Election Integrity News - November 7, 2005 This Week's Quote: “One thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that as we enter a new era in voting equipment we must continue to have faith in our election process…requiring a paper ballot trail is a simple check to make sure the new technology works as it should.” Wisconsin State Representative Steve Freese (R-Dodgeville) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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Proprietary Software On Voting Machines?
by John Gideon, Information Manager, VotersUnite
and VoteTrustUSA
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This week a panel of three judges in Sarasota County, Florida found that a breathalyzer manufacturer, CMI Inc., must turn over its source code to an expert hired by defendants in drunk driving cases. The expert would only be allowed to inspect the code for bugs and he would be under court orders not to divulge any of the code to the public. The manufacturer of the breathalyzer has refused to allow its source code to be reviewed. |
The article goes on to quote Mr. Zimmerman, "It's one of the few cases
that we've seen recently where a court has come out and said it really is appropriate,
if you're going to be making important decisions that affect someone's liberty,
then you should be able to understand what's going on with these technologies
that are helping make these decisions."
The article continues, “He said that in addition to various fears over
losing proprietary advantages, companies may also fear that public examination
of software would let the public know "there may be some flaws in the design,
in the coding, that otherwise they wouldn't have to reveal."
“"The government is outsourcing a governmental process," Zimmerman
said of both e-voting and the breathalyzer questions. "It's not a case
where you're alleging that a certain harm has been done to a specific person.
You're making the allegation that the technology doesn't do its work quite as
well as it could."
“The key to both concerns is the potential for these devices to affect
people's liberty and freedom, while the manufacturers do not provide the public
with the information to know what is going on, Zimmerman said. Both cases, he
said, should tell the government that the public has a right to know how technologies
actually work when they have to do with individual liberty.
“Although the e-voting issue, and potentially the breathalyzer issue,
have the potential to become political issues because of the implication that
government is trying to cover something up or at least not pursue answers vigorously
enough, each is a matter of protecting citizens rights -- which in itself can
be a political issue.”
In response to a question about whether this court ruling was something that
could be used in his lawsuit, Paul Lehto, who has sued Sequoia Elections and
Snohomish County, WA., responded, "This Florida ruling is a common sense
application of the right of citizens to confront their accusers and cross examine
evidence used against them, based on longstanding bedrock principles of due
process fairness and the Courts' truth-seeking function. With regard to secret
vote counting on corporate hard drives, it is already the case that secret vote
counting is grossly illegal and unconstitutional (without any court needing
to rule) but unfortunately some people and voting machine vendors in particular
will persist until they are ordered by Courts to back off. It's not a close
question, though, nor a novel principle of law."
Transparency is important otherwise we will never know for sure how our votes
were counted or whether they were really counted at all. And if, like CMI, voting
machine vendors refuse to reveal their source code for inspection by our experts
then they should not be allowed to use their machines to count our votes.
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Mainstream Media to American Democracy:
Drop Dead! |
| Originally published in The Huffington Post and The
Brad Blog. Reprinted with permission. It's been a full two weeks now since the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO came out with their 107-page report [PDF] confirming what so many of us have been trying to ring the bell about for so long: The Electronic Voting Machines which are proliferating in counties and states across America even as I type, are not secure, not accountable, not recountable, not transparent, not accurate and not adequately monitored or certified by anybody. Culminating a year-long investigation into the secret Voting Machines and Software now being deployed to the tune of millions of tax-payer dollars to privatize our American Democracy, the report was requested by several high-ranking members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The report confirms that “concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.” |
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Furthermore, it was released in tandem with a joint bi-partisan news release which lauded the report. That's right. Six high-ranking U.S. Congressmen (3 Democrats and 3 Republicans) issued the incredibly rare joint News Release together. Two of those Congressmen were Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee respectively. You do understand how rare it is that those two can agree on anything much less issue a joint press release, right?!
The Mainstream Corporate Media couldn't care less. As of yet, none of the above has been carried by even one wire service or one major American Newspaper. Not one. Read the Entire Article
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Arizona: Vote Machine Suit Designed
to Protect Election Process |
| Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer dismisses my lawsuit
as "bogus" ("Brewer sued over voting equipment standards,"
Republic, Oct. 24). My lawsuit asks the court to require Brewer to produce
election equipment decertification standards that are required by state
law, and which her office admits it has not produced.
Currently, there are no procedures or criteria of any kind for removing defective equipment from use in this state, or even determining that equipment should be subject to evaluation. Yet we have very good evidence that equipment is defective. In a September 2004 Republican primary election in Legislative District 20 (Maricopa County), the margin between two candidates was so close that a recount was required. According to the recount, there were 472 additional votes counted on the same ballots. On one optical scan machine assigned to recount mail-in ballots, there was a nearly 4 percent increase in votes. Read the Entire Article |
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Arizona: New Law Keeps Thousands
of Legal Voters From Voting |
That's bad enough but another part of the Proposition requires that all voters prove their citizenship when they register. This has caught tens of thousands of voters unawares and will keep thousands from voting this Tuesday. Elections officials say that only a small percentage of those voters affected by this law are illegal voters. Read the Entire Article
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California: Is Los Angeles County Above
the Law?
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| Officials in the nation's largest county seem to be laboring
under an alarming misinterpretation of California's venerable mandatory
random audit provision. According to an email
from Conny McCormack, Registrar/Recorder of Los Angeles County has asserted
that “early voted ballots on DREs…are not required to be a part
of the 1% manual tally.” Subsequent correspondence with the Registrar’s
office revealed that neither absentee ballots nor early vote ballots are
audited and that the county apparently intends to violate the state election
code by reporting those votes by ballot type rather than by precinct.
The One Percent Recount is detailed in California Election Code 15360 which states that “during the official canvass of every election in which a voting system is used, the official conducting the election shall conduct a public manual tally of the ballots tabulated by those devices cast in 1 percent of the precincts chosen at random by the elections official.” Nowhere are early votes, which are considered a subset of absentee votes, nor any particular type of voting system excluded from this 1% recount. If McCormack has been routinely excluding absentee, early votes, or votes on DREs from the recount in her county, the selection of precincts can hardly be considered to have been “random”. Read the Entire Article |
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Minnesota: Another State Goes with
AutoMarks |
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Speaking at a press conference on Thursday Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer noted that 2006 would mark "a major leap forward" for voting rights, thanks to ballot marking technology that will allow disabled people to cast ballots privately and independently for the first time. Ken Rodgers, president of the Minnesota chapter of the American Council of the Blind, said he hopes the equipment will encourage visually impaired residents to vote. “I can’t wait,” said American Council of The Blind Of Minnesota's Ken Rogers of Minneapolis, of using the ballot-marking machine. “I wish we could do it this election,” he said. Rogers, who lost his sight as an adult, said that in informal surveying of the blind community he has found that many people who were born blind have never voted. The difficulty they have getting to the polls, the lack of privacy, just leaves some blind people thinking the effort isn’t worth it, he explained. Read the Entire Article |
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New Jersey: Garden State Voting Update by Pam Barton, for VoteTrustUSA |
| New Jersey has an election for governor and several statewide offices coming up in New Jersey on November 8th. Here's an update on voting machines, election protection, and Voter ID developments in the Garden State. In a mixed victory for New Jersey voting activists, Liberty’s 2002 qualified DRE was approved by state examiners last month. Nearly every county in New Jersey uses the Sequoia Advantage, and activists and county officials have long sought an alternative that met both state and federal guidelines. While Liberty’s machine is problematic in certain ways (download this report [PDF] from New Yorkers for Verified Voting for a takedown), New Jersey activists feel much more comfortable with this system than with Sequoia’s and are encouraged by their modest success in pressuring the attorney general’s office to accept an alternative, any alternative, to the 1990 qualified Sequoia Advantage. Read the Entire Report |
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Pennsylvania: Senator Conti Introduces Companion
Bill to HB 2000 by Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, VoteTrustUSA |
On November 1, Pennsylvania Senator Joseph Conti (R-10th) introduced S. 977, a bill calling for a voter verified paper record of every vote and a mandatory random handcount of 5% of those paper records in each county in the state.companion bill to HB 2000 yesterday. The bill is a verbatim clone of a bill introduced in the Pennsylvania House in late September by Rep. Dan Frankel (D-Allegheny) The verification language of the bills, which have over 50 co-sponsors in the House and 12 in the Senate, is drawn from Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 550) which was introduced in the US House earlier this year. The Pennsylvania legislation has the support of state and local election integrity organizations and VoteTrustUSA joins with other national organizations like Verified Voting, VotePA and Common Cause Pennsylvania in supporting HB 2000 and S 977. More information about HB 2000 and S 977 can be found here. If you are a Pennsylvania resident please click on this link to send an email to your Representative and Senator in support of accurate and secure elections in your state. |
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Texas: Citizens in Travis County to Conduct Parallel Election and Debut Vote-PAD |
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Parallel election volunteers will also have available a new prototype of a voting system for the visually and physically impaired called Vote-PADs, an innovative voting method that offers a non-electronic way for the disabled to vote independently. The use of this device would provide election officials an alternative to buying electronic voting systems to fulfill the mandate of the ãHelp America Vote Actä to have private voting methods in place for the visually and physically impaired by January 1, 2006. The results of the Citizens' Parallel Election will serve primarily as a basic survey of the voters participating in the CPE and will be compared to the official election results, but only in very sweeping terms. If a significant difference is found between any two election results, this discrepancy will be presented to election officials simply as a red flag that may signal a problem warranting further attention. The final assessment of the CPE, including any such discrepancies, will be announced at a press conference following the election. Read the Entire Article |
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Virginia: Activists Call for Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail |
| The New Electoral Reform Alliance for Virginia ("New Era for VA") is urging the Virginia legislature to require that all ballots be verifiable by voters before being cast, and that all voting machines be equipped with a permanent paper record that can be audited for accuracy and that will form the official record of the vote count. These proposals are currently being studied by the legislature’s Joint Subcommittee to Study the Certification, Performance, and Deployment of Voting Equipment. The election integrity group also supports no-excuse in-person absentee voting, non-partisan redistricting, improved notice to the state party chairs when local officials are conducting their mandatory testing of electronic voting machines, provisions for random audits of machines to ensure public confidence in their accuracy, and a ban on wireless modems and internet connections on voting equipment. Read the Entire Article |
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Wisconsin: VVPB/Open Source Bill Sent
to the Assembly |
The bill would require electronic voting machines to generate “a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector at the time that it is cast that is visually verifiable.” The voter must be able to verify the ballot before leaving the machine and it must be suitable for a manual count or recount. A similar bill passed the Assembly unanimously last session but was stalled in the Senate. This time there is a Senate companion bill, SB 296, introduced by Senator Jeff Plale (D-South Milwaukee).
Significantly the bill also would require that “the coding for the software that is used to operate the system on Election Day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election.” Read the Entire Article VoteTrustUSA has launched an Action Alert in support of AB 627 & SB 296 Click here to send an email to your state legislators. For more information about AB 627 & SB 296 click here.
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November 8th is Election Day in Most States!
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If you experience any problem casting your ballot -- finding the polling place, voter intimidation, accessibility issues, voting machine problems, provisional ballot issues, or you witness anyone having voting problems, please call 1-866-OUR- VOTE to report the problem. Verified Voting Foundation volunteers and staff have developed a new version of the "Election Incident Reporting System" (EIRS) to record all problems reported to 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Since 2004, hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals in the United States have used EIRS to help protect our right to vote and assure that every vote is counted as cast.
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New Mexico Election Reform Task Force Final Meetings Nov. 10-11
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Achieving Election Reform: A Florida Statewide Conference Nov 12-13
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Election Integrity News Editor: Warren
Stewart
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