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{SNIP} This lawsuit alleges that the voting machines used for years in the majority of New Jersey counties – Sequoia’s AVC Advantages - are inaccurate, insecure, and unreliable – and thus unconstitutional for use in New Jersey. Sequoia categorically denies this allegation and has provided material to the contrary. {SNIP} “Throughout our report response, we show how simple, established, and previously used accuracy and security protections - removed from the Advantages studied in the report published by the plaintiffs - make the items in their report next to impossible,” said Edwin Smith, Vice President of Compliance and Fulfillment for Sequoia...

The greater threat to our nation's security comes not from Dubai and its pro-Western government, but from Venezuela, where software engineers with links to the leftist, anti-American regime of Hugo Chávez are programming electronic voting machines that will soon power U.S. elections. Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Chávez rig...

BOCA RATON, Fla. A flood of early ballots from Republican voters, has already exceeded the turnout in the contests in Iowa, NH and Nevada. As of Friday night, nearly 400,000 party Republicans had cast early votes, either in person or by mail......There were 3.8 million Republicans qualified to vote Tuesday. That offers a glimmer of hope to Giuliani's calculated effort to get his supporters to vote early hoping to bank a substantial number of votes before losses in other early states raised questions about his viability and his competitors arrived in the state, driving down his numbers in the polls....

Election fixes stir worries on ballot security Some fearful computer codes are vulnerable Johnnie German admitted he was nervous as he used high-security codes to tap into the Harris County elections computer system last week and change some of the results manually. The system was in good hands as the votes were counted from the sprawling Nov. 6 contests. German is the county's respected administrator of elections, and there were witnesses present as he corrected the vote totals on a sales tax referendum for a fire/ambulance district in the Cypress-Fairbanks area of northwest Harris County. But German's late-night deed, said...

A Berkeley lawyer who has fought electronic voting in California and a half-dozen other states has been tapped by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen as her deputy in charge of voting machinery. Lowell Finley, co-founder and co-director of the election-integrity group Voter Action, has pulled out of lawsuits against elections officials in California, Florida, Ohio and other states in order to accept a post of deputy secretary of state. Bowen, who was sworn in Monday, still is figuring out the management structure for the office, but she expects Finley to have a lead role in her promised "top-to-bottom review"...

"WASHINGTON Paperless electronic voting machines in widespread use across the country may be vulnerable to errors or sabotage and cannot be made secure, a draft report by a federal agency said. The report by researchers at the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology said the paperless voting machines - essentially notebook computers programmed to display ballot images and record voter choices - "in practical terms cannot be made secure." "Many people, especially in the computer engineering and security community, assert that the (voting machines) are vulnerable to undetectable errors as well as malicious software attacks," the report said..."

Sequoia touch-screen is California's most widely used Days before the election, state officials have learned that California's most widely used electronic voting machines feature a button in back that can allow someone to vote multiple times. Several computer scientists said Wednesday that the vulnerability found in all touch-screen machines sold by Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems was not especially great because using the yellow button for vote fraud would require reaching far behind the voting machine twice and triggering two beeps. "If the machine beeps loudly and someone has their arms wrapped around the machine, the poll workers are going to...

WASHINGTON – Just 10 days before Americans vote in midterm congressional elections that could result in a historic shift of power, the federal government is investigating whether anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may control the company that operates electronic voting machines in 17 states. Many questions have been raised about the reliability of the new machines, which leave no paper trails for the purposes of recounts. But now federal officials are investigating whether Smartmatic, owner of Sequoia Voting Systems, is secretly controlled by the Castroite revolutionary leader of Venezuela who denounced President Bush as Satan in his most recent United...

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

SACRAMENTO – Normally ho-hum, the campaign for secretary of state could be seen as a referendum on whether Californians trust new, federally mandated electronic voting systems and how they feel about requiring identification at the polls. The Nov. 7 election also is the first chance voters have to judge appointed incumbent Bruce McPherson, who was forced to spend most of his early tenure cleaning up a political and fiscal quagmire left by his predecessor, Kevin Shelley, a Democrat who resigned under pressure. PROFILES Bruce McPherson RepublicanAge: 62 Residence: Santa Cruz Background: Appointed secretary of state in March 2005 to fill...

TRENTON, N.J. - A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel Wednesday to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines. In a paper posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. The marketing director for the machine's maker — Diebold Inc.'s Diebold Election Systems of Allen, Texas —...

Late Wednesday afternoon, a "Manual Hand Count Request under the Election Recount Provision" was filed at the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office by CA-50 voter Barbara Gail Jacobson. The request is for a full manual hand count of all paper ballots and paper trails in the recent June 6th Busby/Bilbray special U.S. House election in which programmed, election-ready Diebold voting machines were sent home with poll workers for days prior to the election in apparent violation of new laws and provisions by both state and federal authorities. As California state election code requires that a candidate be named...

NEW YORK The most widely used electronic-voting systems all have flaws that can be addressed relatively easily, but few states and counties have actually implemented recommended security measures, researchers concluded Tuesday. Even the printing of paper records widely seen as a countermeasure to hacking and other attacks on ATM-like touchscreen machines does little good if audits aren't routinely and automatically performed, researchers said. While California and 11 other states require audits in addition to paper trails, more than half of the 26 states requiring paper records don't do so. The report, based on interviews with elections officials and analyses of...

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a "dangerous" security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines. The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide. Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable...

One of the first counties in the state to embrace electronic voting is headed back to paper -- and it's not the only one. Alameda County residents going to the polls June 6 will be asked for the first time in five years to fill in ovals on paper ballots rather than casting their votes on costly touch-screen machines. "It's a little bit of back to the future," joked Elaine Ginnold, the county's acting registrar of voters. The decision to go back to paper stems from changes in state law that toughen requirements for touch-screen machines and render the county's...

One of Chicago's most powerful aldermen has a conspiracy theory for the voting problems experienced during the March primary. Alderman Ed Burke wants to know why the Chicago board of elections would pick a Venezuelan company to supply the city's new voting machines, a company Burke believes has the ability to rig an election for political gain. Both the voting machine company and the board of elections are calling alderman Burke's suggestion of a conspiracy absurd. This happened during a city council hearing Friday on problems during last month's primary. Alderman Ed Burke, whose wife just got appointed to the...

APRIL 04, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist wants to know why three of the leading vendors of electronic voting machines have refused to do business with the controversial elections supervisor of Leon County. Crist announced last Wednesday that his office had issued subpoenas to the three companies certified to sell e-voting machines in Florida. Crist alleges that Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S), Diebold Election Systems Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. won’t do business with Leon County, a refusal that indirectly caused the county to be in violation of both Florida and federal election laws. Crist...

London 24.03.06 | Somewhat I feel vindicated. In August last year I posted an extremely thorough piece of investigative blogging regarding Smartmatic; the e-voting machines vendor, which owns Sequoia, that has proven so useful to Venezuela's wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez. The recent e-voting fiasco in Chicago comes to prove the hypothesis that one thing is to observe how rigged electoral processes in far away lands, which do not affect Americans, are overlooked, or simply ignored, by the mainstream media and an entirely different matter when similar problems corrode the transparency and outcome of elections in US soil.

California lawmakers on Wednesday debated the use of open-source software in the state’s electronic voting systems in hopes it might build public confidence in the nascent technology. Sen. Debra Bowen (D-California) called the hearing, citing successful use of open-source software—programs based on widely published code—by large companies including Amazon, AOL, and IBM. No action was expected to be taken. The hearing was scheduled more in the interest of expanding discussion of open-source alternatives, said a spokesperson for Sen. Bowen. California has already taken steps toward using such software throughout the state. In 2004, the California Performance Review strongly recommended the...

A FINNISH security expert has proved to the supervisor of elections in Leon County Florida that it is a doddle to hack Diebold voting machines. Harri Hursti took part in a fake election in Leon County using what Diebold calls unhackable technology. At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes. The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6 However, just as Hursti had planned,...

(Someone sent this to me via Email. Looked interesting). Protest of California Secretary of State: Decision To Hold A "No Hearing Hearing" On November 21, 2005, citizens may voice their concerns about what voting system will record their votes, but thanks to a decision by Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, there's absolutely no guarantee that anyone with the authority to certify voting systems in California will hear those voices. California law requires the Secretary of State to conduct a public hearing as a condition of certifying any voting systems in the state. The Secretary of State has scheduled a hearing...

On Election Day, will your vote be counted accurately? According to a CBS/New York Times poll, only 35 percent of people surveyed had “a lot” of confidence that their votes would be properly counted. Nationwide, a movement to reform election procedures and protect against electronic-vote tampering and other forms of voting fraud is gaining force. CityBeat interviewed San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre regarding complaints raised by local and national election-reform activists over alleged violations of election law in San Diego’s recent mayoral race. “I share some concerns about the integrity of the electoral system,” Aguirre said. In the course...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - California election officials have rejected an electronic voting machine by Diebold after tests revealed unacceptable levels of screen freezes and paper jams. Three counties already have purchased the TSX voting machine, which was found to have a failure rate of 10 percent. Secretary of State Bruce McPherson said that was too high a risk and he notified company officials in a letter sent Wednesday. In a mock election held last week to test the 96 touch-screen machines, McPherson noted in the letter that his staff encountered "problems with paper jamming on the ... printer module," he said...

A study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has found that irregularities associated with electronic voting in this month's election may have awarded as much as 260,000 votes to President Bush in three Florida counties. The study, led by sociology Professor Michael Hout, found that e-voting increased Bush's advantage over Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties to a clearer margin of victory over the edge he held in the 2000 election against Vice President Al Gore. Depending on the method used in counting the votes, the researchers found that e-voting in the...

Numerous problems with electronic voting machines were reported around the country on Election Day and immediately afterward, but most election officials and experts say the great majority of the machines functioned as expected. Critics, however, continue to argue that the election did not prove that all is well. In fact, they say, few of the hardware and software weaknesses that make touchscreen machines unreliable and unprotected from hacking have been corrected. And the lack of a paper confirmation for each vote, they say, remains a major flaw in the machines used in most states. In fact, the lack of paper...

Like so many others here, I have been watching the post-election meltdown among the Democrats with fascination. Some of it I find understandable. I knew that when John Kerry decided in September to cease speaking to voters about who he is and what he planned to do as President -- not that he ever really discussed who he is -- and to instead pursue a strategy for victory that would rely upon raising public anger over Iraq, lost jobs, and whatever else the media produced for his benefit, that an election loss would be difficult for a group of supporters...

NEW YORK - Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time.” I didn’t get the memo. We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and...

Nader requests N.H. vote recount By KEVIN LANDRIGAN, Telegraph Staff landrigank@telegraph-nh.com Published: Saturday, Nov. 6, 2004 CONCORD - Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire after getting seven-tenths of 1 percent of the vote. “We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire,’’ Nader wrote. “These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5 percent to 15 percent over what was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines and optical scanners are being reported in...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch. State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor,...

Yesterday my day started at 0600 hours. In my role as 'inspector' of a local polling place, I had five clerks to supervise in setting up the five electronic touch screen units we were going to use, and prepare for a 0700 hours opening of the poll to voters. Each of the clerks had received a three hour training course from staff of Registrar of Voters office, to acquaint them with their function election day. I formally opened the polling place at 0700 hours. All went well, as voters were processed - each received a plastic card which would activate...

Below is a group of articles discussing different aspects of the electronic voting; possible problems and possible solutions. The article was written at least a few month ago. It's not a reporting of the problems on November 2, 2004 (yet). Sorry, Your Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded TwiceNew electronic voting machines are supposed to prevent another Election Day disaster, but these paperless PCs could make hanging chads seem like a minor nuisance.  A breakdown of 2004 voting machines by county, and a few hotspots to watch    http://www.popsci.com/popsci/lgimg/0,21039,748736,00.html[1] Maryland and Georgia use Diebold voting machines statewide that leave...

(COMPUTERWORLD) - Security experts are substantially more skeptical about e-voting than the public, but their greatest worry is system and programming errors, not malicious hacker attacks, according to a survey released this week by the Ponemon Institute. The study, conducted in July and early August, aimed to measure public opinion about electronic voting systems and then compare the results with those of security experts -- both IT pros and hackers. "The degree of difference was just startling," said Larry Ponemon, adjunct professor of ethics and privacy at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the independent institute bearing his name. The...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The state's top elections official called for a criminal investigation of Diebold Election Systems Inc. as he banned use of the company's newest model touchscreen voting machine, citing concerns about its security and reliability. Friday's ban will force up to 2 million voters in four counties, including San Diego, to use paper ballots in November, marking their choices in ovals read by optical scanners. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley asked the attorney general's office to investigate allegations of fraud, saying Diebold had lied to state officials. A spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer said prosecutors would review...

The president of Diebold Election Systems pledged Wednesday to fix multiple problems plaguing its oldest touchscreen-voting customer on the West Coast. Officials in Alameda County, purchaser of a $12.7 million Diebold electronic-voting system in May 2002, reserved judgment on whether the McKinney, Texas, firm is capable of delivering on its promises. "I got the feeling very much that they were committed to making everything right. Of course, our goal is that the presidential election will run smoothly," said county voting Registrar Brad Clark. "We'll see how they follow through on our discussions." Diebold Election Systems President Bob Urosevich brushed aside...

It is now 10:30 pm, and I have been up since 5 a.m. this morning. Today, I served as an election judge in the primary election, and I am writing down my experience now, despite being extremely tired, as everything is fresh in my mind, and this was one of the most incredible days in my life. I first became embroiled in the current national debate on evoting security when Dan Wallach of Rice University and I, along with Computer Scientist Yoshi Kohno and my Ph.D. student Adam Stubblefield released a report analyzing the software in Diebold's Accuvote voting machines....

Bogdanoff certified as 12-vote winner A heated recount for a state House seat finally ended Monday night, but the six-day wait for a winner has reignited demands for assurances that electronic voting machines are accurate. Ellyn Bogdanoff's 12-vote victory margin over Lauderdale-by-the-Sea Mayor Oliver Parker ultimately held up in the House District 91 race, but controversy swirled after 137 voters in parts of Boca Raton and coastal Broward County went to the polls but didn't cast a vote for any candidate. State Rep. Joe Negron doesn't think that many people would go to the polls without voting. The result raises...

Despite the release of a comprehensive report on Wednesday that showed the Diebold touch-screen voting machines to be "at high risk of compromise," election officials in California say they have no plans to replace the machines before the upcoming gubernatorial election. The report (PDF), commissioned by the governor of Maryland after researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice University found that the Diebold software was badly written and full of serious security flaws, confirmed that Diebold's AccuVote-TS system "as implemented in policy, procedure and technology, is at high risk of compromise."

Three computer researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, with help from a computer scientist at Rice University, say they've uncovered vulnerabilities in the software purportedly used by Diebold Election Systems. As a result, one person can cast multiple votes, elections can be delayed, the anonymity of voters can be breached, and cast votes can be modified or even deleted, the researchers say. However, the code analyzed by the researchers could be up to a year old. The code included modifications through 2002, the researchers said in a statement. The code they analyzed was discovered on a...