Free Republic

Earlier this year, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen established strict new standards for electronic voting machines, requiring independent code audits, Red Team security testing, and support for paper records. The Red Team testing process primarily involves subjecting the machines to review by security experts who attempt to hack the software and bypass the physical security mechanisms. Recent Red Team tests of ES&S voting machines have uncovered serious security flaws. Previous Red Team tests commissioned by the state of California revealed significant vulnerabilities in devices sold by Diebold and Sequoia. At the time, ES&S declined to participate in the testing,...

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...

Paper trails aren't enough to ensure accurate vote counts, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. ITIF said this week that paper trails increase costs and can actually reduce the chances a voters' choices are accurately counted. Congress is considering a "Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007," which would mandate "voter-verified" paper audit trails. The bill, H.R. 811, aims to increase the security and reliability of electronic voting. It is similar to legislation that several states could pass as well. ITIF plans to release a report next week, stating that paper audit trails have "serious limitations that...

What: This Tuesday, DAN RATHER REPORTS presents conclusive evidence of the failure of touch screen voting machines across the country. The episode, “The Trouble with Touch Screens”, is an entire hour devoted to new information on this story. From scientists involved in testing the equipment, to manufacturers in third world countries who shipped these defective voting machines to the United States DAN RATHER REPORTS will present new information showing that these defective machines may have altered the outcome of multiple elections. A screener clip from this controversial episode is now available at the following link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1826549866685179676&hl=enWhen: Dan Rather Reports “The...

DES MOINES, Iowa -- This weekend's Republican straw poll is being challenged by a national group that is threatening legal action over the voting machines that the Republican Party of Iowa is using. A supporter of candidate Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who is not connected to the campaign, made the legal threat, Des Moines television station KCCI reported. The Iowa GOP said the straw poll is fraud-proof. At a Creston restaurant, Paul greeted people Wednesday and hoped some of them would vote for him at the Ames straw poll. "It's pretty important and if we do well, we'll certainly send...

Late Friday, in an atmosphere of total chaos -- with a midnight deadline looming, county election officials waiting anxiously by their phones, and videographers and reporters clamoring outside — Secretary of State Debra Bowen moved to decertify electronic voting machines used by 9 million voters. The decision to decertify leaves county voting officials scrambling once again. They must either find replacement voting equipment that will satisfy the state elections chief before the Feb. 5 presidential primary or upgrade security in systems they do have. The new systems and/or new security measures required must be acquired, tested, installed and workers trained...

California’s top election official on Friday decertified three voting systems widely used in the state but said she would let counties use the machines in February’s presidential primary if extra security precautions were taken. The official, Debra Bowen, the secretary of state, said she made the decision in response to studies showing that the machines could be hacked.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election, and an attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an election using viruses, according to a review of Diebold's source code. "The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," read the University of California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State as part of a two-month "top-to-bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for use in California. The assessment of Diebold's source...

"...the team was able to bypass security in every machine they tested..."

"...Florida’s optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results..."

An Allentown man who smashed an electronic voting machine because he didn't trust it and believed that election results could be altered was convicted Wednesday of summary offenses of disorderly conduct and criminal mischief. After a Lehigh County nonjury trial, Michael C. Young, who represented himself, was sentenced to 180 days of probation and was ordered to pay $2,910 for replacement of the touch-screen machine. Young, 43, of 375 Auburn St., admitted that he went to a polling place at the Good Shepherd Home at Sixth and St. John streets, Allentown, on Nov. 7. He testified that he struck the...

California: All Vote Machines Tested Are Hackable (CBS) SACRAMENTO, Calif. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen released the first part of her review of the state's voting systems Friday, seven days before she must decide whether to decertify any of the systems for the presidential primary It found that computer experts were able to breach all the systems they studied and change the machines' results. But the experts did that under artificial conditions, with unimpeded access to the equipment, a situation that ordinarily would not occur. Matt Bishop, a computer scientist at the University of California, Davis, who led the...

SACRAMENTO - California's secretary of state is considering decertifying an "essential" new part of Los Angeles County's voting system because a vendor missed a deadline to provide key information about it. Decertification would be a blow to the county, leaving it struggling to comply with federal regulations for the state's first February presidential primary. Secretary of State Debra Bowen said the action comes as her office reviews voting systems statewide, and the vendor repeatedly refused to provide the source code for software used in Los Angeles County's InkaVote Plus system. Bowen spokeswoman Nicole Winger said decertification "is in the range...

"HARRISON COUNTY --The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Monday to revert back to the old paper ballot voting methods here, dumping the new electronic voting machines after just a few elections. "We've had a lot of problems with the machines... the costs, I was real concerned about the problems we had last time and it was going to cost us a lot," said Harrison County Circuit Clerk Gayle Parker, who recommended scrapping the high-tech machines after problems during the November elections. Dozens of Mississippi counties reported problems with the new machines. Poll workers had trouble getting the machines to work....

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"...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - A judge ruled Friday that congressional aspirant Christine Jennings has no right to examine the programming source code that runs the electronic voting machines at the center of a disputed Southwest Florida congressional race. Circuit Judge William Gary ruled that Jennings' arguments about the possibility of lost votes were "conjecture," and didn't warrant overriding the trade secrets of the voting machine company. Democrats in Congress meanwhile, said they'd allow Republican Vern Buchanan to take the seat next Thursday, but with a warning that the inquiry wasn't over and that his hold on it could be temporary. The...

"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..."

Programming error miscounts votes in south Texas Election official catches electronic voting maching problem DALLAS — A programming error by a widely used Nebraska-based election system company Tuesday appears to be isolated to Hidalgo County in South Texas, election officials said. The county's top election official discovered the mistake when early voting results in House District 28 put long-shot Constitution Party candidate Ron Avery ahead of popular Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar by almost 2,000 votes with roughly 2,200 tabulated. "We knew there was no way that could be correct," said Teresa Navarro, Hidalgo County elections administrator. The problem was not...

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...