting rights advocate. Faulty equipment in the
March primary forced at least 6,000 of 316,000
voters in the county east of San Francisco to use
backup paper ballots instead of the paperless
voting terminals.
More....
New
Video: Florida's 2000 Election Results
(Note:
video begins playing automatically, with sound)
Also...
"Theft
of the Presidency"
BBC-TV Newsnight
Thursday, February
15, 2001
by Greg Palast
View
the full video here.
GREG PALAST: Washington, the marine band plays
'Hail to the Chief' for George W Bush, 43rd
President of the United States. But in Florida,
some are singing 'Hail to the Thief'. More...
[Note: This may
not be news but the report is comprehensive and
worth reading or watching via the video link.]
LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS
RESCINDS SUPPORT FOR PAPERLESS VOTING
MACHINES
06.15.04
Washington, DC - The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines today after hundreds of angry members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions. About 800
delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible."
"There is a grassroots groundswell across the country to make sure our elections are auditable this November. The decision by the League of Women Voters is just another sign of its growing strength," said Rep. Rush Holt.
Rep. Rush Holt is the author of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, H.R. 2239, which would require paper audit trails on electronic voting machines prior to the November 2004 election. The bill has more than 140 bipartisan cosponsors in the U.S. House
of Representatives.
News from Representative Rush Holt
12th District, New Jersey
www.house.gov/rholt
For Immediate Release
Contact: Jim Kapsis
202-225-5801
Curtain Closes on Calif. Electronic Voting
Diebold
May Face Criminal and Civil Charges
04.30.04
By Adam Tanner
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California set tough new standards for electronic voting on Friday, barring a third of existing machines from November's ballot and
ordering new security measures before thousands of others already purchased can be used.
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley also called for a criminal investigation into the state's largest e-voting machine supplier, Diebold, a firm he
called "reprehensible."
Democrat Shelley said that he would decertify Ohio-based Diebold Inc.'s AcuVote-TSx Voting System, which accounts for a third of all of California's
electronic voting machines following glitches in the March ballot.
"I'm asking the attorney general to pursue criminal and civil actions against Diebold in this matter, based on finding of fraudulent action," he said.
"They broke the law," Shelley continued. "Their conduct was absolutely reprehensible."
More...
Faking Democracy: Americans Don't Vote, Machines Do,
& Ballot Printers Can't Fix That
04.16.04
by Lynn Landes
Machines will produce 99.4% of the election results for the upcoming 2004 presidential
election. With all the hoopla over voting machine "glitches," porous software, leaked
memos, and the creepy corporations that sell and service these contraptions, and with all
the controversy that surrounds campaign financing, voter registration, redistricting
issues, and the general privatization of the election process--we are missing the boat on
the biggest crisis facing our democracy.
Americans aren't really voting. Machines are. Call it faking democracy.
Think of voting as a three-step process: marking, casting, and counting ballots. Once a
machine is involved in any one of those steps, the result is hard evidence of the machine's
output--and only circumstantial evidence of the voter's input.
And no one seems to be challenging it....More....
Senators Call For
Paper Trail to Back Up Electronic Voting
3.11.04
WASHINGTON
(CNN) -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bob
Graham called Wednesday for a paper trail to back
up electronic voting throughout the country. More....(link
to CNN website)
Two California
Lawmakers Urge State to Bar E-Voting
03.17.04
Reports
of confusion and problems prompt California
lawmakers to urge action against e-voting. More...
(link to siliconvalley.com)
[Both stories
have reports of confusion and problems in various
elections that highlight the fact that the
usability of the parts of the system used by the
elections workers is just as important as the
actual voting interface.]
Lost
E-Votes Could Flip Napa Race
3.12.04
By Kim Zetter
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62655,00.html
Napa County in
Northern California said on Friday that electronic
voting machines used in the March presidential
primary failed to record votes on some of its
paper ballots, which will force the county to
re-scan over 11,000 ballots and possibly change
the outcome of some close local races.
The glitch is the latest in a string of problems
with the new generation of electronic voting
machines being rolled out across the United
States. Critics of the machines say they are
inaccurate or susceptible to tampering, and can't
be trusted in this year's presidential elections.
The problem occurred with optical scan machines
manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems, which
failed to record voters' marks off of paper
ballots. The county used the company's Optech
system for processing paper absentee ballots. More...
Power
problem hit 40 percent of polls in San Diego's
first use of e-voting
03.10.04
MICHELLE
MORGANTE
Associated Press
SAN DIEGO - A
computer battery problem affected about 40 percent
of polling stations in San Diego County, delaying
and frustrating voters who lined up to cast
electronic ballots in last week's primary
election, according to a county report issued
Wednesday.
In the largest
rollout of an e-voting system by any local
jurisdiction in the nation, San Diego County
officials believe that the problems prevented an
unknown number of people from casting votes.
"There is no method to accurately measure how
many voters were unable to vote," the report
said.
On March 2, San
Diego County was quickly overwhelmed with calls
for help when poll workers turned on electronic
devices that encode the magnetic-striped cards
used to access touch-screen machines.
Poll workers were
trained to expect their computer screens to show a
page from the voting-system software. Instead, 40
percent of the 1,611 devices initially displayed a
screen from the Windows operating system,
according to the report by the county's Chief
Administrative Office. More....
Super Tuesday
Electronic Voting Problems
03.02.04
SAN JOSE,
Calif. - Electronic voting made its debut in
cities and towns from Maryland to California on
Tuesday as election officials beefed up security
for the record number of voters expected to cast
E-ballots for the first time.
Scattered
technical problems were reported in the early
hours as voters in 10 states, including
California, New York and Ohio, went to the Super
Tuesday polls to choose a Democratic presidential
nominee and decide primary contests for
congressional and state races.
Advocates of
electronic voting say paperless ballots save money
and eliminate problems common to old systems. But
the technology brings a new breed of security
concerns, like software errors and hackers that
could make the results unreliable. More...
Did
Your Vote Count? New Coded Ballots May Prove It
Did
By Sara Robinson
N.Y. Times
03.02.04
More than two
centuries of elections in the United States have
resulted in paper-based voting systems secured by
a multitude of checks and procedures. New
electronic voting systems require voters to trust
computers and the people who program them, a trust
that computer security experts say is unwarranted.
The subject is
not hypothetical. Millions of voters will cast
ballots on electronic machines today in the
biggest test so far of the technology. To address
security concerns, researchers are proposing new
ways of voting that do not require voter trust in
people or software.
More...
Dr.
Barbara Simons Rebuttal to League of Women Voter's
information regarding DREs
03.01.04
The
Q & A written by the League of Women Voters of
the United States (LWVUS) and posted on their
website contains a number of inaccuracies and
omissions. Regrettably
for the good name of the LWVUS, the Q & A is
being widely distributed.
It is even being used by the LWVUS to lobby
one or more co-sponsors of H.R. 2239 - legislation
aimed at making computerized voting machines
secure through the use of voter verified paper
ballots - in an effort to get them to withdraw
their sponsorship. More....
U.
S. Representative Wexler Lawsuit to Require Paper
Ballots in Florida
Sun-Sentinel
02.07.04
U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler's lawsuit to require paper
ballots for the state's voting machines should be
dismissed or transferred out of Palm Beach County,
attorneys for the county elections supervisor and
Florida secretary of state argued Friday. More....
(external link to Sun-Sentinel).
Sparks Fly in E-Voting Debate
MSNBC - Alan Boyle
02.16.04
With
Election Data Services predicting that 50 million
voters--28 percent of the projected U.S. voting
populace--will use paperless electronic voting
systems this year, researchers at the annual
conference of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science intensely argued over the
advantages and disadvantages of e-voting; however,
there was little disagreement that the insecurity
of e-voting systems has the potential to make this
year's presidential election even more riddled
with errors than the last election. More...
States
May Soon Get $2.3B for Elections
Associated
Press
2.17.04
WASHINGTON - A
long-awaited $2.3 billion in federal funds should
be flowing to states by mid-May to help buy new
voting-booth equipment and make other election
improvements, the head of an electoral reform
commission says. More....
(external link to San Jose Mercury News)
Technical
Assessment of the Diebold AccuVote-TS (touch
screen) system (RABA report)
02.11.04
At
the request of the State of Maryland, RABA
Technologyˆ¢s Innovative Solution Cell (RiSC)
performed a review of the DIEBOLD touch-screen
electronic voting system. A team of security
experts reviewed the SAIC report commissioned by
Maryland and went on to hold a "Red
Team" exercise to discover vulnerabilities in
the actual voting system as it will be deployed
for the March 2004 primary. Click here
to view the document.
Military
drops project for voting via Internet
02.06.04
REUTERS
WASHINGTON - The
Pentagon said Thursday it had scrapped its program
to allow U.S. troops and other Americans overseas
to vote through the Internet because the system
was so vulnerable to computer hackers it could
cast doubt on the election results.
The Pentagon heeded the advice of cybersecurity
experts who urged in a Jan. 21 report that the
program be abandoned because it was impossible to
create a voting system with current personal
computers and the Internet that would stop hackers
or terrorists from tampering with election
results. More...
Technical
Security Assessment of Electronic Voting Systems
The Ohio Secretary
of State hired a consulting firm to review the
security (or lack of) of the electronic voting
systems under consideration for use in the state.
The results of that study showed the systems to be
highly vulnerable to possible intrusion and error.
You can read or download that study by clicking here
(to download, right click and choose Save
Target As).
How
to Hack an Election
01.31.04
©
New York Times
Concerned
citizens have been warning that new electronic
voting technology being rolled out nationwide can
be used to steal elections. Now there is proof.
When the State of Maryland hired a computer
security firm to test its new machines, these paid
hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes
and taking over the machines' vote-recording
mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly
that more security is needed for electronic
voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails.
When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS
voting machines, there was considerable
opposition. Critics charged that the new
touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper
record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote
theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on
the machines, in which computer-security experts
would try to foil the safeguards and interfere
with an election. More...
New
Hampshire: N.H. Among Few Using Paper in Vote
Records
01.28.04
By RACHEL KONRAD AP
Technology Writer
January 28, 2004, 6:19 PM EST
The technology troubles that could bedevil
elections this year in California, Georgia,
Florida and elsewhere were absent in New Hampshire
this week. That's because it is among the few
states that require a paper record for every
ballot cast.
New Hampshire's relatively low-tech system --
adopted after disasters with both antiquated punch
cards and touch-screen computers -- could become a
nationwide model as scrutiny over electronic
voting grows. More....
Ohio Shuns New Voting Machines
01.16.04
A group of Ohio's
largest counties, including Cuyahoga, refused
Thursday to meet a state deadline for selecting
new voting machines until Secretary of State Ken
Blackwell can guarantee that the machines are
secure. At the same time, more than half the
counties that were required to select a
voting-machine maker chose the company whose
security problems have gained it the most scrutiny
nationally: Diebold Election Systems. More...
N.Y. Times Editorial
1.18.04
The
morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up
to a disturbing realization: our electoral system
was too flawed to say with certainty who had won.
Three years later, things may actually be worse.
If this year's presidential election is at all
close, there is every reason to believe that there
will be another national trauma over who the
rightful winner is, this time compounded by
troubling new questions about the reliability of
electronic voting machines.
This is no way to
run a democracy. More....
California County OK's the use of paper ballots
with Diebold machines
1.14.04
Solano
County, California supervisors agreed Tuesday to
back up the new touch-screen voting machines with
pen and paper if the state moves to decertify the
county's new machines this week. Board members
voted 3-1 to use optical scan paper ballots in
which voters fill in bubbles similar to those on
school exams.
The Diebold machines have been the focus of local
controversy in recent weeks. A new group called
Community Labor Alliance staged its second protest
against the machines in a week Tuesday morning
outside the board meeting.
"I understand the board and the public's
concern to ensure elections in Solano
County," Registrar of Voters Laura Winslow
said. More....
(link to Times-Herald online).
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