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- by jen
VotersUnite.org is an excellent resource.
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10-27-07: ES&S and Pandora's Box - Is Arizona's Speaker of the House afraid of what might happen if the truth is learned about a local election?
State Republican Senator Jack Harper's enraging a powerful legislator with his determined effort to get to the bottom of a potentially explosive vote-counting scandal at the Maricopa County Elections Department.
The second-term senator from Surprise plans to hold legislative hearings early next year into the controversial September 7, 2004, District 20 recount, where the inexplicable appearance of nearly 500 new votes between the primary and the recount challenge the accuracy and integrity of elections in the nation's fourth-largest county.
Harper's plan to hold the hearings before the Senate Government Accountability and Reform Committee, which he chairs, is upsetting some key Republican legislators, including Arizona Speaker of the House Jim Weiers.
Weiers took the unusual step of summoning Harper to his office on June 16 to berate him for planning to investigate the District 20 recount. Weiers told Harper that the issue doesn't belong before the Legislature.
"This really, truly is an issue that belongs with the [Maricopa] County Attorney," Weiers told me, when I queried him on why he had gotten involved.
Even after Harper related to the speaker that it appears county elections officials failed to properly secure ballots between the Republican primary and the recount, Weiers said he remained opposed to the legislative hearings.
Turns out, elections officials' handling of the situation is even more suspect. The department not only appears to have left the ballots unattended, it currently has no idea who had access to them between the primary and the recount.
<snip>
As for Weiers' plea that the county attorney, if anybody, should take up the fight, Andrew Thomas' office has already whitewashed the matter. And it has done so without providing a clear and convincing explanation of how in the hell 489 votes -- which changed the outcome of the Republican primary race for a state House seat -- suddenly appeared during a recount.
Karen Osborne, director of the county elections department, has blamed the fiasco on gel pens and Sharpies used by some voters to mark early mail-in ballots. But her weak explanation doesn't satisfy the Maricopa County Republican party, which last winter persuaded Thomas' office to conduct the very type of investigation that Weiers suggested.
And that investigation concluded that the county was guilty of stunning impropriety regarding District 20. Thomas' investigators discovered that assistant county attorney Jill Kennedy had improperly provided legal advice to the manufacturer of voting machines used in the election.
Kennedy, who represented the elections department before Conner took over in the wake of this scandal, deliberately took steps to make sure Election Systems & Software employee Tina Polich wasn't served with a subpoena to appear in court to explain how the company's voting machines could have had such a wide variation in tabulating votes. (Although she's employed by a private firm, Polich kept an office in the elections department.)
Polich's absence from a one-day hearing before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Eddward Ballinger on September 23, 2004, allowed Election Systems to cover up evidence of a possible voting-machine malfunction during the District 20 recount.
Polich's failure to appear angered Ballinger, who had no choice, without her testimony, but to certify the election.
Amazingly, Polich later told investigators from the County Attorney's Office that "there could have been a malfunction with the machine that resulted in the large discrepancy."
I'll say there was a large discrepancy -- an 18.3 percent increase in the number of votes counted from early ballots between the primary election and the recount!
But rather than expanding the investigation into the elections department as a whole, Thomas meekly dropped his investigation without getting to the bottom of the incident.
<snip>
Sources close to Harper told me that during the course of their meeting, Weiers offered Harper a business opportunity with the Republican party if Harper agreed to back off his recount inquiry.
"[Harper ] told at least two people that he was offered a quid pro quo," says a prominent Republican, who asked not to be identified, but who has had several conversations with Harper about the June 16 meeting.
Weiers vehemently denied making any such offer to Harper.
"That is just an out-and-out lie!" Weiers said.
But when I asked Harper in early October whether anyone offered him a job with the Republican party in exchange for backing off his probe into the county elections department, the state senator dropped a powerful hint that such an offer had been made.
"I'll neither confirm nor deny who it may have been," he said.
<snip>
These three legislators, along with county elections officials and County Attorney Thomas, simply want the District 20 recount to fade away. They are hoping that the elections department's ridiculous explanation will simply confuse a public that will forget eventually.
<snip>
Torgeson, who ran as a Democrat for the House in District 20, told me that a few days after the September 7, 2004, primary, he asked Robson how the recount would be conducted. Robson had already won one of the two House seats up for election in the District 20 Republican primary.
Torgeson said he was very interested in the outcome of the recount because he felt he had a far better chance of defeating Orlich in the general election than McComish. Torgeson said Robson told him not to expect Orlich to be his opponent.
"[Robson] said he could virtually guarantee it would be McComish," Torgeson said.
Robson's brash prediction puzzled Torgeson.
"I thought it was weird," Torgeson says. "How did he know that?"
Robson said he has no recollection of such a conversation with Torgeson but that he told everyone during the primary campaign that he expected McComish to win the second Republican seat in District 20.
Which McComish did. But only after the strangest and most troubling election recount in recent county history.
The District 20 fiasco has attracted the interest of Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa. Jones is an expert on voting machines who has served as a consultant to elections officials across the country.
"It's hard to tell whether they are covering up incompetence or fraud," says Jones, who has studied the District 20 situation extensively. "And it's hard to come up with a hypothesis that doesn't include, to some degree, one of these things or the other."
But here is the question that lingers in my mind: What is the back story behind Speaker Weiers involving himself in this battle between fellow Republicans? Is he afraid that a Pandora's box of election problems might be opened up in the state's largest county if the truth is learned about how Karen Osborne's office mishandled District 20?
Entire Article Here - Phoenix New Times
10-21-05: New GAO Report Confirms Serious Security Problems with Electronic Voting Systems
"[C]oncerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
A newly released report on the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems, issued by the Government Accountability Office, confirms the seriousness of problems reported by members of the Election Integrity Community since 2002.
<snip>
In a rare, bi-partisan press release on the report, the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House Government Affairs, Judiciary and Science and Technology Committees, commented:
'The Foundation of Democracy Rests Upon Security, Integrity of our Voting System." "[T]here is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems." "I fear that this may just be the tip of the iceberg."
Here is the joint, bipartisan press release from Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) and Ranking Member Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), Judiciary Committee Chair F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI), and Science Committee Chair Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) and Ranking Member Bart Gordon (D-TN).
<snip>
"The GAO report indicates that we need to get serious and act quickly to improve the security of electronic voting machines,” said Rep. Waxman. “The report makes clear that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems – from the day that contracts are signed with manufacturers to the counting of electronic votes on Election Day. State and local officials are spending a great deal of money on machines without concrete proof that they are secure and reliable. American voters deserve better.”
Chairman Sensenbrenner said, "The Founders established the states as the entity primarily responsible for the administration of both federal and state elections. While Congress has provided direction through HAVA and federal grants to modernize state election systems, some states continue to drag their feet in preventing voting compilation errors and eliminating questionable voter registration and poll day procedures... ...The EAC will have to push hard to overcome the resistance of those who rely on outmoded and unreliable voting practices to keep themselves in power."
<snip>
“I am shocked at the extent and nature of problems GAO has identified in our electronic voting systems, and I fear that this may just be the tip of the iceberg,” said Rep. Conyers. “It is totally unacceptable that in 21st century American we would allow faulty machines and systems to rob citizens of their voting rights. While GAO offers some modest recommendations for improvement, it is incumbent upon Congress to respond to this problem and to enact much-needed reforms such as a voter verified paper audit trail that protects all Americans’ right to vote.”
10-12-05: CA Gov signs landmark bill requiring public audits of software vote counts
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed landmark legislation to require public auditing of software votes counts produced from electronic voting machines.
Senate Bill 370, authored by State Senator Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey), requires county election officials to use voter-verified paper audit trails to perform the one percent manual tally, a public procedure used in California since 1965 to give the public confidence in the accuracy of computer-counted election results.
<snip>
The enactment of SB 370 comes one year after California's Legislature passed and Governor Schwarzenegger signed SB 1438, which requires electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) beginning in the 2006 statewide primary. In the past two years, 25 states have enacted VVPAT requirements, and nearly half of those have also enacted laws that require using VVPATs to publicly audit software vote counts.
<snip>
"Just one year ago, California was one of only four states with laws requiring public auditing of election results," Alexander noted. "Today there are twelve. Two years ago, no states required a voter-verified paper audit trail on electronic voting machines. Now half of the states do. Those are fantastic improvements in a very short period of time."
Alexander noted that the widespread, grassroots support from Californians on SB 370 likely made a strong impact on the Governor. "This bill faced formidable opposition but it was supported by thousands of concerned voters who contacted the Governor and urged him to sign it."
10-8-05: National Institute OF Standards and Technology Conference
The MD conference held yesterday ("Threats to Voting Systems") by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has apparently got some election officials thinking, or has at least woken them up from their slumber of denial.
There's a website here that has links to all the papers that were submitted for this conference.
From Bev Harris at BBV:
At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) "Threats to voting systems" Conference yesterday in Maryland, the Hursti report was praised by panelists (as was his new "VotoScope" software, a powerful public auditing tool). Hursti met with the media and several of the scientists and computer people from N.I.S.T., and also with some public officials.
This conference represented an important breakthrough, in that for the first time, elections officials had a real dialogue about security issues, with the consensus coming out of this conference that security risks are real, the attack trees must be catalogued, and risk mitigation strategies must be developed and used. See the concept of "attack trees" outlined here (large pdf file).
I believe there will be steps going forward that will be positive.
Therefore, I think Diebold made a major tactical error by responding to the Hursti Report in the way they did. It is now only a matter of time before the Hursti exploits are replicated elsewhere, formally, at the direction of public officials, and when they are replicated, Diebold's written responses will collapse.
It remains to be seen what will happen to Diebold when their misleading responses to the original report are exposed.
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/show.cgi?tpc=1954&post=12603#POST12603
10-8-05: Investors considering Diebold class action suit
Scott & Scott LLC represents investors in securities class action lawsuits. In a recent press release, the firm mentions that it is "litigating and/or investigating" Diebold:
"Scott+Scott, LLC ... currently is litigating major securities, antitrust and employee retirement plan actions throughout the United States. The firm represents pension funds, charities, foundations, individuals and other entities worldwide. Current cases the firm is litigating and/or investigating include: ... Diebold...among others."
Following the discovery of nearly 40,000 Diebold program files on Jan. 23, 2003, a number of reports and studies have revealed shoddy, bug-prone voting software, riddled with security holes. Therefore, it might not have been surprising to find devaluation during due diligence. What is surprising is that nothing was divulged to the public about the quality problems, nor do internal memos between programmers, following the acquisition by Diebold, reveal any efforts to correct security flaws.
In fact, during the due diligence period, several written communications among programmers pointed to problems with certification, back doors, and security.
Because of Diebold's due diligence failure (or, if due diligence uncovered the problems, failure to act to correct them), Diebold has sustained one black eye after another, and has probably lost a quarter of a billion in sales. But it isn't just lost sales that have cost Diebold stockholders, and it's more than dreadful PR. Diebold has now invested substantial sums in legal fees, including fees to prepare for a possible criminal defense; additional funds for damage control, massive lobbying fees, $2.8 million to pay a false claims settlement, and to continue in the business, Diebold will undoubtedly need to redesign some of its voting systems from the ground up, incurring additional R&D and certification costs.
Many elections officials and vendors are quietly voicing what many of us have known since 2003: "Some vendors shouldn't be in this business."
My guess is that Diebold hasn't bottomed out at $34, and while its ATM division may have gotten Diebold into this mess, its elections division will certainly deepen the infection. Sometimes you just have to cut it out.
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/10448.html
Diebold stock has hovered between $34 and $35 per share, down from over $50 just a few months ago. The problems appear to stem from Diebold's core business (ATM and security systems). Voting systems, though they provide nearly all of Diebold's bad press, represent only a tiny percentage of overall sales. However, Diebold's highly public ethical blunders with voting machines have damaged its brand name, and other voting machine-related actions call into question the wisdom of its management.
(Scott & Scott press release - Diebold is mentioned near the bottom)
10-6-05: E-voting hobbled by security concerns
It's been nearly five years since Americans received a painful education on the perils of traditional voting machines in Florida and almost one year since the 2004 election revealed perplexing irregularities in Ohio's vote tabulation methods.
Yet no uniform security standards exist for electronic voting machines. Even though they were used to tabulate a third of the votes in last year's presidential run, nearly all electronic voting machines in use today remain black boxes without external methods of verifying that the results have not been altered or sabotaged.
Possible threats to an accurate electronic vote tally are legion. They include everything from worms and viruses infecting Microsoft Windows-equipped systems to equipment tampering, code alteration and ballot box stuffing.
<snip>
In principle, there should be an easy solution: Require that e-voting machines include what's known as a voter-verifiable paper trail. That would permit a voter to review a physical printout with his or her selections--perhaps under glass so the receipt can't be removed--which would also provide a way to perform a manual recount, if necessary.
But a complicated mix of partisan politics and the relative paucity of voter-verifiable products available today has delayed the switch to improved technology, according to election experts interviewed by CNET News.com.
<snip>
A congressional bottleneck
In Congress, at least four bills requiring paper trails were introduced in the first few weeks of 2005. All remain bottled up in committee, however, in part because key Republicans view e-voting reform as a Democratic ploy to cast doubt on the last two presidential races.
<snip>
While Congress is tying itself in partisan knots, state legislators have been busy pressing ahead. At least 25 states have enacted verified-voting legislation, according to VerifiedVoting.org, with seven states adopting the requirement in the last three months alone. Legislation is pending in many others.
"The transparency of voting systems is critical to ensuring that the public is supportive of an election, mostly proving that the loser actually lost," said Cameron Wilson, the public-policy director of the Association for Computing Machinery, which supports verified-voting laws. "We (also) feel you should have stronger engineering and testing of both the design and operation."
<snip>
E-voting reformers divided
Complicating the move toward voter-verified receipts is a fierce internal debate between activists and computer scientists about how useful the receipts will prove in detecting election fraud.
"What I'm very much against is a requirement that all voting machines should have to have a paper trail," said Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been the official examiner of electronic voting systems for Pennsylvania. He says the products with the necessary features aren't on the market yet.
Shamos' counterarguments go something like this: Mandating paper trails will halt experimentation with better techniques, paper records have a long history of tampering by both major parties, and paper trails that record voters' choices on one long strip of paper will invade privacy because they show who voted first and last.
His last point--that long strip of paper--will be discussed at the NIST workshop Friday. A paper by John Wack of NIST notes that "this attack could be used to enforce vote selling, or simply to invade the privacy of voters and determine how particular individuals voted."
Michael Alvarez, co-director of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, says he's not opposed to the use of paper for purposes of voter verification. However, he adds, "we also have strongly argued that the legislation that moves in this direction ought to be open for the new technologies and shouldn't preclude the use of these other types of approaches."
That sort of nuanced argument tends to fall on deaf ears in state government. Ohio's law, for instance, calls for "a physical paper printout on which the voter's ballot choices, as registered by a direct recording electronic voting machine, are recorded."
Such a law, depending on how it's interpreted, could preclude innovative, cryptographically secure products such as two that are being developed by legendary inventor David Chaum and mathematician Andrew Neff that generate encrypted receipts for vote verification.
<snip>
Even if the dispute over voter-verified audit trails is eventually resolved, another lies on the horizon: access to source code used by voting machines. Should it be posted freely on the Internet, available only to researchers with credentials or kept a tightly held secret?
Shamos of Carnegie Mellon warns that advocates of more secure voting technology should tread carefully when demanding paper trails--or risk creating additional logs that could endanger voters' privacy.
It would be a shame, he said, if "people, in their frenzy to get rid of the perceived problems with voting security, in a misplaced effort to get some security, they've thrown away privacy."
E-Voting Hobbled by Security Concerns
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