Election Reform, Fraud & Related News for Sunday, December 4, 2005

All members welcome and encouraged to participate.





If you can:

1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web.

2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" listed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x371233

3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too.

4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread.



If you want to know how post "News Banners" or other images, go here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=371233#371391

Link to previous Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x403813

All previous daily threads are available here:

http://www.independentmediasource.com/DU_archives/du_2004erd_el_ref_fr_thr_calenders.htm

Plan to ease voting slowed by test delay

By Edwin Garcia

TIMES SACRAMENTO BUREAU


SACRAMENTO - Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said this week he hopes to comply with a Jan. 1 federal deadline to make voting more accessible to Americans with disabilities.

But a critical test leading up to that deadline -- allowing a computer expert to try to hack into a touch-screen voting machine -- has been delayed.

"We're in the process of working out the details," Nghia Nguyen Demovic, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office, said Tuesday.

Several media outlets reported that a hacker would be given access to the electronic voting system Tuesday, but Nguyen said a date has not been determined for the test.

"The secretary said he hoped to have it done by the end of the year," she said.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/state/13325590.htm
More:

Voting-machine deadline at risk

California's secretary of state says he may not certify any more electronic ballot systems this year, throwing compliance with a U.S. disabled-voter law into doubt for many counties

By Kevin Yamamura -- Bee Capitol Bureau

Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Secretary of State Bruce McPherson conceded Monday that he might not certify any more electronic voting machines this year, leaving many of the state's 58 counties at risk of missing a Jan. 1 federal deadline requiring upgrades for voters with disabilities.

But McPherson promised that the state would work with federal officials to comply with the Help America Vote Act by the next statewide election in June. He spoke to reporters during a two-day summit on voting systems tests in Sacramento attended by 100 elections officials and experts from throughout the country.

"Jan. 1 might be a difficult date to hit," McPherson said. "But the Department of Justice and others have said you're moving in the right direction ... . We think we are going to be right on target. We hope to be there certainly by June."

HAVA requires by Jan. 1 that voters with disabilities be able to vote independently and privately with at least one accessible machine per polling place. Voting systems also must allow users to review selections before they cast their ballot and inform them if they mistakenly mark off more than one candidate.

snip

http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/13916539p-14754856c.html

Posted on Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - 08:00 am

What's going on with California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson?

- He asks Black Box Voting to do a test, but tells the press he's asked Finnish security expert Harri Hursti to do it, before he formally invites Hursti or obtains any agreement from Hursti to do the test;

- He gives Black Box Voting a Nov. 30 deadline, then tells the press he has no idea where the Nov. 30 date came from.

- He asks Black Box Voting to confirm they intend to do the test, they confirm. BBV never hears from the sec. state's office again.

- The participants in the test learn by reading in the newspaper that the test has been delayed (18 hours before it is scheduled to begin).

- In a related matter, while on the radio this week McPherson's office could not answer the simplest of questions about what transpired at a Nov. 21 Diebold hearing.

Here's the correspondence trail -- judge for yourself.

snip

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/15517.html

Blasts injure three in Venezuela as opposition boycotts elections

By Ian James
ASSOCIATED PRESS


CARACAS, Venezuela - Three explosions went off at a military base and near a government office as Venezuela prepared for a congressional vote Sunday amid a boycott called by opposition parties, the attorney general's office said.

One homemade explosive went off near a government legal office Friday afternoon, injuring two people, said Aryeli Vera, spokeswoman for the attorney general's office. Two other explosives thought to be grenades went off in Fort Tiuna military base in Caracas, seriously injuring a police officer, she said.

"I don't want to blame all the opposition, but there are absolutely irrational sectors in the opposition camp who believe they can disturb the process with those acts," Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel told reporters Saturday, citing reports of the explosions.

President Hugo Chavez has accused major opposition parties of staging a U.S.-backed conspiracy by pulling out of elections days before the vote.


...snip

Opposition leaders have argued the National Electoral Council is pro-Chavez. They also have alleged irregularities with the voter registry and argued that touchscreen voting machines are vulnerable to confidentiality breaches.


More: http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/13325476.htm

How and Why Venezuela’s Opposition Imploded

Sunday, Dec 04, 2005 Print format
By: Gregory Wilpert – Venezuelanalysis.com

...snip

Voting Machines

One of the opposition’s most persistent complaints has been the voting machines. First, a careful analysis of the machines shows that compared to other voting machines, Venezuela’s are probably among the most secure in the world. Not only do they print paper ballots, unlike most voting machines in the U.S., but observers are allowed to inspect the software’s source code, they have tamper-proof software signatures,<2> removable memory in case a machine is damaged, and passwords that are shared by different parties involved in the electoral process.

While the opposition objected to the very principle of introducing voting machines during the August 2004 presidential recall referendum, they appear to have accepted them to some extent. The opposition NGO Sumate, which was heavily involved in the recall referendum and aims to monitor every step of the CNE, never appears to have accepted them, though. Sumate recently launched a campaign arguing that even though the machines do not store voter information, they could violate the secrecy of the vote if the machines are connected to the fingerprint scanners that the CNE has been using to prevent multiple voting.

During a November 23 trial run of the voting machines, in the presence of elections observers, opposition technicians said they demonstrated that there is a file in the voting machines that store the order of the votes. If one were to compare this order to the order of the voters registered by the fingerprint scanners, this would be a serious problem. CNE President Jorge Rodriguez immediately denied that this would be possible, saying that even if the machines stored the voting data in the order in which votes were cast, the fingerprint scanners are not assigned to specific machines and themselves do not store the order in which fingerprints are scanned. It would thus be impossible to reconstruct individual votes. Despite this, the CNE agreed to the opposition’s main demand of not using the fingerprint scanners. According to Rodriguez, the measure was not an admission that there was something wrong with the voting process, but to reassure those who had doubts about the process that the vote would be secret.

However, the opposition’s initial complaint about the machines, that they altered the result of the vote, has been practically completely dropped. Initially, following the August 2004 recall referendum, practically all opposition parties cried fraud, at first with no proof and then spent an inordinate amount of time concocting statistical proof that there was fraud. However, the Carter Center and a panel of independent statisticians denied any validity to these opposition statistical arguments. Eventually, the opposition leadership stopped mentioning the recall referendum, but among opposition activists and sympathizers, the myth that Chavez stole the recall referendum was kept alive.


More: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1621

Via computer, a vote-counting headache
States are working to iron out wrinkles before New Year's

By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press | December 4, 2005

NEW YORK -- Even in this election off-year, the potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling some state officials, as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with new standards for the machines' reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders, or other ills that beset computers.

This isn't just theoretical; problems in some states have led to lost or miscounted votes.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding computerized ballots -- their frequent inability to produce a written receipt of a vote -- has been addressed or is being worked on most states.

Still, a report issued in October by the Government Accountability Office predicted that overall steps to improve the reliability of varied electronic voting machines ''are unlikely to have a significant effect" in next year's elections.


...snip

The state has been negotiating details with Finnish security specialist Harri Hursti, who uncovered severe flaws in a Diebold system used in Leon County, Fla. (He demonstrated how vote results could be changed, then made screens flash ''Are we having fun yet?")

Similarly, elections officials in Franklin County, Ohio -- where older voting machines gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a preliminary count in 2004 -- recently asked a group of computer specialists to test newly purchased touch-screen voting machines from Election Systems & Software Inc.

Such designated hack attempts might be a flawed approach, because a failure proves only that a particular hacker couldn't break into a machine under certain conditions in a fixed period. That's not the same as opening things up to a broader group of researchers, as software developers sometimes do. Many critics of touch-screen election computers said the software should be publicly examined to make sure vote tampering couldn't occur.

But McPherson spokeswoman Nghia Nguyen Demovic said the hacking test would be just one of many factors in deciding whether to approve the voting machines.

McPherson has released a 10-point plan for certification efforts; these would include a software code escrow system.


More: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/12/04/via_computer_a_vote_counting_headache?mode=PF

Proposed election reforms draw criticisms

RHINEBECK - Advocates for voters' rights say regulations put forth by the state Board of Elections to guide companies that want to supply new voting machines to New York are "terrible" standards that will fail to ensure the integrity of the system.

Local elections officials, meanwhile, say they are less concerned with the regulations themselves that with what they will mean to their counties.

...snip

Bo Lipari, executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Voters, said not only are the regulations technically deficient, but they seem to favor a direct-recording electronic voting system over the precinct-based optical scan system supported by his organization.

"We think they're terrible," Lipari said. "They're actually really poor."

Miriam Kramer, a government policy analyst with the New York Public Interest Research Group, said the state Board of Elections "failed the voters by passing weak and incomplete regulations about how (existing voting machines will be) replaced."

Lipari said his organization is still conducting a technical review of the standards, but that, at first blush, the regulations seem to give "far too much latitude" to companies to define and satisfy accuracy testing requirements and what can be considered proprietary information.

He also criticized a section of the new rules that would allow the state Board of Elections to waive some standards and said the regulations, as written, contain vague definitions of "crucial terms."

"There should be no reason that any part of the test or any other regulations can be waived by the state Board of Elections because that would make the regulations meaningless," Lipari said.

Kramer said the regulations proposed by the board reflect a disregard for voting integrity.

"They don't care about lost votes or if somebody 'undervotes,'" she said. "There's nothing to notify voters if they missed voting in a particular race."



More: http://www.dailyfreeman.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15688867&BRD=1769&PAG=461&dept_id=74969&rfi=6

Digital voting fears are grounded in facts

I wanted to comment on two articles I have seen on your Web site, both concerning the WINVote machines specifically and paperless electronic voting in general.

The first, "Voter paper trail might be a blind alley," contains a relatively standard defense of paperless machines from Registrar Randall Wertz, based on security steps the state and localities take against tampering.

All of these steps are useful and necessary, but in the grand scheme they are nothing more than a sugar pill. The software that collects and tallies votes is complex, written to meet poor standards and has a history of failure. We, as computer scientists, know how to write good code -- it runs our airplanes, our pacemakers and our military equipment -- but we don't know how to do it on the cheap. Boeing spent $2 billion over five years to write the control software for the 777, and the final product contains less than one-fourth of the total amount of software that runs on your voting machines.

If airplane code were written to the same standards of reliability as voting machines, every day about 10 planes flying out of Baltimore/Washington International would experience a software failure during flight.


More: http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/columns/forum/wb/wb/xp-43263

Ballot paper trail unlikely in '06, Palm Beach elections chief says

By Anthony Man
Staff Writer
Posted December 4 2005


It has been almost a year since Arthur Anderson took office as supervisor of elections after a campaign that included a promise to "ensure there is an auditable paper trail for all touch-screen voting machines."

Progress toward that goal has been glacial, and for months Anderson has said there is no realistic chance that Palm Beach County residents will vote in the 2006 gubernatorial election on anything but the electronic machines that are vilified by some of the people who worked to put him in office.

Meanwhile, he has somewhat softened his commitment to printers.

Appearing before the Democratic Executive Committee this summer, Anderson acknowledged many members of his party were concerned about the paper-trail issue. "I don't want to make an unqualified commitment," he said.

Opponents of the electronic, touch-screen machines plan to protest on Thursday at the next meeting of Anderson's Election Technology Advisory Committee.

More: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-ppapertrail04dec04,0,2304525.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

Diebold and the Miracle of the Immaculate Certification

Posted by Donna Wentworth

'Tis the season for miracles, and it looks like Diebold, the company that tried to gag college kids with specious copyright claims for revealing potential flaws in its voting machine technology, is the happy beneficiary. In less than 24 hours, the North Carolina Board of Elections inspected and chose to certify Diebold equipment for use in real elections. That's after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my beloved former employer, dragged the company, kicking and screaming and grabbing desperately onto door frames, into the courtroom. Where company lawyers insisted, repeatedly, that Diebold could not possibly meet the basic requirements for such an inspection.

Explains e-voting superhero Matt Zimmerman at Deep Links:



Diebold pleaded with the court for an exemption from the statute's requirement to escrow "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system" and to release a list of all programmers who worked on the code because... well... it simply couldn't do it. It would likely be impossible, said Diebold, to escrow all of the third-party software that its system relied on (including Windows).

What a difference a few days make.

Despite Diebold's asserted inability to meet the requirements of state law, the North Carolina Board of Elections today happily certified Diebold without condition. Never mind all of that third-party software. Never mind the impossibility of obtaining a list of programmers who had contributed to that code.

And never mind the Board of Election's obligation to subject all candidate voting systems to rigorous review before certification...



It's not sexy these days to talk about the battle over transparency and accountability in voting technology. It's the wrong November, and there's no "rootkit" in e-voting. But this kind of outrage continues to happen. If you value hearing about things Diebold and other companies really wish you wouldn't, pass the word along and join EFF today.

Update: Here's another way you can help safeguard future elections, via Danny O'Brien: sign this petition urging Congress to pass H.R. 550.

Update #2: On a lighter note, here's a great collection of parody ads for Diebold technology.


For more and clickable links: http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/12/03/diebold_and_the_miracle_of_the_immaculate_certification.php

Republicans cheated in the 2004 election

Republicans in Washington State like to accuse us Democrats of having cheated and stuffed ballot boxes in order to secure the election for Governor Christine Gregoire. Of course, there's no shred of credibility or truth to a single one of their allegations, and their claims were dismissed with prejudice by a court of law.

However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that while no fraud or cheating happened in Washington State, it certainly did happen elsewhere last year:

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the Government Accountability Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its thorough, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software.


Much more: http://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2005/12/republicans-cheated-in-2004-election.html

Harris to donate contributions of scandal-tainted firms

The Associated Press

December 4, 2005

MIAMI -- U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said she plans to donate to charity $51,000 in contributions linked to disgraced ex-Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

Cunningham, a Vietnam War veteran from Southern California, resigned Monday after pleading guilty in federal court to accepting at least $2.4 million in bribes for steering government contracts to two defense contractors.

Since 2002, federal records show, owners and employees of two companies identifiable in Cunningham's indictment -- MZM Inc. and ADCS Inc. -- have pumped the money into Harris' campaign.

"She doesn't want to be linked with at all," Harris spokeswoman Morgan Dobbs said Friday. "She thought the best thing to do is give the money to charity."

...snip

Harris, the Florida Republican who played a central role in the 2000 election recount as secretary of state, has struggled to raise money and Republican support for a bid to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.


More: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-harris0405dec04,0,6414626.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-state

Protecting election integrity

MARY KIFFMEYER

Recently, an article appeared in the Pioneer Press regarding Minnesota's rejection of certification of an election system called a Direct Recording Electronic voting system, which is ballot-less, produced by Diebold ("Kiffmeyer, counties at odds over voting equipment," Nov. 30). This system failed certification in California because of receipt jams and computer crashes. This system is not good enough for Minnesota, either, and I'd like to tell you why.

Minnesota has a paper ballot tradition — a well-established and well-functioning tradition. Most voters agree that changing to some kind of "electronic" ballot that you can't see would be unsettling. Especially in election recounts, we like to have actual paper ballots, marked by voters, to verify the validity of elections.

A "receipt" of an electronic transaction like that produced by a DRE voting machine is not a ballot. It's like when you go to the cash machine: the receipt you get is not the $20 bill you requested, no matter what the receipt told you the machine produced. On the topic of DRE voting systems, the League of Women Voters has written, "Simply because a voter verifies their vote on a piece of paper does not guarantee the same results have been recorded within the machine and vice versa."

The bottom line: Paper ballots are better than DRE vote receipts.

The DRE system that Diebold recently proposed for certification isn't certified at the federal level for the use proposed in Minnesota, so it cannot be certified in Minnesota, anyway.

And, even if it were to be certified at the federal level, Minnesota statutes require additionally that an electronic voting system:

1. Accept and tabulate an optical scan ballot,

2. Create a marked optical scan ballot, or

3. Securely transmit a ballot electronically to automatic tabulating equipment in the polling place while creating a paper record of each vote on the ballot. The DRE submitted for certification does none of these things.

It should be understood that the reason we're even looking at new voting systems is that a new federal law requires the installation of voting equipment to allow people with disabilities to vote privately and independently by Jan. 1.

Four Minnesota counties — Anoka, Dakota, Ramsey, and Washington — were counting on Diebold to invent a good system, compatible with their existing ballot scanners, so it is unfortunate the company did not deliver.

...snip

Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake Township, is Minnesota's Secretary of State.



More: http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/editorial/13314351.htm

Thanks for working this thread. :hi:

:hi:

Copyfight

Fall of the House of Cards?

December 03, 2005

Diebold and the Miracle of the Immaculate Certification

Posted by Donna Wentworth

'Tis the season for miracles, and it looks like Diebold, the company that tried to gag college kids with specious copyright claims for revealing potential flaws in its voting machine technology, is the happy beneficiary. In less than 24 hours, the North Carolina Board of Elections inspected and chose to certify Diebold equipment for use in real elections. That's after the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my beloved former employer, dragged the company, kicking and screaming and grabbing desperately onto door frames, into the courtroom. Where company lawyers insisted, repeatedly, that Diebold could not possibly meet the basic requirements for such an inspection.

Explains e-voting superhero Matt Zimmerman at Deep Links:

"Diebold pleaded with the court for an exemption from the statute's requirement to escrow "all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration, and operation of the voting system" and to release a list of all programmers who worked on the code because... well... it simply couldn't do it. It would likely be impossible, said Diebold, to escrow all of the third-party software that its system relied on (including Windows)."

What a difference a few days make.

Despite Diebold's asserted inability to meet the requirements of state law, the North Carolina Board of Elections today happily certified Diebold without condition. Never mind all of that third-party software. Never mind the impossibility of obtaining a list of programmers who had contributed to that code.

And never mind the Board of Election's obligation to subject all candidate voting systems to rigorous review before certification...

It's not sexy these days to talk about the battle over transparency and accountability in voting technology. It's the wrong November, and there's no "rootkit" in e-voting. But this kind of outrage continues to happen. If you value hearing about things Diebold and other companies really wish you wouldn't, pass the word along and join EFF today.

snip

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/12/03/diebold_and_the_miracle_of_the_immaculate_certification.php

Posted on Sat, Dec. 03, 2005

Weekly Editorials

Tuesday Voting

Finnish computer expert Harri Hursti soon will have at a touch-screen voting machine awaiting certification in California. The invitation to expose potential flaws in a Diebold Election Systems machine is further proof that Secretary of State Bruce McPherson is taking the issue of voting security seriously. Giving a hacker access to an electronic voting system, under real-world conditions, should be part of the testing process. So should a full and independent examination of vendors' proprietary source code; that would enable the state to immediately identify fundamental problems.

snip

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/13319022.htm

Feb. 4 Elections In New Orleans Are Postponed

By Doug Simpson
Associated Press
Saturday, December 3, 2005; Page A14

BATON ROUGE, La., Dec. 2 -- Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) agreed Friday to postpone New Orleans's Feb. 4 elections for mayor and City Council for up to eight months because of the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

Blanco's decision came hours after Louisiana's top elections official recommended the delay, saying polling places have not been rebuilt and thousands of voters remain scattered across the country.

Secretary of State Al Ater said he needs to ensure that poll workers are in place and polling places and absentee voting systems ready for an election he called "the most important in that city's life."

"The new administration, the new council, the new people that will be elected will be in charge of making decisions affecting billions and billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives," Ater said.

snip

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/02/AR2005120201616.html

Election Updates Blog

Saturday, December 03, 2005

New Orleans Elections and the Civil War

As was reported today, the New Orleans city elections have been postponed until the Summer or Fall of 2006. This delay raises an interesting question about the role of government in facilitating elections during times of crisis.

When Mayor Ray Nagin suggested that the elections in New Orleans should go forward, because "voting during our regular cycle would further bring a sense of normalcy and empowerment to our citizens," he was in part reflecting an attitude that has existed in America since the Civil War, when President Lincoln decided not to postpone federal elections during a time of internal war. Several historians have noted that Lincoln's decision was not what would be expected; nations historically had not held elections in the midst of a civil war.

The difference between the Civil War and today is that, during the Civil War, the state and federal governments worked to adopt new voting schemes to address the problem. Expanded absentee voting and remote voting for military personnel in most states dates to the Civil War. Some states set up actual voting precincts in forward state militia positions so that soldiers could vote. Other states allowed military personnel to give a proxy to a third party.

In New Orleans, it is clear that the government response, especially at the federal level, was not working to facilitate the February election date. As the Washington Post noted, Louisiana Secretary of State Al "Ater laid much of the blame for the delay on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which he said has not provided any of the $2 million his office requested to repair voting machines damaged in the Aug. 29 storm and to upgrade New Orleans's absentee voting system."

http://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2005/12/new-orleans-elections-and-civil-war.html

Published December 3, 2005

From the Lansing State Journal

Fieger ex-associate claims illegalities

Lawyer denies he solicited donations for John Edwards

By Sarah Karush

Associated Press

DETROIT - A former associate in trial attorney Geoffrey Fieger's firm said Friday that he and his wife each gave $2,000 to Democrat John Edwards' 2004 presidential campaign on the promise that they would be reimbursed by the firm.

Fieger, best known for defending assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian, is running for Michigan attorney general. On Wednesday, FBI and IRS agents raided his offices in Southfield.

snip

Joseph Bird, an attorney fired from Fieger's firm over the summer, told The Associated Press that about two weeks after he joined the firm in 2003, partner Ven Johnson came into his office, closed the door and told him that he was expected to give to the Edwards campaign.

"I don't know what word to use - urged, strongly suggested, not quite threatened," Bird said.

snip

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051203/NEWS01/512030316/1001/news

States and Localities Prepare for Jan. 1 HAVA and Electronic Voting Deadline

December 2 2005 By News Staff

Last year Washington state experienced what State Elections Director Nick Handy termed "the mother of all recounts," during the closest governor's race in U.S. history. "2.8 million people voted and we counted the ballots three times," he said. Thirty-eight of the state's 39 counties had been tallied, and the state waited, electrified, for the final county's results. The reason? The candidates were only eight votes apart.

snip

Lot's of Commentary

http://www.govtech.net/news/news.php?id=97448

Sen. Obama Cracks Down on Voter Suppression

By Ed Davis

Posted on Sun Nov 27, 2005 at 11:56:26 AM EST

In order to put an end to deceptive practices, Senator Obama's bill would:

* Criminalize deceptive practices in elections and give voters a private right of action to seek relief from deceptive practices;

* Provide a criminal penalty for deceptive practices, with penalties of up to $100,000 or one year imprisonment, or both;

* Preempt the negative effects of deceptive practices by requiring the Department of Justice to provide voters with accurate election information when allegations of deceptive practices are confirmed;

* Authorize the Attorney General, in consultation and collaboration with civil rights organizations, voter protection groups, state election officials, and other interested community organizations, to develop methods by which corrective election information will be disseminated;

* Require the Attorney General, in collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission and the Election Assistance Commission, to study the feasibility of using
public service announcements, the emergency alert system, or other forms of public broadcast, to provide corrective election information;

* Require the Attorney General, after each federal election, to report on the allegations of deceptive practices, the actions taken to correct deceptive practices, and any prosecutions resulting from allegations of deceptive practices.

snip

http://www.commonblog.com/story/2005/11/27/115626/05

Thanks to Pat_K

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x403675

Every vote counts

Opinion The Baltimore Sun December 4, 2005

Americans' electronic election tallies still are not safe or reliable, according to a thorough review by the Government Accountability Office, and won't be in time for the balloting in 2006. The problem: lack of meaningful national standards for how the machines should work and how to independently verify results. The solution: Fully fund and support the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which is assigned to set these standards, and ensure states abide by them.

Maryland, which is doing a lot of testing on the voter side of the equipment, has its set of standards, for example; California another set. North Carolina set its own standard, including a wise requirement that companies submit a copy of the source code that runs the machines so it could be examined - then last week approved machines made by Diebold, which had refused to submit its source code.

This does not build confidence in a system in which tiny pixels on a screen are translated into who runs the country.

snip

http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=6428

Sunday, December 04, 2005

New River Forum

Digital voting fears are grounded in facts

I wanted to comment on two articles I have seen on your Web site, both concerning the WINVote machines specifically and paperless electronic voting in general.

The first, "Voter paper trail might be a blind alley," contains a relatively standard defense of paperless machines from Registrar Randall Wertz, based on security steps the state and localities take against tampering.

All of these steps are useful and necessary, but in the grand scheme they are nothing more than a sugar pill. The software that collects and tallies votes is complex, written to meet poor standards and has a history of failure. We, as computer scientists, know how to write good code -- it runs our airplanes, our pacemakers and our military equipment -- but we don't know how to do it on the cheap. Boeing spent $2 billion over five years to write the control software for the 777, and the final product contains less than one-fourth of the total amount of software that runs on your voting machines.

If airplane code were written to the same standards of reliability as voting machines, every day about 10 planes flying out of Baltimore/Washington International would experience a software failure during flight.

snip

http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/columns/forum/wb/wb/xp-43263

States are working to iron out wrinkles before New Year's
By Brian Bergstein, Associated Press | December 4, 2005
NEW YORK -- Even in this election off-year, the potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling some state officials, as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with new standards for the machines' reliability.

Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders, or other ills that beset computers.
This isn't just theoretical; problems in some states have led to lost or miscounted votes.
One of the biggest concerns surrounding computerized ballots -- their frequent inability to produce a written receipt of a vote -- has been addressed or is being worked on most states.

Still, a report issued in October by the Government Accountability Office predicted that overall steps to improve the reliability of varied electronic voting machines ''are unlikely to have a significant effect" in next year's elections.
This, the GAO said, is partly because efforts to establish and disseminate the certification procedures remain a work in progress.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/12/04/via_computer_a_vote_counting_headache/