GOP Urges Investigation of Voting Machine Performance

ABC News ^ | January 10, 2004

[GregD]

Hello. I’m the webmaster of www.verifiedvoting.org.

I’m a Democrat, and you folks presumably will want to flame me on that point alone. But if you would bear with me, perhaps we could avoid that. I need to talk about an issue that affects all of us, and I am not here to pick a fight. I need your help.

VerifiedVoting.org is NOT about conspiracy theory. We are NOT about screaming about “Wally O’Dell delivering the votes to GWB”, but I do have to admit that his remarks were about as ill-conceived as they might have possibly been, and have made it a lot easier to recruit activists to this issue from certain segments of our population. And we certainly are NOT about “one party or the other is trying to rig the machines or steal an election.”

What we ARE about is looking at this situation from a non-partisan, academic, computer-science perspective. Our goal is to see that legislation and procedures are established and enforced to make sure that elections are counted properly; them may the “real” winner prevail, and we can all rest assured that the win was indeed valid and fair.

OK, so let’s frame the situation: we have systems which run proprietary code that nobody gets to look at. At the certification stage there is no organized code review, at the development level there are no standards that have to be met. As such, the certification process appears to be completely lame. When I developed mission-critical applications for a major international retailer, we had team walkthroughs that senior members of the tech staff participated in. Each line of code was inspected, each module carefully discussed. So when you look at the observations of the Johns Hopkins study http://avirubin.com/vote/, along with other studies, it is clear that the Diebold code completely sucked but that it was not rejected by the ITA. (Sure, the code that was reviewed by Rubin was not current at the time of the review, but it was likely “current code” at an earlier point, and the certification process has NOT substantially improved since then.) Why did this get past the ITA? Because they (the ITA) don’t get to see the code – all they do is run some (undisclosed to the public) tests, give it a kiss and tell it “ya look pretty, have a nice day… See ya…” If I presented that crap to a senior manager in my former shop, I’d get canned – plain and simple. Boom, outta there, have a nice life…

So, we have these systems running secret application code that stores our votes, our precious and irreplaceable votes, without so much as an audit trail. Buy gas? Get a receipt. Buy food? Get a receipt. Get cash or make an ATM deposit? Damn right we get a receipt! Our vote is more valuable than any of those things, and do the machines print anything that allows verification of our votes? Nope, sorry – don’t think so… What? And with no audit trail, be that paper or whatever other technology might be is verifiable in the future, there is no means of verifying the results of an election. If the computer malfunctions, we can’t prove it. If a bug creeps in, we won’t know. Can we do a recount? Absolutely not – all we can do is re-print the same totals that were questioned in the first place.

A common arguement that frequently comes up is related to cost. My response is "what is the price of democracy". Also, if the vendors want the business, make them find a way to build that into the product at a reasonable price. They stand to sell tens (hundreds?) of thousands of these at around $5k-6k a pop. And in San Diego, CA one vendor already committed to throw them in for free. So as far as I'm concerned, forget the cost question - it just does not seem to apply.

Is this a partisan issue, from one side or the other? Not the last time I checked, although some would like to frame it that way… VerifiedVoting.org refuses to – it simply is NOT a partisan issue…

Has this caused problems in elections? Yes, for both parties, in recent state elections we have problems in (at least) Maryland, Virginia and (of all places) Broward County Florida...

Broward (just in the past week or so) is a total meltdown. They had a single race in which 7 Republicans were seeking a state legislative seat. 134 votes were not counted by the touchscreen machines. The race was won by 12 votes, well under the .25 percent level for a mandatory recount (state law). But you cannot recount the vote with paperless touchscreen systems. They are not designed for that.

A number of these instances are listed here: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=997

So that’s the issue – we have these machines running programs that are NOT REQUIRED to achieve the sort of levels of quality control expectations or scrutiny that any corporate mission-critical software application currently demands, the security on the systems appears to be TOTALLY out of control, yet this is how we are supposed to run our democracy. This just is not right!

It gets worse... We have procedures that are not being followed. How do we know? Because people made a big enough stink that California decided to audit Diebold in 17 counties. (In case you don’t know, all hardware / firmware / software needs to be certified at the Federal level, assigned a NASED number, then approved by the State.) So they run an audit and what percentage of the randomly selected systems are in compliance? NONE! ZIP! NADA! Whose fault? Not sure yet, we will start to determine this on January 15 when the VSP meets again – but it looks like Diebold breached the public trust by supplying (or installing) software that was not certified, and the counties allowed the installation of non-compliant code (or installed it and didn’t check to make sure it was good to go.) http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=978

So what do we do about it? Well, thousands of our fellow Americans have spent the past 6 months (or more) calling Congressmen and asking them to support HR2239. That bill is ok, could be stronger, but it will have to do for now – time is running out. Frankly it would be nice if there was a stronger automatic recount (right now it calls for .5 percent, and that really needs to go up, just to make sure these beasts aren’t hosed.) It would be nice to boost this in conference committee, assuming we get that far, and before the bills become law.

Currently, we’re looking at just under 100 Democrat cosponsors and 3 or 4 Republicans. I’m sorry, but I really don’t understand those numbers. I’m glad we have a few Republicans that have joined in agreeing that a fairly counted election really still is the core of America’s democracy. But we need more, and that’s why I am here. I need your help, and I need it pronto please…

How can you help? Call your Congressmen (ask for their support of HR2239) and Senators (ask for support of S1980 which is a duplicate of HR2239). Help us get organizations to endorse this important legislation. Here are organizations that already stand behind these important bills: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/endorsers_s1980.asp

There are other action items on our site. I beg you – in respect for what our forefathers left for us – please help us get this done and protect the core of our democracy.

Here is what your own people are saying:
-------------------------------------------------------------

Back in August, lelio said
“I'm more scared as Diebold's engineering staff sounds like a bunch of clowns. An MS Access database on Windows 98? Are they asking to be hacked into?” He referred to this story. I completely agree with him.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

And in http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/973667/posts, Timesink said:
There is little question, though, that we can never totally trust the results of any election conducted via computerized voting, and such machines should not be allowed to be used (and indeed, I give it less than ten years until they start being outlawed state by state as various scandals pop up, real or imagined). For all the mess that Florida 2000 turned out to be, at least we had actual physical ballots to deal with. The optimal solution, of course, would be going back to something along the lines of the old standards: Paper ballots in sealed boxes; monitors from both parties (and anyone else that wants to watch) at every precinct; multiple police officers riding along as ballot boxes are delivered to the county courthouse; all boxes opened and all votes counted in front of cameras from the news media, local government and any public citizens that wished to make their own records ... along with laws requiring proof of identity in order to vote
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Whoever lelio and Timesink are, I’m with you 100 percent. How can we TOTALLY trust these systems, simply looking at it from the programming perspective? Programmers make mistakes, and with the current certification procedures, those mistakes will NOT all get caught. You would be amazed if you looked at the modification logs and bug lists for the Diebold stuff. These are NOT simple programs, and complicated programs are prone to error.

The only practical solution is to demand visibility into the programs, a verification procedure that allows each citizen to check their vote, and a robust automatic (random) recount to make certain that there is no program errors, and no fraud (on EITHER side).

Help us get this done – Please! Come to our site, have a look, and write to us if you have comments or questions.

www.verifiedvoting.org

[conservativecorner]

You were recently hacked. The bottom line is that you promote a product/software that is not yet ready for market. Quit whining about your problems, and roll up your sleeves and fix them. No free lunch is a Republican/Conservative theme.

[goodnesswins]

Have you ever spoken with the woman in Renton, WA who is very much into this, too, if I understand what your true intentions are?

[truthandjustice1]

"Ooh, a Zot in the making"

Uh, why?

[Mark]

Oh, one additional thingy. We do expect all military votes to be counted also.

BTT (bump to the top)

[goodnesswins]

And, on another note, the harder it is to vote, the better, as far as I'm concerned. We've made voting WAY to easy in this country. I'm for going back to the get your tail end to the local school and vote....unless you are out of town or ill. Soooo....I'm for putting roadblocks up in front of "internet" or "electronic" as much as possible. Motor voter registration is a fraud, already. I'd like to see the registration system get cleaned up before we go adding on ANOTHER system.

[Sidebar Moderator]

Ooh, a Zot in the making.

Not likely

[chiller]

bttt

[kingu]

"Ooh, a Zot in the making" Uh why?

Actually, I was wrong in terminology. It should be a pulled thread.

GOP Urges Investigation of Voting Machine Performance is the title of the article that is referenced, but the thread starts with a vanity. That vanity is there to promote his website. The referenced article isn't part of the thread.

A shame, because he makes some great points, but if you're going to post your own vanity, just post your own vanity, and don't hide it.

[RaceBannon]

Who have you discussed this with in your congressional district?

Have you written your senators? Congresscritters? The local Newspaper?

[truthandjustice1]

"A shame, because he makes some great points, but if you're going to post your own vanity, just post your own vanity, and don't hide it."

Understand.

[lepton]

I’m a Democrat, and you folks presumably will want to flame me on that point alone.

Only to amuse ourselves. There happen to be a fair number of Democrats, and "Other"s here.

If you're legit and sane, and make a decent argument you'll find people to discuss most issues.

[gitmo]

This was a very good post. I don't see how the states could purchase such mission-critical applications without some certicficate of security and QA. We should insist on audit capabilities and transaction tracing.

I also think we need better verification of voters. Having worked at voting precincts in the past, I know for a fact I could have stuffed my ballot boxes to the brim and no one would have known a thing.

FReepers: if we don't insist on these audits up front we're going to be trying to close the barn doors while we still have one or two head of livestock left. The few machines I've seen were simple to manipulate and were error-prone as well. Even without a hacker we could have botched elections on our hands.

We like to poke barbs at the democrats, but let's not run this guy off. His points are very timely and very prescient.

[Sidebar Moderator]

It should be a pulled thread.

Not likely either

This thread does not look to the moderators like most self-promoting threads do. We feel the poster has brought in a legitimate topic for discussion and that he is not the typical leftist troll or disruptor. Should we be proven wrong on this, appropriate action will follow.

For now, let's see if those on both sides of the political spectrum can work toward getting this shared problem corrected.

Thanks for your cooperation

[ThanhPhero]

I am also quite concerned about computerized voting. It's like giving the Daley machine access to voting everywhere. Or conceivably a techie of Republican(rare in my experience) bent and in the right position could move 1.5% of the vote everywhere.

With the butterfly ballots and the voting machines, vote manipulation is a task for armies of operatives. Votes have to be physically changed by throwing away ballots or pushing rods through piles of ballots, etc.It is alocal thing and not amenable to a national effort. With the computers it only takes one manipulator and the evidence that always exists even when ignored by the press and the law, i.e. vote counters in the trunk of an operative's car, boxes of ballots in someone's garage, multiple signatures, signatures of dead people, v.v., does not exist at all in computer voting fraud. It can be a couple of lines of code that no one but the programmer can see. Maybe a hacker can do the deed and the damage may be visible but there is no way to rectify the result or even to know what the damage was. As voting migrates to the internet I can't see how any real control can be exerted to keep it honest at all.

Butterfly ballots are far superior in respect of actual fraud and political machines will figure out how to rip off an election no matter what. It will just be so much harder to get caught with computer voting. It tempts the big boys to get into it because the problem can ultimately be a national program rather than many local problems.

The temptation is to think that this Democrat is just trying to slide something over on the Republicans by trying to get back the old methods used so profitibly by the Crat big citymachines but the truth is that there are many Crats who are truly convinced that the vote in Broward/Dade 2000 was rigged by Republicans and they think W will use the opportunity to screw the Crats.

Few Democrats are capable of connecting results with actually visible and obvious causes and they do think that the 5 Republicans in Dade managed to steal the election. I know people like that, intelligent people(as measured by IQ but hey....).

[jsbankston]

Nice Job. Voter Fraud is fraud no matter which party perpetrates the fraud. Perhaps each party should hire its own code writers to read the code for every voting machine and mandate that no machine can be used until both code writers sign off on each machine. This is very much the same standard done with a standard paper or punch card ballot. Do yo Recall Palm Beach in 2000 when the Dem signed of on an allegedly flawed ballot?

As long as both parties play by the rules we should be okay.

[Krodg]

My team and many others have been expressing deep concern about these systems for months, without tangible evidence (hosed elections) to point to.

Ah yes...I've read your many rants at DU about Diebold. The problem with the machines is that 'Republicans' own the companies.

Has it ever entered your mind that every company has a leader and as shocking as it is....every leader is a person with a right to vote?? I suppose you would be happy if all voting machines came from companies controled by Democrats? But what would you do if a Democrat designed a ballot that their voters couldn't understand....cry foul?

[GregD]

Hello antaresequity

What you are saying is the same thing I was thinking until I became buried in this issue.

When you start looking at elections, it is amazing (I'm stunned frankly) at how much comes up. Every freaking state (and sometimes at a county level) have different rules. And the applications that are used to run elections need to be configurable by civil servants who may or may not have a high degree of IT familiarity.

There are a couple points to consider.

Scanned ballots are probably a lot easier to deal with, in terms of the tabulation software, and thankfully offer a paper document that can be re-scanned if necessary. That's a good thing.

But there is an interface that allows the elections staff to configure the machine/ballots for different races, with X number of candidates, can you vote for one (only) or for more than one... Then you have to accomodate propositions and such.

The scanner needs to be configured to know where to "look for" the voters mark, and what the marks indicate, based on the layout of any particular election's ballot. (You should have seen the one for the CA Recall - it was brutal.) The software has to know if an undervote or an overvote has occurred.

So it actually becomes a robust application to configure the scanner, count/verify the ballots at the precinct, and finally consolidate the totals at the county level.

Yeah, not rocket science, but also not as straight-forward as it would seem on its face.

Then we get to the touch screen systems. The Diebold system runs on Windows CE. The user has to be able to "paint" the screen for each election, defining different races and everything else, configure how each race works (as in 1 or more votes are valid). My impression is that this makes for a very complex application when done properly, and (at least) Diebold has left "properly" wide open for curiosity and challenge...

Speaking of CE, Jim March discovered that Diebold was hiding the fact that it was not COTS (Commercial Out of The box Software), and they appear to have acted to avoid having that software certified. In case your are unfamiliar with Jim, he is a California lobbyist for "Concealed Carry Permits" - not exactly what you would call a flaming liberal - he is a staunch conservative and a good friend. Here is a page in his site where he discusses the CE problem http://www.equalccw.com/sscomments2.html

So anyhow, I get your point, but the software simply is not simple... Here is a list of bugs fixed in just one release of their code: http://www.countthevote.org/buglist.htm

BTW, if you have not followed the Diebold e-mail discussion, check this series of thread at www.blackboxvoting.org
http://tinyurl.com/2rzqv

The big difference with scanned ballots versus touchscreen is that most of the touchscreens presently have no printed "ballot" or anything else that serves for a recount. And without that, elections are getting hosed: not a theory, but a real and growing fact.

Please help us stop this threat to democracy.

[GATOR NAVY]

Ooh, a Zot in the making.

Grow up.

[lepton]

GOP Urges Investigation of Voting Machine Performance

Saturday January 10, 2004 6:29am

Fairfax (AP) - Fairfax County (website - news) Republicans are urging the county to investigate the what they call the poor performance of high-tech voting machines last November.

A report from the county G-O-P committee calls the touch-screen voting machines used in local elections "a failure," and says and county officials weren't prepared to deal with the problems.

The party is also recommending state regulations that would require localities with the new equipment to follow stringent procedures.

The machines were supposed to speed up the reporting process, but instead they produced one of the slowest vote counts in recent history. Republicans are also angry that election officials took ten machines that crashed to the county government center for repairs.

[IGOTMINE]

BTT

I'd like to get my hands on the software the Dems use to reanimate the dead every election.