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"We"? Who is this "we"? Here in New Hampshire, they passed a paper trail law in 1994 and we've not had any of these problems.

BlackBoxVoting.org published an announcement that voting machine vendors are now hiring more support techs, asking people with skills who want to protect democracy from broken voting systems to get paid to do it:

On Sun, 8/24/08, Black Box Voting wrote: From: Black Box Voting
Subject: From BBV: Patriotic Techs - Please apply for voting machine tech temp jobs

Widest possible distribution needed. Please do spread this in blogs, etc:

This post will no doubt produce howls of objection for the vendors that read it. Black Box Voting is encouraging all individuals with a technical background to search and apply for temporary tech ELECTION SUPPORT jobs for the November 2008 election. Hiring is underway for temporary technicians to help with voting machines this fall.

Vendor dependence is undermining the structure of US elections, as described here in the new report by VotersUnite.org:
http://www.votersunite.org/info/ReclaimElections.pdf

We want to see You, the People, enter into the vendor mix directly HOW TO FIND TEMPORARY ELECTION TECH POSITIONS:
In a presidential election year, voting machine vendors will hire and trainthousands of technicians staffed around the country. For example, anywhere that Election Systems & Software has a machine, they are under contract to provide an on-site support tech. Hart Intercivic, Premier (Diebold), and Sequoia also use Election Day support technicians.

Temporary election tech support jobs have been spotted on hotjobs.com, rollouts.com, and local tech temp firms like (in 2006) DecisionOne. The tech services firm may be a subcontractor for the big four voting machine companies.

Sometimes you'll find the positions advertised by your local county. Sites like Rollouts.com have you register in their E-tech database. They search for techs based on skill set and area. There isn't much in the way of a skill set needed for the election projects.

QUIETLY APPLY FOR THE JOBS Anyone with tech skills interested in safeguarding the November election is encouraged to regisster at technical recruiting sites and apply for any election-related projects.

CONSIDER ASKING FOR TIME OFF ON YOUR FULL TIME JOB TO DO THIS. This November, there may be no better way to watch the behind-the-scenes process than to be a stagehand, so to speak. It is not the vendor, and not the government, that has the right to elections information, it is the PUBLIC.

Citizens have inalienable rights to sovereignty over the government they created and pay for. These rights cannot be honored without mechanisms to see all information related to elections, and ultimately, to have control processes that honor citizen sovereignty. That said, it ain't gonna happen this November. Therefore it is entirely appropriate, patriotic, and important, for citizens to apply for temporary positions as voting machine technicians to provide inside public oversight for the process. There will be nondisclosure agreements, which are not appropriate at all for public elections, but it's a reality now that vendors are trespassing on citizen right to know. There may be issues that arise which the public clearly has a right to know. When that happens, a decision must be made.

YOU WON'T BE THE FIRST We have already been in communications with other patriotic volunteers who have successfully obtained these positions in the past, and are doing this for November. THERE ARE ALWAYS WAYS TO DEAL WITH IMPORTANT ISSUES IF THEY ENDANGER THE PUBLIC GOOD. You, the People, are needed on the inside of the elections industry this November. This is a public service bulletin from Black Box Voting. Black Box Voting Tool Kit 2008 - free download here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit2008.pdf Empower more election watchdog actions:

Since you still refuse to publish a URL of your supposed YEARS of fighting the voting machine.

We'll start you off nice and slow this morning.

Your homework consists simply reading several articles. Then removing your foot from your mouth.

Hunt for the (backdoor)kill switch in microchips.

US reveals plans to hit back at cyber threats (note the part about CHIPS)

Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers (if you can do this you can do anything)

The Hunt for the Kill Switch (This is the best of the articles in my opinion)

So your idea of "computerized tabulation" will work only if the public John Doe/ Jane Doe/ You/ Me/ Slashdot Readers/ "We The People" and anyone else is allowed to destructively reverse engineer every electronic voting machine component under an electron microscope looking for backdoor logic (Which is NOT allowed), and any network, hub, switch, vault, radio transmitter, Radio receiver, or memory device that might have been used in conjunction with the election (Again the public is NOT allowed to, not to mention it would be physically impossible and too costly at the expense of bringing down the entire communications infrastructure.), and monitor the whole spectrum 24/7 at all geographic locations during an election. (ain't going to happen) And monitor the power supply for rogue signals, or frequency or voltage anomalies.

So really what your saying is it's okay for someone to walk in on election day, reach into their pocket, activate their hidden transmitter, and flip the vote, by a plethora of methods.

And that's just the HARDWARE.

Shall we wait until you digest all that before we talk about the SOFTWARE and WHAT'S ALREADY BEEN FOUND?

hint #1
Top To Bottom Review

hint #2
Federal Vote-Counting Accuracy Mandate Is Ignored
Violations abound, but no federal action is taken

And again I remind you that 100% hand counts of ballots that have 100% chain of custody (even that is broken) with 100% public oversight (currently the public is denied access and ballots have been illegally destroyed) have never been compared to the 100% machine tabulation.

Furthermore your continued publicizing of the myth that "hand counted paper ballots are unrealistic due to population." Is just that. A MYTH!

If your ideas are so open source, show them right here right now. Quit saying you don't know where to take these ideas, I'm telling you right now.

Publish it! Publish it right here, right now.

Get a free frigging yahoo/geocities account, and publish it. Make a god damned blog and publish it. Rar the shit up and upload it to Rapidshare. Create an account at sourceforge and PUBLISH IT!

I'm assuming that you have the Hart InterCivic system as stated by The Verifier. In that event, as other authiors have noted you may have no hope of detecting truly electrionic tampering. However you may spot some things. The links below also apply to Diebold and ES&S systems as well.

I would be sure, to tell all voters to read the confirmation screen carefully. Many other locations have reported instances of vote switching where voters, once they reach the closing screen, see a different outcome than they pushed. Evidence from a Rice University study indicates that less than 30% of people even read this screen but those that do have reported nontrivial numbers of flipped votes.

Secondly I would educate yourself about the machines. Ohio's Everest study, particularly chapter 14 contains many scary things about the machines. Some you can look for, many you cannot.

You will also find information from the California study notably the red-team reviews of the hart system.

Voters Unite is also a source of some good info As does Pollworkers.us which is a useful site for those working the polls.

and the only thing you need besides the voter-verified paper is a minimum of 5% automatically-triggered random audits.

We have it in New Mexico because we formed a voter group, studied it with experts, formulated the desired system, and made it happen.
http://www.votersunite.org/info/newmexicoaudits.asp
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
http://www.uvotenm.org/

To be clear, the system we chose is:

paper with numerical ID the voter takes it to the scanner and inserts it (with assistance right at hand) the scanner gives an error code if there is a problem access to the the scanner's storage is physically tamper-proof sealed the memory chip is physically tamper-proof sealed automatic random audits are performed by hand on 5% of the scanners' results (versus the paper) to verify accuracy

This system was studied by a team of data security experts, and the probability of undetected tampering is very, very close to zero.

Check out these sites, and get involved, especially if you are in one of the 6 remaining states with no VVPR (Voter-Verified Paper Record) requirement and no audit requirement:

http://www.votersunite.org/info/newmexicoaudits.asp
http://www.uvotenm.org/leg.html
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/

It's what we do when they fail that makes a difference. Right the broken machines and processes. Yes. But prepare for the glitch. Change election laws to recognize statistically improbable results for what they are and let those voters who were victims of the failed process resubmit their vote. A MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW, novel of the stolen election. Featured on http://votersunite.org/

I don't have a dog in the HR 811 fight. Having argued both sides, I've been ambivalent. (I've even given some money to the good folks at verifiedvoting.org. You should too.)

I can, however, state with absolute certainty that the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) is a placebo and is worse than wrong. The VVPAT is the toilet paper roll attached to the computerized voting machine. Here's why:

1) most voters don't verify their votes

2) there's no reason to believe the votes printed and the votes recorded are the same

3) because these machines are crap, there's no way to meaningfully audit them

I'm an election integrity activist in King Co WA. I attended the "audit" of our Diebold AccuVote TSx machines after the Nov 2006 general election. 21 of the sealed toilet paper cannisters were pulled from the pile of some 400. 3 county-wide races were chosen to recount.

Humans manually recounted the paper trail. One reads, another records.

When the VVPAT wasn't readable, due to rip, jamming, smudge, or whatever, the entire paper trail is REPRINTED from the memory card. So it wasn't clear to me what was being "audited".

This happened 3 times. Meaning 10% of the VVPATs were spoiled.

After the Cuyahoga County OH election meltdown in 2006, an outfit named ESI did a post-mortem. They reported the same failure rate, plus a lot more of other failures.

Advocates for HR 811 make the very valid point that some jurisdictions will use touchscreens without paper trails in 2008. I get that. But the solution isn't to throw good money after bad money, to go through the charade of election integrity. The correct answer is to switch back to paper ballots tabulated on precinct-based optical scanners. It's the best available solution (today).

Any way, back to HR 811. Voters Unite has a great summary of its history and why it's such a bad idea: More Harm Than Good.

My number one reason for distrusting computerised systems is that they enable "wholesale fraud" with a single point attack,

I find it interesting that there is so much investigation into voting inconsistencies when Republicans are successful (2004), but not when the Democrats are successful (2006). We're still having stories about 2004, but there has been little interest in talking about the known inconsistencies from 2006.

Just scanned the replies (3 or higher, nested). Lots of uncritical praise, very little skepticism. If everyone here can take a breather from the mutual admiration and basking in the collective wisdom, as it were, I'd like to set everyone here straight.

First, and please remember this, the ideal is private voting and public counting. Aka "The Australian Ballot".

Computerized voting machines are fatally flawed. Unredeemable. There is no way to have a fully electronic system which protects the secret ballot as well as ensures the public vote count. Can't be done. Cannot. Be. Done. Period. Despite what all the electronic voting enthusiasts tell you. (I'm looking at you, Avi Rubin.) If you don't understand this, then please stop kibitzing, figure out how our voting systems should work (historically) and get up to speed. Thank you.

Second, this bill relies on "auditing" to ensure the integrity of our elections.

That never works. You cannot test your way to quality. Any one working software knows this. If you're in software and don't, please stop pretending and resign your job.

Additionally, by the time the mistake happens in an election, it's already too late. Too late. Because there's no recourse.

Timothy B. Lee, and other electronic voting apologists, like to mischaracterize the opposition of informed and experienced election integrity activists and experts. I can't guess why. My pet theory is unbounded technolophilia. Others suspect darker motives. Who's to say.

Anyone actually concerned about the health of our democracy would do well to read the criticisms of Holt's HR 811. Here's Beware of the Bandwagon -- A concise list of problems with Holt Bill HR 811 and Help Amend HR 811 to prohibit "electronic ballots."

That is all. I'm happy to answer anyone's questions. I'll check back later.

go here

http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

First of all, I'm from Missouri. Missouri approved a company to create touch screen voting machines to Missourians. According to Voter's Unite, one of those companies is AccuPoll - a company that is now bankrupt. The CEO of that company recently spoke out against voting machines, saying the following: I am not happy about the outcome, or the state of the industry. I think that something needs to be done. I'm not sure what it is, it probably doesn't include AccuPoll at this point, but I do not feel that any of the vendors has a system that voters can trust,"

"I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting a VVPAT system requirement. They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it,"

What standards do you think could be put in place that would prevent the problems, and should there be harsh penalties for the above behavior (misrepresenting security, stability, etc)?

In addition, I just read one Missourian's complaints about the voting process and the supposed paper trail. What standards do you think should be in place regarding the people volunteering at the polling stations? I do tech support for a living, and I can tell you that the average joe should not be working at these polling stations without extensive training. Do you think there should be some sort of technical certification process for voting machines? If so, what?

Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as

Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.

Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as

Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.

Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as

Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.

Additional State info can be found at VoteTrustUSA vtUSA has good links to individual state and local groups as well as to programs that one can become involved in such as

Voters Unite is also a good resource especially for lists of State Groups, Failures grouped by individual vendors, and a howto on helping entitled Pray With Your Feet.

Oops, wrong kind of bracketing...

first link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_Voting_System s

second link,
http://www.votersunite.org/info/CorrectingSequoia. pdf

The United States of America uses the "Australian Ballot" form of voting. That means everyone gets a secret ballot and the ballots are counted publicly. It was then, as it remains now, the best design to accommodate our system of elections. Please understand this essential reality before suggesting "improvements" (e.g. receipts, mail ballots, etc.).

Someone in this thread is going to state that HAVA 2002 mandates the use of electronic voting machines (aka "DRE" or direct recording electronic). That is false, as thoroughly explained in Voters Unite's Myth Breakers document.

Someone in this thread will make some statement about how electronic voting devices permit the disabled to vote in private. That's not exactly true. To the best of my knowledge, the existing products do not preserve the secret ballot. Nor are they particularly accessible. Meanwhile, there are solutions which do preserve the secret ballot and are accessible to disabled voters. Such as ES&S's AutoMark, the Vote-PAD, and EqualiVote. (There are some other novel systems, too. I just haven't researched them yet.)

Someone in this thread is going to state that electronic voting is just splendid, and we can make it work, if we just try harder next time. Fine. Show me. Then let's talk. Meanwhile, all current systems suck.

Someone in this thread is going to suggest that we have all paper ballots counted manually. Like Canada. Or Germany. It's not a bad idea. But it wouldn't work in the USA with our current constraints and expectations. To contrast, in Canada, the races are very simple and so the tabulation is feasible. In Germany, they have proportional representation and rely on their superior form of exit polls. Meaning their system is very tolerant of errors. And they have legions of civil servants working weeks to get the exact manual tally. Whereas here in the USA, politicians and news networks demand results now, now, now!

Someone in this thread may suggest it's all about the Republicans. Or the Democrats. It hasn't proven that simple. I believe it's a fight between the people in power, who want to stay in power, and us voters. I'm a pretty progressive guy. But I readily acknowledge the bad guys (with respect to election integrity) here in King County Washington are in the Democratic leadership. (My experience is that the rank and file of both major parties are completely on board with election integrity.)

Someone in this thread may also suggest that we eliminate the need for electronic voting at poll sites by transistioning to forced mail voting (100% vote by mail). Like Oregon State has done and where most of Washington State is heading. It's terribly idea. No more secret ballot. No more public vote count. Higher error rate. Huge more expensive. Long-term decline in voter turnout. It's a big topic. We've been researching it for about 9 months and have only scratched the surface. We discuss

Someone in this thread will also exhort the necessity of using a voter verified paper audit trail. They may even encourage others to support Rush Holt's HR 550. Unfortunately, the VVPAT is a placebo. What guarantees what's recorded is what's printed? Nothing. And experiences to date demonstrate that actually auditing the VVPAT is infeasible (1h 15m per ballot cast). That said, the efforts of VerifiedVoting.org and other are not misguided. Many states already have electronic voting machines without the VVPAT. So passing HR 550 would be better than nothing.

The take away point is this:

The most reliable, secure way to vote in the USA today is to use voter-correctable precinct-based optical scanners. That means paper ballots at poll sites fed into a ballot scanner.

Please support Voter Action. They have successfully prevented the use and procurement of electronic voting machines in a few states already. They are expanding the fight as fast as they can

You can hire a hell of a lot of people for what 1 machine costs.

It costs Sarasota Office of Elections an extra million dollars each year to maintain and operate the DREs in years without any major election.

Anyone ever think of that?

What the hell is the big deal about hiring more workers to count ballots cast by hand?

Matter of fact, here is some info for anyone who wants to volunteer to do so as to save the a few bucks of cost for an accurate count.

Please note: Nothing personal intended. This is a very important subject to me.

Leaving aside the Sarcasm, that's exactly what we want. Other states including New Mexico and Washington have gone this route as have many counties. In all cases its because of the demonstrated problems with voting systems. In New Mexico's 2004 election we have a perfect test case. In that year the state employed eight different systems scattered more or less randomly thuought the state. Four of these systems were optical scanners and four were paperless touchscreen or push-button DREs (Direct Recording Electronic systems). In the 2004 Presidential race it was found that votes were missing largely from minority voters. Worse yet the missing votes were in up-ticket races, noteably the U.S. Presidential Race. Typically votes are missing for down-ticket races like local judges. Interestingly enough these patternes appeared on all the paperless systems not just systems made by one company or another. Lost votes were not a problem in precincts using the optical scanners. The excess (overcounted) votes were removed because they had the paper backup.

At the risk of nagging people, this info doesn't belong just on /. It belongs in letters to our state and local elections boards (whoever actually sets the law). It belongs in local newspapers via op-eds. Other people are concerned but most of then simply know nothing about these problems. Changing opinions on this issue won't really happen here, but elsewhere.

Some choice morsels of info can be found Here, here, here, here and here

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110006139 http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/mediaSnohomi shCounty.htm

Here is a URL for all the problem. From there is it a simple matter of looking up the names of the companies who provided the machines and who they had ties with.

Evidence Of Election Irregularities In Snohomish County, Washington, General Election, 200

This is only about winning, at any cost. If the GOP was actually concerned about fraud, they'd insist that electronic voting machine vendors like Sequoia open up their boxes for independent inspection. As it is today, the contracts stipulate that vote counting is a trade secret.

That's just lovely.

I am somewhat frustrated that sites specific to vote error (fraud) are hard to find in specific catagories. Math, code, action, law etc... Don't get me wrong... /. rocks. I would just like to be able to find Evoting link sites without spending hours scouring the net... http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ and http://www.votersunite.org/ are doing a great job but if university types are going for the goods they need a clearer path... Any suggestions?

The 2004 election revealed many problems with electronic voting: lost votes, undervotes, overvotes, and votes rolling over into negative numbers. These links are taken from the group blog E-voting experts:

• Broward Co., FL - ESS software on their machines only reads 32,000 votes at a precinct then it starts counting backwards: http://www.news4jax.com/politics/3890292/detail.ht ml
• Wichita Co., TX - Nearly 6,900 of 26,000 total early votes had 'undervote' for President. Human error to blame. County has software problems that need ESS to fix before they can run ballots: http://www.timesrecordnews.com/trn/local_news/arti cle/0,1891,TRN_5784_3303816,00.html
• Lancaster Co., SC - Unilect Patriot voting machines were used and failed. Printouts of votes had to be taken from the machines memories and hand-counted: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/1 0094349.htm
• Mecklenburg Co., NC - More votes registered than voters: http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/politi cs/10094165.htm
• Volusia Co., FL - Diebold optical-scan machines had another failure with 6 machines having memory card failures. "Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor in Leon County, said officials with Diebold told him that the new, higher-capacity memory cards tend to have more glitches than older cards.": http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/elections/orl- asecvolusiaglitches04110404nov04,1,3289659.story?c oll=orl-news-headlines
• Craven Co., NC - Software glitch forces a recount which changes the outcome in one race.: http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Templat e=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfmStoryID=18297Section =Local
• San Francisco, CA - A glitch in the new tabulation software made by ESS to handle IRV/RCV voting (more here) stoped the counting and forced a recount of 81,000 ballots.: http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle .jhtml?articleID=52200321
• Sarpy County, NE - 3000 phantom votes show up after an audit reveals that some tabulation equipment counted votes twice. (Im not sure if this is optical scan or some other system they used optical scan in 2002): http://www.wowt.com/news/headlines/1161971.html
• Willacy County, TX - Human error in reading results reports causes presidential votes for John Kerry to be counted twice and subsequently misreported to the Texas Secretary of State.: http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/101 23432.htm?1c
• Columbus, OH - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,25

"Sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but the contestant was actually correct!"

In all seriousness, though, your very cropped quote is quite disingenuous, given the important omission of the following:

Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.

Furthermore, I see no political slander anywhere, neither in the grandparent post nor in the article itself. I assume what you must be talking about would be this:

Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California agreed.

"This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent," she said.

"I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors. We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."

If we as a nation truly have nothing to hide, this will be a nice vindication of our way of doing things. On the other hand, if there are real issues, best to find them and deal with them.

Once again, I have to answer - election officials see a number of advantages to electronic voting technology, none of which have anything to do with speed of reporting (which isn't currently an issue):

1) Accuracy. The main reason that everyone is junmping on the e-voting bandwagon is fear that they could preside over the next broward county, with significant numbers of voters being disenfranchised because it is impossible to be sure for whom they are voting. (Significant = greater than the margin of victory.) There is a perception that e-voting machines are more accurate then current voting systems.

2)Access. DRE machines can often be fitted to easily display and count ballots in multiple languages, and can provide audio or raised button (Braille) for the blind. As the first article mentions, currently voters with special needs don't actually have a secret vote. As governments expand excessibility requirements in all areas, electronic voting becomes more attractive.

3) Second-chance voting and error checking. Some electronic voting systems require that the voter check their votes and show any errors (accidently voting yes and no on the same referendum, or skipping a race). Second-chance voting is a good thing that is attractive to a number of voter advocate groups. (Its my understanding that the [leadership of the] League of Women Voters really likes electronic voting for this reason).

I'm not argueing for electonic voting. In fact I'm working with a number of groups opposed to e-voting. However informed debate on the topic requires that e-voting skeptics understand the reasons that election officials choose these technology. If you really are interested in this, I'd suggest that you have a look at a document called Myth Breakers for Election Officials produced by Voters Unite