Free Republic

There is no prospect of electronic voting being reintroduced into Ireland in the short to medium term, the Government has confirmed. The Minister of State in charge of local government, John Paul Phelan, has said that far from representing progress, electronic voting can potentially undermine people’s confidence in the democratic process. “There is no prospect in the short to medium term of the chicken coops being taken out of retirement and used,” he said. Mr. Phelan was referring to the eventual fate of the voting machines that were purchased when then minister for the environment, Martin Cullen of Fianna Fáil,...

U.S. government researchers are warning that someone could sneak an inexpensive piece of electronics into e-voting machines like those to be used in the next national election and then remotely change votes after they have been cast. ... Basically, when a voter pushes a button to record his or her votes electronically, the remote hijacker could use a Radio Frequency remote control to intercept that communication, change the votes, and then submit the fraudulent votes for recording. The researchers uncovered similar problems with Sequoia e-voting systems in 2009.

{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.