Systemic Vote Theft

Yet more proof came out yesterday of the systemic flaws in the voting machines that were touted as an improvement over the old paper ballots. Of course, the officials that have accepted and used these voting machines are hardly above suspicion, but the computer is programmed by them and increasing flaws that were programmed in are coming to our attention.

Errors have been accumulating, and studies have been run on the operations of the existing machinery. One reported in 2004 has proved seminal, although where it reported amateurism it becomes ever more clear that intentional fraud was committed.

Avi Rubin, a computer-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, spent two weeks analyzing the software from the world's biggest voting-machine company, Diebold Election Systems, which has over 50 percent of the market.

"We found all kinds of problems in the code," he said. "A computer scientist can look at program and immediately tell you if it was written by professional programmers who know how to do software engineering or if it was just put together by a bunch of hacks. And, upon looking at the source code for Diebold, it was pretty clear that this was a real amateur job."

The report yesterday from California provides more proof that features the voting machines were purported to possess, most particularly accuracy, simply are not there. Once again, voting officials who wanted to provide a way to steal votes were given the perfect vehicle, by a manufacturer who admitted that he wanted the war criminals in office.

Even the audit log system on current versions of Premier Election Solutions' (formerly Diebold's) electronic voting and tabulating systems --- used in some 34 states across the nation --- fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots. Even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the shocking admission heard today from Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's tabulator system, GEMS v. 1.18.19.

An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as has recently been discovered by Election Integrity advocates in Humboldt County, CA, and then confirmed by the CA Secretary of State. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

The problems may lead to decertification of the company's voting systems, as well as an examination of voting systems made by other companies to determine if they too may have been able to sneak such violations past both federal and state testers...

Today's hearing was a response to the startling discovery last December, by a volunteer group in Humboldt County that, under fairly common circumstances, the older version of GEMS used by the county, and several others in the state, dropped all votes from the ballots in the first deck of ballots run through GEMS.

The audit log had been sold as a sure-fire check for any errors that would occur, the backup that was supposed to substitute for paper ballots' sureties. A recount was deemed too time consuming, but an audit log was that swift and sure way to recount questioned results in machine voting. Now we know that the selling point never actually existed. Once again, those instrumental in putting war criminals into high offices show that fraud was their method, and/or intention from the beginning.

The results of elections in this country were very disappointing, so I suppose I am feeling a little bit relieved as the flaws in our voting machines are rolling out. At least my fellow Americans were better than it looked when crooks, liars, and frauds were voted into high office ... twice.

Get It Right, Dammit!

After eight years, we still don't have a secure voting system. At least back in 2000 we just had hanging chads to worry about, but now we don't even have a ballot to examine because of the rush to unverifiable electronic voting. Senators Dianne Feinstein ("D"-California) and Robert Bennett (R-Utah) have introduced a bill which purports to 'fix' the problems of voting machines but does nothing to instill any confidence in our election process, as this editorial in today's NY Times makes clear.

... A good law would require that every vote in a federal election produce a voter-verifiable paper record, and it would mandate that the paper records be the official ballots. It would impose careful standards for how these paper ballots must be “audited,” to verify that the tallies on the electronic machines are correct.

The Feinstein-Bennett bill does none of these. It would permit states to verify electronic voting machines’ results using electronic records rather than paper. Verifying by electronic records — having one piece of software attest that another piece of software is honest — is not verifying at all. The bill is also vague about rules for audits, leaving considerable room for mischief. The timeline also is unacceptable. States might be able to use unreliable machines through 2014 or longer.

This bill goes out of its way to placate voting machine manufacturers and local election officials, two groups that have consistently been on the wrong side of electronic voting integrity. Reform groups like Verified Voting, which have done critical work in the states, say they were not allowed to provide input. [Emphasis added]

As the editorial points out, the states have had to do the heavy lifting on the verifiable paper ballots and over half of them have passed laws regarding electronic voting which can be trusted. Over half, but not all. This bill would undo that hard work and essentially leave things as they are, with hackable software and no way to verify the actual vote. This is unacceptable in a nation which keeps on insisting on free and fair elections in the rest of the world.

What is Congress afraid of? Real elections? That's what it looks like to me.

Evildoers.

More About Those Damned Voting Machines

California Secretary of State Debra Bowen now doesn't look quite so stupid for decertifying most of the state's electronic voting machines late last year (see my post here). In fact, it appears she didn't go far enough, if this article in today's Sacramento Bee is any measure.

Improper maintenance of some of Sacramento County's voting machines – and the tint of the Feb. 5 ballots – were to blame for malfunctions that sidelined vote-counting scanners and delayed results of last month's presidential primary, according to the county's top election official. ...

Because of the malfunction, all ballots had to be counted in the election department's central command in south Sacramento – instead of some being processed as usual at the precincts.

The accuracy of last month's vote was not in question, county officials said.

During its investigation, the county said that the vendor that supplies and maintains the scanners, Elections Systems & Software, conducted improper recalibration and preventive maintenance on the machines in December.

In addition, the report said that ballots printed by Consolidated Printers were too dark to allow the ballot to be correctly read by the faulty scanners.

The county said both vendors cooperated during the administrative inquiry. ESS will recalibrate the county's scanners without charge in time for the June 3 election, election officials said.

This isn't Diebold, and these are scanning machines (the ones that count the votes when the 'ink-a-blot' ballot is passed through them), but the result could have been just as disastrous. Fortunately, Sacramento County had a back-up system and the votes were counted, it just took longer. Surely we can come up with a better process. Elections are just too important (especially the one coming up in November) for these kinds of glitches.

Counting The Votes

Many California voting officials are complaining right now, primarily because Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified their precious electronic voting machines as being unreliable and insecure. While her decision really didn't leave local voter registrars much time to shift to optical-scan systems, Ms. Bowen really didn't have much choice. The whole dust-up is being examined by the Los Angeles Times in a two-part series, the first of which appeared yesterday.

In a series of controversial decisions last year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified the vast majority of electronic voting machines in the state, arguing that they were vulnerable to tampering and have defects that could corrupt vote counts.

As a result of her order, about a third of California counties are scrambling to prepare for the Feb. 5 presidential primary, printing millions of paper ballots, acquiring new optical scanners and pressing into service optical scanners normally used to count absentee ballots. ...

Bowen enlisted a team of eminent computer scientists from top laboratories and universities. They were able to hack into every type of voting machine. "People just don't trust them," Bowen said about the electronic machines. "You only have one chance to get an election right."

The systems in Los Angeles County, which already uses paper ballots, and in Orange County were recertified and do not expect major problems.

The obvious complaint, that of wasted millions of dollars by counties trying to comply with the "Help America Vote Act" of 2002, certainly has some merit. But that federal law, passed in response to the dreadful 2002 Florida re-count, was itself flawed in that certain assumptions were made, among them that electronic voting machine manufacturers would provide reliable, tamper-proof machines that would come with open-source code. The assumption, of course, was soon proved to be wrong, as elections and complaints since 2002 have made clear.

The real complaint coming from local officials, however, is that the optical scan system, coupled with the increase use of absentee ballots will take more time to get accurate results on election night and the following days.

In San Bernardino, a test run of paper ballots in November found that optical scanners could count only 10,000 votes per hour. That means it could take more than 17 hours, starting at 10 p.m., to handle the 175,000 votes expected, said Registrar Kari Verjil.

"We will be working all night," she said.

So?

I mean, why is it absolutely necessary to have full results by 11:00 PM election night? One answer is that the networks want an early report so that they can blast the names of winner and losers, can analyze and re-analyze the trend, and can tout their own brilliance in predicting the winners. I think the media has had more than their share in shaping elections. I don't think they deseve another big chunk.

While I've pretty much always been a fan of instant gratification, this is one area where I'd much prefer the officials got it right, not simply got it done fast. I can wait a week if it means that my vote and every other vote actually got counted. If the local voting officials have to accomplish that by tallying each individual vote by hand, then so be it.

All elections are important, especially this one. It's our right as citizens that the vote counting be done accurately, and voting officials should plan on doing just that rather than whining before the ballots even get to them.

A Good Idea

For over six years, our elections have been marred by irregularities. I tend to hang out in the camp that says the "irregularities" were deliberate attempts at sabotage, that elections were stolen as part of a nationwide campaign to install a Thousand Year Reich. Tinfoil hat aside, however, one way to fix one of the problems attendant to our election process is to demand that each and every electronic machine have a paper trail. Since 2005, the Democrats have been proposing bills that do just that. As in editorial in today's NY Times points out, another bill has been proposed in the 110th Congress, once again by a Democrat (Rep. Holt, D-NJ), and hopefully this time it will pass. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that this is an important first step in defeating voting fraud.

Electronic voting machines in their current form simply cannot be trusted. Just last week, a team of computer scientists from California released a study of three different voting systems that once again showed how easy it is to hack into electronic systems and alter the count.

The most important protection against electronic voting fraud is the voter-verified paper trail, a paper record that the voter can check to make sure that it properly reflects his or her choices. There should then be mandatory audits of a significant number of these paper records to ensure that the results tallied on the voting machines match the votes recorded on paper.

Rep. Holt's bill needs to be passed by the House and sent over to the Senate before the end of the year. But this is just a first step. The Democrats won the last election by the kind of margin that couldn't be manipulated via the machines. A combination of turn-out and general disgust with the Republicans over the Iraq War and over the corrupt malfeasance of several members of the GOP as the election neared ensured that victory.

However, massive voting-list purges, intimidation tactics against new citizens, and voter-fraud witch hunts by a politicised Justice Department also have to be stopped. Until the whole system is cleaned up, citizens will remain skeptical that their votes have any meaning, and tht means too many of them will just stay home.

Securing the Vote

Tucked in amongst the reports of the damage done to John Edwards' campaign by his hiring of two bloggers who have been known to use intemperate language and the outrage over House Speaker Pelosi's request for an airplane that can actually fly her non-stop to her district in California are articles, columns, and editorials on what actually matters. Today I was cheered by an editorial in the NY Times dealing with Sen. Dianne Feinstein's push to investigate voting machines.

With a proper sense of urgency, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who leads the Senate committee in charge of elections, is asking all of the right questions about voting technology. This week, she ordered an investigation of the case of as many as 18,000 electronic votes that turned up missing in a tight Congressional race in Florida last November.

Senator Feinstein called on the Government Accountability Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to conduct “top to bottom” federal investigations of the machines used in Sarasota County, where the 18,000 votes may have disappeared. Florida is now moving to toss out electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper trail. But this is no comfort to Christine Jennings, the Democrat in the 13th Congressional District race, which includes Sarasota County. She lost by 369 votes and is now in court trying to find out what went wrong in the election.

While Christine Jennings' heartbreaking loss in the November elections is an excellent example of why Florida is wise to now insist on voting machines with a paper trail, more is at stake here than one race. 18,000 votes were somehow "lost" in that district. How many have been "lost" throughout the country? Just as importantly, how many eligible voters have stayed home on election day because they see no reason to assume that their votes will actually be counted?

Once confidence in the election system is lost, it is difficult to build it back up, but one way to ensure that votes cast and votes counted match is to insist on such measures as the auditable back-up a paper trail provides.

Sen. Feinstein (who happens to be one of my senators) has disappointed me in the past with her 'centrist' positions, but this time she is on the right track. So is the NY Times with its conclusion in this editorial:

As long as there are no paper records, and voting machine manufacturers continue to insist that the software that runs the machines is a “trade secret,” voters cannot be expected to trust that votes are being counted correctly. The leadership in Congress needs to focus on making sure that Ms. Feinstein’s paper-trail bill becomes law, along with a companion House measure from Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey.

The Sudden 180

For the last several election cycles, Democrats have been have been pushing Congress for a reform of the 2002 election law which would require electronic voting machines to have paper trails. Somehow, those proposals never quite made it into law in the Republican led Congress. Now, however, Republicans are suddenly very interested in the concept of fair and transparent elections. One such Republican is even leading the fight from (of all places) Florida. From today's NY Times:

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

I'm sure the embarrassing scenes in Ohio and Maryland and the law suits pending in Florida finally got the GOP's attention on a system in such disarray that many Americans don't think it worth bothering to vote because the chances of their votes actually being counted seemed remote. I'm even more sure that the devastating loss of Congressional power in the 2006 elections woke the Republicans to the need for fair and open elections if they are ever to resume power.

Ultimately, the reasons for finally addressing a glaring need are less important than actually addressing that need. Neither party should fear a transparent election process and both parties should embrace the changes to ensure that transparency.

Diebold had its chance, and it blew it.

The Gray Lady Weighs In

On December 6, I put up a post suggesting that it was time for demanding a paper trail for electronic voting machines throughout the country. Today, the NY Times said essentially the same thing in one of its editorials:

Two influential federal advisory groups have added their voices to an emerging national consensus that voting machines must produce a voter-verified paper record if they are to be trusted. One of those groups, the one dominated not by scientists but by election officials, was more grudging than it should have been. But their analyses should give further support to members of Congress who plan to push next month for a strong federal law requiring voter-verified paper records.

...The National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency that promotes good standards in everything from medical devices to smoke detectors, recently concluded that paperless electronic voting is unacceptable. The agency’s scientists said that for electronic voting to be trustworthy, it must be “software independent,” meaning there has to be a means apart from the machines’ own software to prove that the vote tallies are correct.

The obvious way to do this is a voter-verified paper record. The institute allowed that there could be other ways, like a video or audio record of votes cast, but those technologies remain unproven.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, plan to introduce legislation to require voter-verified paper records. That legislation has a good chance of passing. If any members of Congress are uncertain why such a law is needed, the NIST report makes the case convincingly. [Emphasis added]

Exactly so.

It's not only important to stop the fiascos we've seen in Florida, Ohio, Maryland, and other sites, it's also a way to convince citizens that their votes are important and secure. Surely the integrity of the voting system is important enough to find the funds to assist those states which invested in machines without that back-up to purchase machines with it.

It wouldn't hurt to let your senator and your congress critter know that you expect such legislation as that about to be introduced by Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Hold to be passed. Start now, and follow up as the bills wend their way through committees.

More Honest Elections

As Diane’s post earlier today pointed out, the Commission supposed to improve voting certitude concluded that it was too expensive to do its job yesterday, in Maryland. Since authorization legislation that creates commissions to study any problem does not contain any directive to make sure that they save the public’s money, this is not just obstructionism, it’s a failure to do a job they’re hired, and paid, to do. Even the Do-Nothing Congress in authorizing a fence to keep out illegal immigrants for the few hundred miles they decided would be enough, included the authorization of monies to do it. (Of course, the DNC advised the cretin in chief that he could use the money in any other way he chose.)

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the present executive branch has no interest in even the semblance of honest voting machinery. Of course, with a background in hijacking elections, that would be pretty self-destructive of it. It’s taken six years of outright criminality for the voters to get savvy enough to throw out the GOP from enough of the representatives’ seats so that we can get some functioning congresspeople into offices where they can do some good, or at least prevent much further harm, to the country.

In the Dallas Morning News Viewpoints section there is a really good call for renewed integrity in our elections system which advises, among other things;

Although significant efforts have been made in recent years to improve elections, serious questions remain.

The 2002 Help America Vote Act was supposed to be the answer. Congress passed the law to modernize the process and provide much-needed federal funds to state and local governments. With at least one recent national exit poll showing high voter confidence in the accuracy of election results, officials should be praised for making improvements. But, as the evidence suggests, the difficulties that continue require immediate attention.

Four important steps should be taken.

One: The time has come for Congress to fully fund the new law. Unanticipated costs associated with implementing this important act have caused a severe financial burden for state and local jurisdictions. And maintenance and trouble-shooting costs associated with electronic voting systems have come at a steep price – a cost often paid by state and local tax dollars.

Seems that authors Martinez (former vice chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission) and Rubin (author of "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting.") are in sync with Diane today, and start off with the premise that if you’re going to fix our broken elections system, it’s going to require more than friendly suggestions to achieve it.

From Black Box voting, a site that has been promoting awareness of the irregularities of any numbers of U.S. elections, there is an interesting coverage of some shadey results from several places, including Florida and Texas, which is being vigorously shielded from scrutiny.

Because This is the fourth time Black Box Voting and/or its founder, Bev Harris, have received legal threats from voting machine vendors who believe they have the right to sell secret software that miscounts elections.

Attached below is a copy of a peculiar cease and desist order from ES&S, which asks Black Box Voting to remove links that don't exist on its Web site. Black Box Voting does not even have access to the information ES&S is demanding.

ES&S machines have demonstrated proven miscounts in Texas, Florida and Arkansas in the Nov. 2006 election, but exactly how the software miscounted is supposed to be a secret, knowable only to people who work for this privately held company.

Even the county officials, who in some cases have been crying out for assistance -- and are unhappy with the level of service they've received from ES&S and its contractors -- are not permitted to look at the ES&S software that miscounted their votes.

Details on those stories follow, after some additional records are received from Freedom of Information and public records requests to further document those situations. In the mean time, some of the ES&S miscounts can be found through news searches.

Here is a link to the latest ES&S threat letter, which is full of factual inaccuracies:

ES_S_Slashdot-45351.pdf

It’s sad but timely, that voters are waking up to the machinations, rather than working machinery, that are being employed in electing the officials present officeholders want to see at the public trough. In Texas, of course, it took the Supremes to declare one election district invalid because it violates racial distribution standards. That same bunch of Supremes concluded, though, that there are no legal restrictions on when or how often any state can redistrict to keep its elected officials in office. And they did nothing to counter such redistricting practices as running a long tongue of a district from Dallas to Waco, to lap up the voters Texas GOP’ers thought would give them another seat at the trough.
I am greatly looking forward to a Congress dominated by public interest to right some of the great wrongs that the Do-Nothing 109th has perpetrated.

Back to the Dallas Morning News, which has taken this cause seriously today;
It’s encouraging that the incoming Congress doesn't want to stop there and will push for paper verification. And measures have been introduced for consideration by the 2007 Texas Legislature; they would require the state to join the two dozen others that now use paper trails.
Further improvements won't come cheap for enhancing or replacing today's machines. But then, no one ever said democracy was easy.

Democracy is not going to be easy, ever, but when the present bunch of cretins is thrown out of the executive branch, it’s going to be attainable again. And I say, bring it on.

Say, What?

Yesterday I came across a rather disturbing article in the Washington Post having to do with electronic voting machines.

A federal advisory group rejected a measure yesterday that would have discouraged states from using electronic voting systems that lack an independent means of verifying their results, according to a spokeswoman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Members of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group created by Congress to advise the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, deadlocked 6 to 6 on the proposal at a meeting held at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg. Eight votes are needed to pass a measure on the 15-member committee. [Emphasis added]

While not binding, resolutions from this advisory group are generally adopted by the states, which is why the outcome was so disappointing. What was more disappointing was the reason given for the rejection:

Committee member Brit Williams, a computer scientist who has conducted certification evaluations of Georgia's paperless electronic voting system, opposed the measure. "You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware," he said.

Why, yes, it probably would involve such a drastic and expensive move. Given the endless reports from computer experts showing the total lack of security in most of the machines currently in use, such a response is necessary to protect the voting system in the nation.

This morning, the AP has a report up that at first seemed to indicate that the panel had reversed its decision.

A federal advisory panel approved a revised proposal that encourages states to use electronic voting machines that can be independently verified, a day after rejecting a similar recommendation.

The resolution, adopted unanimously Tuesday by the panel drafting voting guidelines for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, recommends that states use voting machines that produce a paper record or other means for voters and election officials to make sure ballots were properly cast and counted.

It suggests that when states buy new machines, they consider buying ones that include verification tools. [Emphasis added]

A close reading suggests no reversal, simply one of those compromises Washington is famous for: cutting the baby in half. Rather than fixing the problem now, states are encouraged to buy better, more secure and verifiable machines the next time around. In the mean time, the older, hackable versions can remain in place. That means more Ohios, Marylands, Floridas in the next election cycle.

Clearly the new Congress is going to have to step in and mandate the changes necessary for a fair and honest election system. Perhaps federal funding assistance will be required, but the money could be found if less were allotted to, say, the Pentagon for purchasing overpriced and untested weapons systems.

Just a thought.