DVO electronic voting lawsuit for Texas gets filed tomorrow (6/14)

The Texas Civil Rights Project is filing a lawsuit on behalf of a few Texas voters, who in turn represent all of us Texas voters. David Van Os as promised in his first filibuster, is proceeding with the lawsuit on the constitutionality of paperless voting. There's a press conference tomorrow to announce this lawsuit. I'll post the details of the lawsuit after it's announced.

I'm posting a link to this AAS article because I think the timing is pretty incredible.

As much as I like Dana, without legislation to force every county in Texas to take extra security measures like she describes, her procedures are no more than great recommendations. No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Equal Protection Cclause 14th Amendment US constitution)

How about that unequal protection of voters throughout Texas? I want my protection back. I want a paper ballot!

Kudos to David Van Os for following through on his promise. He's not even waiting to take office, he's going after them right now!

Sonia

State political food chain. I got a response from Ann McGeehan, Director of Elections, in the SOS's office. Great letter and the best response I've received from any civil servant (elected or otherwise).

In short it says that at present they do not have the authority to certify a VVPAT system. Last year two bills were offered to require a VVPAT, Texas H.B. 166 and H.B. 1289 both of which were voted down. The Director of Elections is hamstrung unless without some sort of state or federal law allowing for certification of a VVPAT system.

Tarrant county has a paper trail during regular voting (uses optical scanners), but for handicap access and for early voting there is none.

I'll be looking into those two bills to see how my reps voted on them.

I'm an auditor by profession and the way that election officials use "paper audit trail" is meaningless. What we want is a Voter Verified Paper Ballot that is the ballot of record for all recounts.

give something to count by hand should a re-count be necessary. Voter's can't carry the verification out of the polling place, it's not a receipt.

Educate me.

VVPAT has two problems.

First is the use of the word "verifiable". Verifiable means you could verify it...if they let you. Whereas verified means you DID verify it.

Second is the terms "paper audit trail". Like I mentioned, I am an auditor by profession. I have talked to many election officials and none of them seem to know what this term really means. When I ask them which auditing standards they use...they give me blank looks. Depending on how "paper audit trail" gets defined...it might not necessarily by something that you and I would recognize as a "ballot". It's important that we use terms that tell them EXACTLY what it is we want...no room for them to redefine the terms, no wiggle room for them at all not to provide a paper ballot that the voter actually verified at the time the vote was cast as accurately reflecting who they intended to vote for. If you give them any wiggle room...they'll find a way to ensure they keep right on stealing elections out from under us.

flamin lib, your reps never got to vote on the bills because they never made it to a floor vote. They died in committee or were butchered beyond what the original bill submitted looked like. HB166 was Rep. Aaron Pena's bill that called for both VVPAT and VVPAB. It was initially a VVPAT bill but by the time it was heard in committee it was very much improved, and included the VVPAB part. The difference being that the printed voter verified ballot would have been the ballot of record. The machines would simply have been calculators. Senator Elliott Shapleigh had the companion piece in the senate SB94 and that never got a hearing, thanks to Senator Robert Duncan from Lubbock.

Rep. Mary Denny chair of the Elections Committee butchered the final version of the HB166 to the point it only became a study of VVPAT. It was reported favorably out of committee as a simple study of VVPAT. Even that bill, they use the same bill number HB166, died in calendars committee. Denny killed that bill with delays. She held on to the bill for so long, refusing to schedule a hearing on it. Timing is everything in the Legislature. Your bills have to get early hearings so that they can get to the calendars committee and get scheduled for a floor vote. Denny, Craddick and Perry never wanted this bill to see the light of day. Senator Shapleigh tried to get an amendment on the Senate side late in the session, to a bill Denny authored to close the SOS vendor examinations. But that was also stripped in conference by Denny. Denny did not want VVPAT in any shape or form.

You must have missed our celebration in this forum when Denny announced her resignation. She is not seeking office in Nov. although she did serve during the special sessions. In fact she even called an Elections Committee meeting this past session. In it she claimed she tried to add changes to the election code, so that we could take care of the horrible problems we had in the primary. Too little, too late Mary Denny.

The HB1289 was the Leibowitz bill that I believe never even got a hearing. At least 4 VVPAT bills were filed in the 79th regular session. Pena got his filed first, so many of the other bill writers singed onto Pena's bill because it had the best chance of getting through. The bill ultimately had 5 sponsor authors and was very bi-partisan. Aaron Pena and Scott Hochberg were the two Ds on the bill and Todd Baxter, Lois Kolhorst and Byran Hughes were the 3 Rs on the bill. Leibowitz didn't want to give up his bill and never signed to support HB166.

Also don't place too much confidence in Ann McGeehan. She's not on our side. She works for the SOS and is clearly there to protect her job. If we had true leadership from both the SOS and the Governor, this issue would have been taken care of last session. They want the status quo.

Pena will be filing that VVPAT/VVPAB bill again in the 78th session in 2007. The fault clearly lies with the republican leadership.

Sonia

PRESS RELEASE



June 14, 2006

Democratic Attorney General nominee David Van Os joined with the NAACP, two Travis County voters, and the Texas Civil Rights Project today in filing a lawsuit in state district court seeking to block the use of electronic voting machines that do not produce paper receipts. Attorney Jim Harrington, Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, represents Van Os and the other plaintiffs.

“Democracy belongs to all the voters. When every voter cannot be sure that a machine recorded his or her vote the way he or she intended, democracy is not fulfilled. These paperless machines are a direct threat to Constitutional democracy. We must have paper ballots.”

The lawsuit claims that the paperless machines violate the public’s right to a secure election and the purity of the ballot box under the Texas Constitution.

More than half the states have enacted legislation that requires voting machines to print a paper ballot when the voter casts his or her vote. The voter reads his or her ballot to make sure it recorded the vote he or she intended and then casts both the electronic and paper ballots.

The paper ballot can be counted in the all too often case when electronic ballots vanish into thin air or when there is a discrepancy between the number of people who voted and the number of votes recorded. Having a paper trail also makes fraud less likely.

For further information contact David Van Os at (210) 332-7070.

Go Sonia! Go David! Go Jim Harrington!

dg

If there is a paper trail how can we be sure that that will ensure whether or not the person we vote for "really" received the vote.

Example: I vote for candidate D, the receipt says I voted for D.

How can I be absolutely sure that after the fact that my vote wasn't switched later?

How would someone challenge the vote if there is a huge gap in the vote totals?

Let's say candidate D received 50,000 votes, but were switched to only 25,000 with the other 25,000 going to candidate R. Candidate R now has let's say 75,000 votes to the D's 25,000.

How could they challenge such a large gap?

I can see this working on a close race, but if there is a huge difference in the vote count how can that be challenged?

Can someone put my mind to ease on this dilemma?

Sorry about being repetitive but I'm having trouble trying to explain it:banghead:

We want VVPB!!! The machine should produce a piece of paper which is the ballot. The piece of paper is the instrument of record, NOT the electrons in the machine.

I'm assuming that you are voting on these electronic voting systems now. You never see a paper ballot. You see a screen ballot and you essentially have a faith based system. You have to trust that the software, the private companies who programmed them, and the county clerks and workers. The only paper trail you see with e-voting is the poll book (list of registered voters for each precinct). You still have to sign in these days. Although they are proposing to do away with those electronically as well. You will have some paper in mail-in ballots and provisional ballots. Otherwise the only paper you see is what the machine spits out as tallies of the voting totals.

Vote switching in an e-voting system. Can it happen? Absolutely. Malicious code can be programmed to switch votes from one candidate to another and it can be done right at the end or every 10th vote or however the programmer wants to write that in. Right now you have no protection against that because we don't get to see the software code. It's proprietary. They can test it initially and our registrar says they run about 6,000 votes through the machines now up front. Good for her. But if I'm the malicious code writer or hacker and I know they're going to do that, I can easily write code to have my malicious code kick in at 20,000 or have it date set to run only on real election dates.

If the ballots are verified by the voter i.e. you use the e-voting systems only to print your ballot. Just like using your computer to print a letter. You proof the letter before you send it off. Same thing on VVPAB. You vote on the machine and it prints a piece of paper that should look exactly what you voted on the machine. It will remain with the county clerks at the voting poll. You do not get to walk out with that ballot because it is the real ballot. The machine is simply used as a calculator. Any candidate then suspicious of an outcome that asks for a recount, counts the paper and does not have to rely on the machine count. I agree that really subtle rounding machine errors might not be contested so it does depend on the candidate knowing their ballot strength. For example you had a recent republican Supreme Court judge Steve Smith, lose in the republican primary and he sued as well. They did some analysis and found that even in his own home county (Tarrant) his vote percentage swing from the last election was something like 36%. That's something that looks very out of place. He was not successful in his suit because they had no paper trail they could audit.

Two of the best sites to help you research the problems:
http://www.votersunite.org/
http://www.votetrustusa.org/

Sonia

That helps explain some of the questions/concerns I was having about how does someone challenge the tally.

I'm aware of the difference of VVPAB's and VVPAT's. I happen to vote on optic-scan machines, which I have a choice of that or electronic machines.

But from my research even optic scan machines my vote can be hacked.

How could I prove if my vote was cast correctly?

How can candidates protest if there is a wide margin of votes for one candidate over the other?

I will do some research on the links you attached. I did a quick scan of one of them already and it appears that the person doing the tabulations has the power to question the voters intent.

Thanks for providing me more data to do research with concerning the matter....

The key however is the legislation. If the ballot of record is the paper ballot you marked, then that's the vote that gets recounted. There has been tabulation software in our voting systems for quite a while now. We don't have a feel for accuracy in those systems either. And now that tabulation software is being written by these new electronic voting machine vendors.

Again the candidate has to know their voting strength to suspect that an outcome (even a large loss) is suspect. Candidates do polls, they can estimate turnout in their precincts, they can look at how those votes look. For example if you were to flip an election in my pct (heavily Democratic) it would be obvious. No way a PCT that routinely votes 80-85% Democratic suddenly votes even 60% republican. That would be suspect.

Sonia

you are talking about the other half, the auditing. I personally would like to see spot checks of elections, electronic count vs. paper.

As far as recounts, again, another election change. Right now candidates can request a recount but must pay for it and often don't, because it is expensive. Wish we could make this easier and cheaper!

The emphasis above is mine. That part just makes me furious. :mad::grr:

Sonia

Dumber words were never spoken!

:nuke:

But her obsession with paperless e-voting being secure is beyond me. She really does test her systems here in Travis beyond what is required, but that does not guarantee security. Those tests are not done uniformly across the state either. There is no legislative mandate to force them to perform all of those tests.

Why is she against paper ballots? I honestly think it has more to do with cost. In other words if the printers were going to run us another $1M or so here. So the only way she's going to get on board with that is to be forced to do it. Well we're hopefully going to give her that mandate.

Sonia

I would think she's been shown all the evidence collected to date which shows that these paperless systems *cannot* be secure. I wonder why it won't take...

:(

At this point, scaring the horses is our only hope.

If Hart InterCivic is SO secure, why weren't the eSlates' memory cards crosschecked against the Judge's Booth Controllers' tallies for each precinct in the Vo/Heflin recount? Outside of Craddick, Heflin was the most powerful man in the legislature so you have to wonder why the Heflin camp didn't insist on it.

Keep slapping the horses gal.