Secure Electronic Voting New Zealand voting survey, post-election 1981 : user's guide for the machine-readable data file Help America Vote Act of 2002 : conference report (to accompany H.R. 3295) (SuDoc Y 1.1/8:107-730) Alternative ballot techniques : hearing before the Subcommittee on Elections of the Committee on House Administration, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, second session, September 22, 1994, Washington, DC (SuDoc Y 4.H 81/3:B 21) The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2004

• Black Box Voting BluesElectronic ballot technology makes things easy. ... 3 issue - After the traumas of butterfly ballots and hanging chad, election officials are embracing a brave new ballot: sleek, touch-screen terminals known as direct recording electronic voting systems (DRE). States are starting to replace their Rube Goldbergesque technology with digital devices like the Diebold Accu-Vote voting terminal. Georgia uses Diebolds exclusively, and other states have spent millions on such machines, funded in part by the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. ...
• Unforunately, the machines have â œa fatal disadvantage,â � says Rep. ...
• The best minds in the computer-security world contend that the voting terminals canâ ™t be trusted. ...
• The resulting report confirmed many of Rubinâ ™s findings and found that the machines did not meet the stateâ ™s security standards. ...
• The devices are certified, scientists say, but the process focuses more on making sure that the machines donâ ™t break down than on testing computer code for Trojan horses and susceptibility to tampering. While thereâ ™s no evidence that the political establishment actually wants vulnerable machines, the Internet is buzz-ing with conspiracy theories centering on these â œblack boxâ � voting devices. ... ) Suspicions run even higher when people learn that some of those in charge of voting technology are themselves partisan. ... â � (He later clarified that he wasnâ ™t talking about rigging the machines. ...
• To remedy the problem, technologists and allies are rallying around a scheme called verifiable voting. This supplements electronic voting systems with a print-out that affirms the voterâ ™s choices. ... Itâ ™s not a perfect system, but it could keep the machines honest. ...
• Critics of verifiable voting do have a point when they note that the printouts are susceptible to some of the same kinds of tricks once played with paper ballots. But thereâ ™s a promise of more elegant solutions for electronic voting that are private, verifiable and virtually tamperproof. ...

• Out with the Old Voting Machines? .
• by Ned Benton (February 26, 2004) Local voters in three upcoming elections will be registering their choices using the old-fashioned mechanical machines with small levers and large handles that the federal government says must go by January 2006. The mechanical machines do have their problems, but finding and funding replacements is proving to be a challenge - here and across the country. ...
• John Caridi maintains the mechanical lever voting machines used in Larchmont and Mamaroneck .
• Currently the local machines are being checked out and tuned up for the three elections scheduled for: .
• Let nostalgia be another reason for you to vote, because there may be only a few more opportunities to use the old machines. ...
• According to the NY State Help America Vote Act Plan, which was released last August as a draft for comment, all lever machines are slated for replacement by January 1, 2006. New York is among 24 states that have applied for funds to replace punch card and lever voting machines, but they have also applied for a waiver of the deadline. ... ) According the the Election Reform study, enthusiasm about alternative voting technologies has worn off, as voters and election administrators have raised concerns about the reliability of the new systems. ... Until new systems are proven, she wants to stick with the mechanical lever machines. ...
• While Larchmont and the Town of Mamaroneck have not experienced problems in recent elections, an Audit of the State Board of Elections by the NY State Comptroller reports numerous breakdowns of similar mechanical voting machines across the state. ... During the same election, a voting machine malfunctioned in White Plains leading to litigation over the disputed election result. A voting machine jammed - but only on one candidate's line. ... While new machines are not being produced, used machines are widely available, along with parts and service. As an interim measure, the Mamaroneck Town Council recently purchased three used voting machines from a company in upstate NY. These are the machines used in local town, village and school district elections. According to the Cal Tech/MIT Voting Technology Project, the old machines work compartively well: "Paper ballots, lever machines, and optically scanned ballots have the lowest average and median residual vote rates. ... ) According to John Caridi, who maintains Mamaroneck's Automatic Voting Machines, "They are fantastic, if they are handled properly you have no problem with them. ... " However, the Help America Vote Act, a Federal Law passed in 2002 to reform voting technologies and procedures, has raised the bar. It requires that by January 2006, all voting systems must: .

• The Voting Rights Struggle of Our Time.
• Now election officials everywhere are trying to prevent another Florida-style election meltdown by replacing paper-based voting systems with new, all-computerized ones. ...
• Computerized voting solves the problem of the moment – imperfect vote counting technology – but replaces it with a whole set of new problems we are only just beginning to understand. ...
• The biggest problem with computerized voting systems is that they are not transparent. There is simply no good reason for voters to trust a 100-percent computerized, paperless voting system run on proprietary software. People are not asked to exercise this kind of blind trust in any other important transaction, and voting is the most important transaction of all. ...
• It's these kinds of risks that led hundreds of respected computer scientists and technologists to sign Stanford computer science professor David Dill's Resolution on Electronic Voting, which insists there be an audit trail to back up digital ballots. ...
• Growing public awareness of these risks also led California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley earlier this year to convene a task force to study computerized voting. ... Secretary Shelley has given the public 30 days to evaluate the report and share their views with him before he decides whether he will raise the bar and require California's computerized voting machines to provide a voter-verified paper back-up of every digital ballot cast. ...
• as states and counties work to implement new voting requirements imposed under Help America Vote Act (HAVA). ...
• Computerized voting is expected to increase dramatically all over the country within the next few years due to new federal HAVA funding to replace punch card and lever machines, as well as a mandate that all polling places provide at least one voting machine that allows blind and disabled voters to cast a secret ballot without assistance. Computerized machines are the only ones on the market today that can do that. ...
• California is at the forefront of the paper trail debate because it is moving faster than other states to replace its voting systems due to a federal court order to replace Florida-style punch card voting machines, as well as the availability of $200 million in state bond funds to improve voting systems. ...
• In the past six months all three of the nation's top computerized voting vendors – Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia – have begun developing paper audit trail prototypes. ...
• But any reasonable person who takes a moment to think about it quickly understands why it's not a good idea to trust 100 percent computerized, paperless voting systems run on secret software. A voter-verified, paper audit trail is the best way to mitigate the real and perceived security risks inherent in any computerized voting system. ...

• Voting.
• Top News | Overview | Voting in the News | Resources.
•          Endorse the resolution on voter-verified paper ballots sponsored by Verified Voting.
•   An audit of Diebold Election Systems voting machines in California has revealed that the company installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its electronic voting equipment. Diebold admitted wrongdoing at a meeting of the state's Voting Systems Panel and said it was making changes to its procedures for upgrading its systems.   The Voting Systems Panel is continuing to investigate whether or not Diebold will be sanctioned for violating state election code. ...
• Ohio Suspends Electronic Voting Machine Use. ... Kenneth Blackwell has halted the use of electronic voting machines in the state until security weaknesses revealed in two state-commissioned studies are resolved.   A technical analysis of four different electronic voting systems used in the state and a report of findings from on-sight inspection of each vendor's security procedures revealed significant flaws. ...
• California to Require Paper Printouts for Electronic Voting.   California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley announced (pdf) that the state will require "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" for all touch screen voting machines by 2006.   The proposal is strongly favored by technology experts, including members of the National Committee for Voting Integrity. ...
• New Voting Group Launched.   The National Committee for Voting Integrity held a press conference in Washington, DC to urge Presidential candidates to address the integrity of electronic voting systems.   The new organization, which consists of a host of voting experts from the fields of technology, academia, politics, and media, has formed to promote voter-verified balloting and to preserve privacy protections for elections in the United States. ...
• Library of Congress Releases Report on Electronic Voting Machines. ...

• What can you do? Voice your support for HR 2239, a bill that would force all electronic voting machines to create a paper trail.
• What can you do if you're a computer programmer with experience in open-source software? The Center for Voting and Democracy is working on open-source voting software to compete with the black-box options now available.
• Having a so-called security-conscious voting machine manufacturer store sensitive files on an unprotected public web site, allowing anonymous access, was bad enough, but when I saw what was in the files my hair turned gray.
• They contained diagrams of remote communications setups, passwords, encryption keys, source code, user manuals, testing protocols, and simulators, as well as files loaded with votes and voting machine software. ...
• Voting machines open new avenues for massive vote fraud.
• Technologists advocate a paper trail for electronic voting machines Hey kids -- let's all call our respective city halls and ask if they know about paper receipts. ...
• Company lied about voting machine's reliability.
• Company with worst e-voting security record produces machines with wireless capabilityExcerpt: . ...
• Diebold backs off legal intimidationExcerpt:  Diebold Election Systems is withdrawing legal threats against voting activists and Internet service providers for publishing copies of internal staff e-mails that the company says were stolen from its servers.
• The documents pointed to security flaws with Diebold's computerized voting machines and suggested the company knew about those flaws long before it sold machines to several states, including California, Maryland and Georgia. ...
• Electronic voting machines cause problems nationwide.
• Diebold memos disclose Florida 2000 e-voting fraudBackground information —.
• These companies — all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid — have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. ...
• President of voting machine company says .
• he's "committed" to Bush re-election The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. ...
• The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election. ...

• Voting Machines.
• Please do not forget that there are issues with electronic voting machines that must be resolved before these machines can be trusted.

• Voting Machines They've been tested and state election officials are confidant that voting machines in Alabama's 67 counties will function properly during Tuesday's general election.
• Election Administrator Ed Packard with the Secretary of State's office said county officials ran a final check on the machines two weeks ago. ...
• Packard said there are three types of voting machines used in the state. ...
• Montgomery, Mobile and DeKalb counties use the direct record voting machine that requires voters to punch a button next to the candidate of choice.
• Bullock County uses the lever-style voting machine, it requires a voter to push a lever next to a candidate's name.
• The remaining 63 counties use optical scan voting machines. ...

• Here in New York, at my local polling place, we use those great clunky lever-driven voting machines. ...
• There was an incident not too long ago in Massachusetts wherein an accumulation of dust in some of the machines triggered errors in the recording of votes cast.
• The rush to implement a fully computerized touchscreen voting system has led us to an eminently hackable and totally unreliable set-up completely dominated by partisans and minions of the Bush regime. ...
• Not surprisingly, in these unlikely places, the voting machines are manufactured by Diebold. Diebold machines were behind the insane seesawing vote counts in Brevard County and Volusia County, FL, during the 2000 presidential contest. These machines have also been implicated in irregularities (not to say outright fraud) in Dallas, TX, and in Georgia. ...
• org, a website run by a Seattle woman by the name of Bev Harris who has written an excellent critique of computerized voting systems, "Black Box Voting. ...
• Black Box Voting reveals for the first time that it was the Volusia and Brevard County anomalies that caused TV networks to call the election for Bush. ...
• –A replacement set of votes was uploaded on the Diebold machines (then called Global Election Systems) in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes. ...
• –Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election Systems (now Diebold) voting machines. ...
• com, called for an "electronic civil disobedience campaign," and college students from sea to shining sea took up the cause, setting up mirror sites including the extremely damaging internal Diebold memoranda regarding problems with these machines.
• 30, quoting MIT voting expert Stephen Ansolabahere as saying, "The computer science community has pretty much rallied against electronic voting. ...
• Meanwhile, over in Australia, a little company called Software Improvements put together a perfectly workable, open and verifiable electronic voting system based on the Linux operating system in just six months back in 2001. ... Software Improvements’ lead engineer on the project, Matt Quinn, told Wired that that all e-voting systems should be open to public inspection and provide paper receipts.
• If a voting system precludes any notion of a meaningful recount, is cloaked in secrecy and controlled by individuals with conflicts of interest, why would anyone buy it? At the very least, give citizens the right to choose whether they want to use paper ballots, thus allowing each elector to be personally satisfied as to the integrity of the process in which they are participating. ...

• Voting Reform.
• Instant runoff voting.
• Voting machines.
• Voting Machines .
• Touchscreen voting is essential if Instant Runoff Voting and Proportional Representation are to be implemented, as it makes counting the votes vastly simpler. ...
• Most of the serious objections come from computer security and computer science people who remain unconvinced that current touchscreen voting is secure. ...
• "That's my primary concern about computer voting: There is no paper ballot to fall back on. Computerized voting machines, whether they have keyboard and screen or a touch screen ATM-like interface, could easily make things worse. ... And computers are fallible; some of the computer voting machines in this election failed mysteriously and irrecoverably. ...
• Online voting schemes have even more potential for failure and abuse. ... What recourse is there if the voting system is hacked, or simply gets overloaded and fails? There would be no means of recovery, no way to do a recount. ... A secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers. ...
• Electonic Voting By Rebecca Mercuri, has ahuge amount of information, She is an acknowledged expert on voting security. ...
• "In the rush to correct problems exposed by the 2000 Presidential election debacle in Florida, many municipalities were pressured or required to procure new voting systems. ...   The vendors and certifying authorities have taken a "trust us" stance, claiming that the machines are "fail-safe" and that the internal record and tally constitutes an accurate reflection of the ballots cast on the machine. ...
• In fact, machines have failed in actual use -- choices have been displayed that were not selected by the voters, and votes have been mis-recorded (in some cases losing them entirely, or shifting them to other ballot positions).   Some of the machines enter a lock-down mode when the polls are closed, rendering it impossible to later check that votes could have been cast properly for each candidate or issue.   Vendors have tied the hands of election officials and independent examiners by protecting their systems under restrictive trade-secret agreements, making it a felony to inspect the operation of the machines without a comprehensive court order. ...

• Voting Machines.
• Sequoia Voting Code Released.
• DIEBOLD Voting ALERT — Diebold initiates legal proceedings against activists.
• EFF: Voting Machine Standard Generates Controversy.
• Mark Crispin Miller: Diebold Machines Yield Fishy Results!!.
• California a testing ground for cheats on Diebold Machines?.
• Diebold Election Systems is withdrawing legal threats against voting activists and Internet service providers for publishing copies of internal staff e-mails that the company says were stolen from its servers.
• The documents pointed to security flaws with Diebold's computerized voting machines and suggested the company knew about those flaws long before it sold machines to several states, including California, Maryland and Georgia.
• William Rivers Pitt: Electronic Voting: What You Need To Know.
• As I write this article, America is on the verge of losing the last shreds of its democracy, with the rise of ballot-less computerized voting machines.
• John Kaminski's suggestion of not voting would work (regain freedom for Americans) only if in fact no-one voted, if the citizens showed that they know the system is a fraud by completely boycotting it. ... (it is taught in schools as part of the civil religion) so even if there is widespread skepticism regarding the validity of the voting system many people (those who have faith, or less charitably, those who are too stupid to understand what is really going on) will still vote. And when pictures of people emerging from polling booths are broadcast on TV that will be enough for the election riggers (as if the mere sight of people "voting" was sufficient to validate the "election" in the minds of most people) — they can fix the vote using their voting machines and computers and who's to know how many people actually voted or for whom?.
• If the use of voting machines is widespread, or they are used in places where the vote is predicted to be close, then who can trust the election result? How are people to know that the person whom most people wanted to become President is the same as the person who was "elected" President according to the (partly electronic) vote tallies? Especially if the vote is close, as in Florida in 2000.
• By controlling the way voting machines work (or can be made to work by those who know) they can do so.
• The makers of the voting machines say no one can look inside of them, because they would reveal trade secrets. What secrets? Isn't their job to count votes? Or do they get secret messages from Mars? Is the cure for cancer inside the machines? I mean, come on. And all three owners of the companies who make these machines are donors to the Bush administration. ...

• Better voting methods require upgraded voting machines.
• The need for better voting methods has been thoroughly stated in the educational work of FairVote Minnesota.   What is becoming more fully understood is the importance of getting voting machine technology in place that can process and count ballots cast using alternatives to First-Past-The-Post plurality elections. ...
• Before voters or their representatives can be persuaded to adopt an advanced voting system, they need to be confident that the system can be implemented. ...   In order to use an advanced voting method, a community must have compatible voting technology in place.
• Since the 2000 presidential election, considerable attention has been given to improving election administration in the United States, including upgrading voting machine technology.  A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in February that nine California counties must replace their punch-card voting equipment before the next presidential election.  This decision came in a lawsuit brought under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, alleging unequal protection for voters, with implications for voting jurisdictions across the country. ...
• Legislation in Congress would provide funding to states to purchase precinct-based electronic voting machines.  A Minnesota law from the 2001 special session created an account to receive any federal funds which may become available and, in turn, provide matching grants to local governments to purchase machines. ...
• Heightened interest in upgrading voting technology suggests increased demand. ...   Anecdotal information from voting equipment vendors says that sales are down because purchasing decisions are being put off.
• This delay gives reform advocates an opportunity to make sure any machines purchased are compatible with Instant Runoff Voting and other advanced alternative systems.   One of the big obstacles to public adoption of advanced voting methods (including Instant Runoff Voting and various forms of proportional representation) is that the voting machine technology to support those elections has not been distributed to Minnesota communities. ...
• What makes a voting machine compatible?.
• In order to be used with Instant Runoff Voting, a voting machine must be able to record all the voting information on each ballot. ...

• Voting machines criticized by scientists.
• RICHMOND -- The touch-screen voting machines purchased by Norfolk last year put the city on the cusp of election technology, but the $1. ...
• Norfolk is the only locality in Virginia using the Diebold machines, but computer scientists say they have similar concerns about the security of other brands of electronic voting equipment.
• ``It's all of these machines. I don't think computer technology is ready for paperless electronic voting. ...
• Government officials say the technology experts failed to consider the security procedures developed over decades to prevent dishonest partisans from getting access to voting machines.
• But pressure is mounting on state and local governments to re-evaluate the security of their voting machines.
• Dill has collected more than 1,000 signatures from computer scientists in a petition asking election officials and voting machine vendors to halt the sale of electronic machines until upgrades are made. ...
• Dill said he does not believe any voting fraud has yet occurred with the new machines. But he was disturbed by news reports during the November 2002 elections about the rapid proliferation of computerized voting screens, most of them made by three major manufacturers: Diebold, ES&S of Omaha, Neb. , and Sequoia Voting Systems of Oakland, Calif.
• 9 million to replace aging voting machines and implement other reforms.
• ``Voting machines have not gotten a lot of attention from anybody for years,'' said Jean Jensen, secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections.
• ``Now the vendors are coming out of the woodwork and all kinds of people are suddenly experts on electronic voting machines. ...
• Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, said that frenzy of activity is largely to blame for flaws he said he found in the Diebold machines. ...
• ``There was a rush to develop these machines without proper security procedures,'' he said in an interview. Rubin's report warned that a partisan infiltrator working for a voting machine vendor or a dishonest polling official could rig the equipment to miscount votes. ...

• Scientists question electronic voting .
• The crux of the discussion is whether Santa Clara County, the heart of the valley, should follow the lead of other jurisdictions that are moving to all- electronic voting or instead choose systems that combine the convenience of digital balloting with the auditability afforded by paper ballots. ...
• Santa Clara County is one of nine California counties still relying on punch-card voting machines, the technology that caused so much grief in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. ...
• So the county government began looking at alternatives, and its staff came up with a $20 million plan to buy touch-screen voting machines. ...
• Most other counties in the state are moving in the same direction, taking advantage of financing offered by Proposition 41, the $200 million Voting Modernization Bond Act California voters approved a year ago, and the $3. ...
• Their objection, as David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford and leader of the campaign, puts it on his Web site: The machines the county planned to buy, like those other jurisdictions around the country are installing, "pose an unacceptable risk that errors or deliberate election- rigging will go undetected, since they do not provide a way for the voters to verify independently that the machine correctly records and counts the votes they have cast. ...
• Dill, Alexander and their associates are not opposed to touch-screen voting. ...
• After all, as proponents of the technology argue, it does offer many advantages over the alternatives, including the ability to display ballots in multiple languages, potentially easier access for people with disabilities, easy ways for voters to correct mistakes or change their minds, and the possibility of programmed safeguards against human errors that could disqualify a ballot (such as voting for multiple candidates in a single race). ...
• Sacramento County is already testing machines that print out ballots, and Mendocino and Sonoma counties are insisting on this capability in their new equipment, according to Alexander. ...
• Dill, who says he began working on the issue in the fall without even knowing about the county's plans, had already put a powerful presentation of his case on the Web in response to reports of problems with paperless voting equipment in Georgia. ...
• In consultation with other experts and his Stanford colleagues, he had also written a petition urging that voting machines not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. When such machines are already in use, the petition stated, they should be replaced or modified to provide such a record. ...
• Last month he appointed a task force to advise him and the board charged with certifying voting equipment in the state on security and auditability issues raised by touch-screen voting. ...
• They directed the county administration to proceed with plans to buy touch screens from Sequoia Voting Systems in Oakland, as the staff had recommended all along, and they didn't mandate the addition of printing equipment. ...
• Dill was by no means the first scientist to challenge the move toward paperless voting. Among others, Peter Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International's Computer Science Laboratory and a leading expert on the risks associated with high technology, and Rebecca Mercuri, a software developer and Bryn Mawr professor who wrote her dissertation on electronic voting systems, have been arguing for years that there's no reliable way to guarantee the security and integrity of all-electronic counting systems. ...

• New voting machines to debut .
• Voters gathered Tuesday in the Bellingham Public Library to voice concerns about new voting systems that the Help America Vote Act could mandate for Whatcom County. ...
• The act requires that new machines replace the punch-card machines by Jan. ...
• The 2004 elections will allow Whatcom County voters to try various new voting machines and answer questions and concerns before a permanent replacement for the punch-card voting machines is implemented.
• Whatcom County will receive $578,500 from federal HAVA funding to assist with the replacement of punch-card voting, Whatcom County Auditor Shirley Forslof said. ...
• I'm recommending that Whatcom County wait until the spring of 2005 to implement a new voting system. ...
• The four-person education panel addressed how errors and manipulation can occur with touch-screen voting machines.
• The forum gave community members a chance to hear some of the positive and negative aspects of new voting machines. ...
• Guest speaker Bev Harris, author of the book "Black Box Voting," said she has been investigating voting systems for the past 13 months and has discovered numerous security flaws in electronic voting devices.
• Harris said she documented more than 100 elections in which machines miscounted votes enough to flip landslide elections in favor of the losing candidate.
• Robbi Ferron, chair of Whatcom Fair Voting, one of the organizations that sponsored the event, said she agreed with the panelists as to why Tuesday night's educational forum was so important.
• New voting machines to debut .

• EDITORIAL: Voting machine paper trail.
• Nevada's state Board of Examiners voted Tuesday to buy more than 4,500 new electronic voting machines, meaning the rest of Nevada will now join Clark County in the computer voting age. ...
• Secretary of State Dean Heller has ruled the old punch card readers that have been used for decades in Carson City and six other northern counties are no longer legal voting devices. ...
• The remaining roadblock to installing this long-overdue safeguard? Carson City Clerk Alan Glover warns he and other cow-county election officials are concerned that even if Sequoia Voting Systems gets them their machines in the next month, the counties won't be able to use them, because Mr. ...
• He said his preference is that, if the printing attachments aren't certified in time, the counties be allowed to use the new machines without them. ...
• Heller has said he wants the printing units before the new electronic machines are used statewide. ...

• Voting machines taking heat.
• After the 2000 election turned Florida's punch-card ballots into a national punch- line, state officials spent millions of dollars on high-tech electronic voting machines.
• But a growing number of critics have local officials around the country wondering whether electronic voting machines -- like the ones used in Charlotte, Sarasota and Manatee counties -- were impulse purchases they will come to regret.
• Commissioners in Miami- Dade and Broward counties recently announced that they are reviewing their new systems because the machines don't give voters a paper record of their selection. ...
• 6 million purchase of voting machines so an independent testing company could review vulnerabilities in the systems. The results of the tests released Thursday included more than 300 security flaws in voting systems made by Diebold Elections Systems Inc. , the company that supplied Manatee County's voter machines.
• In some cases, companies that created the voting systems have been allowed to install software on voting machines, opening up the election process to tampering by outsiders. ...
• Electronic voting converts say the machines are safe and far superior to anything used in the past. ...
• That fear was seeded in the 2002 primary, when thousands of Broward and Miami-Dade voters experienced errors with their voting machines, or had their votes ignored by a computer.
• Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom said that when his wife went to the polls in 2002, she pressed the screen to vote for one candidate, and the machine showed she was voting for another. ...
• Three years after Bush was elected, every county in Florida has electronic voting. ...
• Johns Hopkins University professor Avi Rubin, who has studied and written about security problems with the new systems, said the rush to get electronic voting in place may have compromised security.
• A determined computer hacker, a corrupt elections bureaucrat or a natural disaster could short-circuit safeguards on any voting system and lead to inaccurate or incomplete results.
• The question being raised about modern voting systems isn't if they can be corrupted, it's if they can be corrupted more easily and with less potential for detection. And ultimately, were they worth the billions spent nationwide to get rid of old voting machines.

• Electronic Voting.
• A detailed explanation, along with my recommendation for appropriately configured voting equipment, is provided in the full text of this statement, available *here*. ...
• Electronic Voting Update .
• US Voting Rights Act .
• ELECTRONIC VOTING UPDATE .
• 8B in federal spending, with a substantial portion of these funds allocated to US states and terrirories for the purpose of replacing their punch card and lever voting machines and making voting systems accessible to the disabled. ...   Note that states are not required to purchase computerized voting systems, they can still obtain mark-sense (optically scanned) products, but in order to receive certain of the equipment funds, the plan must indicate that the state will replace all of its lever and punch card machines by the first election for Federal office held after January 1, 2006. ...
• The Presidentially appointed 4-member HAVA Election Assistance Commission, in addition to approving each of the state plans, will also be responsible for administering a host of other tasks, not the least of which include overseeing a 14-member Technical Guidelines Development Committee and a 110-member Standards Board, and making provisions for "testing, certification, decertification, and recertification of voting system hardware and software by accredited laboratories. "  The Technical Guidelines Committee must produce a set of recommended voluntary voting system guidelines nine months after appointment, and it is understood that these guidelines would be the ones used by the laboratories in their certification and testing processes. ...
•   This resulted in 9 states requesting HAVA extensions, and many others contracting to purchase voting systems that can not possibly be HAVA compliant, since there does not yet exist any official HAVA standards. ...
• You are welcome to attach a copy of the statement by Rebecca Mercuri on HAVA and Electronic Voting to your letter.
• But vendors say their voting machines are certified: Voting systems are currently certified under a system established by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). ...   (See my detailed comment The FEC Proposed Voting Systems Standard Update. ... "  Some problems with the FEC standard include the lack of a requirement that vote tallies be independently auditable, the allowance of trade-secret code that may not be able to be inspected should an election contest question the proper functionality of a voting system, and the use of commercial software products in balloting and tabulation systems without any inspection at all. ... Revelations that uncertified software was used in at least two California elections (including the Gubernatorial recall) led to the mandate that voter verified paper ballots be added to their fully-electronic voting systems.
• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has chartered Project P1583 to develop a technical standard of requirements and evaluation methods for election voting equipment.   Based on the structure of the 2002 FEC guidelines, this performance standard will provide detail necessary for increased assurances of voting product accessibility, accuracy, confidentiality, reliability, security and usability. ...  Although there are currently no mandates for this IEEE standard's actual application to the certification of voting equipment, it is thought that the states may replace their use of the FEC guidelines with this new document, and that the results of the IEEE project could be incorporated into the HAVA standard (which does not yet exist).

• Beyond Voting Machines: HAVA and Real Election Reform.
• Hundreds of elderly Jews voting for Pat Buchanan. ...
• In so doing, the debacle created an opening for voting reform that we have not seen for decades. ...
• Specifically, it is an opportunity to knock down some of the structural barriers that keep millions of Americans from voting. Many of our past barriers to voting – like colonial laws that enfranchised only white, male landowners, or Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests – have been culled out as un-American and abolished. ...
• HAVA mandates that all 50 states upgrade many aspects of their election procedures, including their voting machines, registration processes and poll worker training. The specifics of implementation have been left up to each state, which allows for widely varying interpretations of the Federal law – and thus leaves open the possibility of either progressive reforms or regressive erosions of voting rights. ...
• " A group of respected journalists and computer scientists (many writing in this MoveOn bulletin) have raised an important red flag about electronic voting machines being vulnerable to fraud and manipulation. ... If we focus only on the risks of computer voting, we reinforce the misunderstanding that HAVA is no more than "machinery chicanery. ...
• On the other hand, election officials in some states are interpreting the law in ways that will not dampen voting. ...
• The law requires polling places to have at least one fully accessible and private voting machine for disabled voters, and machines that can perform in other langauges. ...
• The money could pay to train poll workers in the details of voting reforms like Election Day Registration (see below) or Instant Runoff Voting, a system of ranked voting that eliminates the "lesser of two evils" conundrum. ...
• One of the largest scandals in the Florida 2000 election involved "felony disenfranchisement laws" – laws that strip voting rights from people convicted of certain crimes. Florida's disenfranchisement laws kept over 600,000 citizen with felony convictions from voting in 2000, even those who had fully finished their prison time, parole or probation. ...
• The most extreme states – such as Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and Virginia – bar ex-offenders from voting for life. ...
• senators recently voted for a measure introduced by Senators Harry Reid (D-NV) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) to grant voting rights to ex-offenders in federal elections. ...

• Voting machine showdown A leading maker of computer election equipment defends itself in court against charges that it overreached itself in trying to stifle critics.
• Diebold, one of the nation's leading manufacturers of computerized voting machines, faced off against some of its critics on Monday in U. ... But this time, the question at issue wasn't whether the machines could be hacked, but whether Diebold was abusing the principles of free speech in an attempt to quash the critics. ...
• For several months, activists and academics concerned about the security of touch-screen voting systems had closely scrutinized the company, and they'd found much to worry about: Diebold's voting machines were said to be full of security flaws, and its CEO turned out to be a major supporter of George W. ...

• --> Voting machine maker retracts threat to sue students.
• , a supplier of touchscreen voting machines, agreed not to sue or further threaten student activists around the country after months of legal haggling over the publication of sensitive Diebold documents on the Internet.
•     After two students at Swarthmore College first published the company's internal memos and emails, which seemed to show the company knowingly produced voting machines that were subject to tampering, Diebold issued cease-and-desist orders to Swarthmore to have their documents taken down.
•     Though Diebold denies the authenticity of the students' postings, the company's voting machines have been implicated in voting irregularities in recent years.
• Rush Holt has introduced a bill in Congress requiring all electronic voting machines to leave an auditable paper trail.
•     Voting machine flaws may negatively affect the democratic process, University economics professor Paul Krugman wrote in an opinion article for The New York Times on Monday. ...

• On-Line Demonstration of Voting Terminal.
• Seniors try out voting system.
• Cuyahoga County Selects Diebold Election Systems For Touch-Screen Voting.
• Opponents of change a threat to electronic voting.
• Electronic voting is solution .
• Some 33,000 Diebold voting stations are being used simultaneously in locations across the United States to assist voters in exercising their most fundamental constitutional right: The right to vote.
• Diebold is a global leader in providing high-quality cutting-edge direct recording electronic (DRE) voting solutions to jurisdictions of all sizes, along with a comprehensive service and elections support capability that’s unmatched on a global scale. ... The AccuVote-TS™ system provides voters with an entirely new state-of-the-art design that represents a major leap forward in voting technology. ...
• Recent articles concerning electronic voting systems.

• Voting Problems Persist In Orlando, South Florida.
• MIAMI - Florida's first big test of its new elections system turned into a nightmare Tuesday as polling stations opened late on a busy primary day and problems cropped up with the touchscreen voting machines brought in after the 2000 debacle. ...
• The ballots were tearing as they were fed through optical scanning machines, making them unreadable. ...
• ``The state put up money - significant sums of money - for training, for machines. ... There's no excuse for not having precinct workers in a precinct for voting, no excuse for not turning on the machines. ...
• The state changed voting laws and outlawed punchcard ballots after the 2000 presidential election. Florida spent $32 million to reform its election system and more than half of the state's voters were expected to use new touchscreen machines Tuesday instead of punchcard and butterfly ballots. ...
• Attorney General Janet Reno, who was seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Bush this fall, was delayed from voting after election workers struggled to get the touchscreen machines operating. She waited several minutes while an election official booted up one of the 18 machines. ...
• Her campaign said she welcomed Bush's decision to extend voting. ...
• In one precinct in a predominantly black Miami neighborhood, voting didn't begin until 11:45 a. ... Officials estimated about 500 people left without voting. ...
• A precinct at a senior center in Jacksonville opened 90 minutes late because poll workers didn't realize they were supposed to turn on machines themselves. ...
• In Boca Raton, where two candidates sued over Palm Beach County's new voting machines, Ellen Siegel left her polling place without casting a ballot. ...
• Siegel said she and several other voters were given the plastic cards they needed to insert into the new ATM-style voting machines, but they read ``invalid. ...
• ``No one had any idea how to get the machines up and running. ...

• The Secretive World Of Voting Machines.
• THE SECRETIVE WORLD OF VOTING MACHINES .
• Voting machines conceal critical parts of the voting process which must be observable in order to ensure honest elections. Therefore, any and all voting machines should be unconstitutional. ... Over the last 100 years Americans have slowly but surely surrendered our public voting process to private corporations and their voting machines. ...
• Voting machines can be easily rigged and impossible to monitor. ... The use of voting .
• machines should be unconstitutional, but Congress has failed to act. ... except to pass laws that give billions for voting machines, while failing to require any mandatory standards. Meanwhile, misguided voting .
• rights groups are suing for the right to use the latest most sophisticated computerized voting equipment. ...
• education, a clean environment, and a living wage? In the secretive world of voting machines. ...
• VOTING MACHINE ERROR REPORTS .
• Bev Harris is the lead investigator on voting machine ownership and errors. ... com/">Black Box Voting. ...
• The only legal option to voting machines - go back to hand-cast-hand-counted paper ballots. Paper ballots cast early, absentee, or by-mail may still be counted by machine, however they do leave a paper trail and may also be the only way to protest the use of voting machines and "business-as-usual. ...

• Resolution on Electronic Voting .
• "Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is therefore crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. Many of the electronic voting machines being purchased do not satisfy this requirement. Voting machines should not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail; when such machines are already in use, they should be replaced or modified to provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the essential requirements for certification of new voting systems. ...
• In response to the need to upgrade outdated election systems, many states and communities are considering acquiring "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) voting machines (such as "touch-screen voting machines" mentioned frequently in the press). ... Unfortunately, there is insufficient awareness that these machines pose an unacceptable risk that errors or deliberate election-rigging will go undetected, since they do not provide a way for the voters to verify independently that the machine correctly records and counts the votes they have cast. ... Deployment of new voting machines that do not provide a voter-verifiable audit trail should be halted, and existing machines should be replaced or modified to produce ballots that can be checked independently by the voter before being submitted, and cannot be altered after submission. ...
• But an election without voter-verifiable ballots cannot be open and transparent: The voter cannot know that the vote eventually reported is the same as the vote cast, nor can candidates or others gain confidence in the accuracy of the election by observing the voting and vote counting processes. ...
• Without a voter-verifiable audit trail, it is not practical to provide reasonable assurance of the integrity of these voting systems by any combination of design review, inspection, testing, logical analysis, or control of the system development process. ... Many computer scientists could list dozens of other plausible ways to compromise computerized voting machines. ...
• Most importantly, there is no reliable way to detect errors in recording votes or deliberate election rigging with these machines. Hence, the results of any election conducted using these machines are open to question. Available alternatives to DRE machines .
• When a reasonably reliable, accurate, and secure voting technology is already in use, such as optical scan ballots, acquisition of DRE machines would be a major step backwards. ...

• Hacking democracy? Computerized vote-counting machines are sweeping the country. ...
• 20, 2003  |  During the past five months, Bev Harris has e-mailed to news organizations a series of reports that detail alarming problems in the high-tech voting machinery currently sweeping its way through American democracy. ...
• Harris is a literary publicist and writer whose investigations into the secret world of voting equipment firms have led some to call her the Erin Brockovich of elections. Harris has discovered, for example, that Diebold, the company that supplied touch-screen voting machines to Georgia during the 2002 election, made its system's sensitive software files available on a public Internet site. She has reported on the certification process for machines coming onto the market -- revealing that the software code running the equipment is seldom thoroughly reviewed and can often be changed with mysteriously installed "patches" just prior to an election. ... Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, used to run the company that built most of the machines that count votes in his state -- and that he still owns a stake in the firm. ...
• A small group of writers, technologists and activists is working hard to convince elections officials all over the country that their rush to upgrade aging punch-card machines with seemingly more reliable touch-screen systems is dangerous. ...
• The same is true for several unexpected Republican victories in Georgia last year -- during which the entire state used touch-screen machines for the first time. ...
• Her stories on voting machines are based not on her politics but on serious, in-depth investigative reporting. Since October, she's spoken to dozens of people in the voting world, from elections officials to "systems certifiers" to engineers whom she calls whistle-blowers. She's detailed some of her findings on her Web site, but she says they aren't the whole story -- which she'll tell in a book, "Black Box Voting," to be published in May. ...
• Touch-screen voting machines aren't especially reliable; there are documented cases in which they have frozen, broken down and tabulated incorrectly during actual, binding elections. ... Though voting companies will confidently tell you about their myriad security policies, the fact is that these machines run software, and software can be tampered with: An election result could be changed without anyone being the wiser. And perhaps worst of all, the machines and the companies that make them are shrouded in secrecy. ...
• Indeed, the conspiracy theories, regardless of their validity, nevertheless highlight the main problem with electronic machines. Because they leave no paper trail -- the vote count is registered only electronically in the machine -- the results that the new machines deliver are open to dispute by people who have cause to be suspicious. ...

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