This article needs a response. Short (pithy) letters to the editor are

best. Simply send your short comments to letters@byu.edu with subject
line: "Re: Utah's AccuVOTE Proves to be Safe and Successful By Lauren
Shaw - 22 Jan 2008"

Utah's AccuVOTE Proves to be Safe and Successful
BYU Newsnet - Provo,UT,USA
By Lauren Shaw - 22 Jan 2008

http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/67064

The government passed several new laws, including the Help America
Vote Act in 2002, according to the Federal Election Commission's Web
site. ...

Possible talking points in response to this misleading article include:

1. Shaw said that "To prevent any kind of tampering with the machines,
the state and county set up extensive security measures that are
effective before, during and after each election."

We would like to know what these secret "security measures" are.
Lacking any public oversight or input or participation in the security
of our voting systems may mean that there is none. "Security by
Obscurity" is a thoroughly discredited method of security that gives
ultimate freedom to insiders to tamper.

2. Shaw said that "Hoffman said the governor in no way forced the
counties to comply with his choice, and allowed the county
commissioners across the state to thoroughly investigate other voting
systems."

Why then did the Lt. Governor tell all county council members and
commissioners that they would have to meet HAVA requirements without
being provided with any federal funding that was doled out by his
office unless the counties used the voting system he chose for them?
This is a blatant lie on the part of the Lt. Governor's office.

3. Shaw said that "With paper systems, blind voters required the help
of another person in order to vote at the polls."

Another false statement. Ballot marking devices are in use in many
other states which permit blind voters and voters with other
disabilities to vote privately and unassisted on paper ballots. In
fact over 60% of US jurisdictions use paper ballots and meet all HAVA
requirements for voters with disabilities.

4. Shaw said that "unadvertised storage facilities with limited
access keep machines safe from hackers prior to each election."

Keeping the locations of machines secret and available only to
insiders increases the chance of hacking because, like all other
systems, including banks and businesses, elections are most at risk to
attack from insiders within the voting and election systems, not from
voters or outsiders as election officials would like to have you
believe.

5. Shaw emphasizes the user-friendliness of the touch-screen and
ignores the facts that invisible ballots are being secretly counted by
private companies without any valid manual audits in Utah and that
numerous other states (CA, CO, MD, FL, OH,...) are in the process of
scrapping the same unreliable, insecure, un-auditable, touch-screen
voting systems as Utah continues to use without doing any valid
audits.

Response: What is Shaw's motivation for passing on so much
misinformation about Utah's voting systems, for not interviewing any
independent voting system experts for her story, and for publishing
such a one-sided, misleading article on Utah's e-ballot voting
systems?

6. Shaw says that: "With all of these precautions, it is nearly
impossible for anyone to conspire, hack into the system or even access
the server, Hoffmann said."

Hoffman's statement shows a hopeless lack of understanding and
training in computer technology. Utah's voting systems could be
trivially attacked without her knowledge by any of a myriad of persons
who manufacture, transport, upgrade, store, or maintain the voting
machines, and no amount of pre-election testing would detect it. As
far as we know, Utah uses no security procedures and all computer
scientists who have examined Utah's voting system have said that
despite any and all security procedures including reformatting and
reinstalling all the voting machines and memory cards between every
election, it is not possible to secure the machines from tampering.