Los Alamos Reconsiders Touch Screen Voting

goombah99 writes "Los Alamos county, which boasts the highest geek PhD per capita in the world and considerable clout in secure computing, has voted to rescind its previous plans to purchase Touch Screen voting systems and will ask the New Mexico's secretary of state to address its concerns regarding an imminent state-wide purchase. They may get forced by the Clerk's office to use them anyway if the state makes its bulk purchase of Sequoia AvcEdge touch screen systems with a Windows-based WinEDS database. The Los Alamos position is welcome news since it casts the rejection of these systems in a more sober light; widespread right-wing conspiracy theories have done great harm by galvanizing election officials to be dismissive of re-opening their consideration of the issue. What won the day was convincing the county they had until 2006 to comply with HAVA, and that better machines with voter verifiable audit trails and even open source, were on the way. There is also more in the local newspapers."

Comments

No, not conspiracy theories.

[The Terrorists]

They aren't conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence about the Bush-Diebold connection. The theories are based on solid, classical campaign finance skulduggery and not on the technical merits of the system at all. There was a good SecurityFocus article on the register about it as well, focusing on the technical aspects. I propose the establishment of independent technical federal commissions to review all voting technologies.

Re:No, not conspiracy theories.

[mark2003]

There is a vast amount of evidence that large numbers of people were denied the right to vote because they had a similar name to that of a known criminal - sometimes just a surname and town in common could be enough. Those running the election (Katherine Harris) employed a company now owned by Diebold (I believe) to construct the list used. This list included people from other states who had prior criminal records but were allowed to vote under FLORIDA law - however they were removed from the voter's role.

Now due to demographics and crime rates in the US, where those who are poor and black are more likely to have a criminal record, this deliberate policy of ignoring FLORIDA state law by it's governer and the electoral commitees disadvantaged the Democrats as most poor and black voters vote democrat. The fact that they mis-matched on name also helped the Republicans as not many wealthy, white Republican voters have similar names to poor blacks. There are many, many cases of the wrong people being denied the right to vote.

Article slashdotted posted here

[Anonymous Coward]

Headline News
Council yanks voting machine funding

By ALLISON MAJURE, lareporter@lamonitor.com, Monitor Staff Writer

Revisiting a motion that had narrowly passed by a 4-3 vote last month, Los Alamos County Council rescinded funding for the purchase of 17 Sequoia Pacific "Edge" touchscreen voting machines by a vote of 7-0 Tuesday.

Councilors Nona Bowman, Diane Albert and Mike Wheeler opposed the original motion on Oct. 28. At a meeting Nov. 4, Councilor Fran Berting asked councilors to support her motion to revisit the issue. They voted 5-2 to do so with Councilors Geoff Rogers and Jim West opposed. In light of newly received information, Berting sought an opportunity for further discussion on the voting machines, as well as an opportunity to change her vote.

The 17 machines would have been purchased by the county as back-up machines for each of Los Alamos' precincts. The State of New Mexico has already funded the purchase of 19 "Edge" touchscreen voting machines for Los Alamos through federal funding received as part of the Help America Vote Act.

The HAVA was enacted shortly after the presidential election of 2000 when discrepancies in Florida called the count into question. Among its requirements is the provision of voting machines for the visually impaired so that they may vote independently without personal assistance.

During public comments, Kathy Campbell read her letter to the editor to the councilors and highlighted the fact that the proprietary software that tabulates the votes is not failsafe. Any tabulation errors indicated, would need to be researched by Sequoia Pacific technicians, because the software is proprietary, she said.

"Australia, Canada and New Zealand use open source software for their voting machines, which are reliant on an open source operating system such as Linux or UNIX," she said in an interview today.

Charlie Strauss also provided information for the councilors, saying the state deadline for the use of these machines is 2006, not 2004 as was previously asserted. He said, "There's no need to rush, we're going to have good machines soon," indicating that machines with a ballot-level voter verification capacity might be on the market shortly.

Strauss urged councilors to send a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State expressing concerns about the validity of the "Edge" machine's output. He referred to New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt's bill, HR 2239, which is sponsored by 61 other congressional representatives, as useful for its language which objects to touchscreen machines made by Diebold, Sequioa-Pacific, ESS and others.

The councilors unanimously endorsed a motion to rescind funding for the voting machines and to draft a letter to the New Mexico Secretary of State, articulating Los Alamos' concerns.

Re:Evidence?

[wytcld]

if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000?

What the evidence shows is that it is easily possible to rig these machines. What historical evidence shows is that people who can rig elections sometimes do. For instance, Lyndon Johnson first got into the Senate because of ballot box stuffing in one Texas county; and there were a lot of people in Cook County, Illinois who managed to vote for JFK despite their graveyard residences. There were some stuffed ballot boxes in Kansas City when Truman first got into the Senate too.

So we can conclude from history that given the chance, Democrats at least will sometimes rig elections. Are Republicans more pure? How about those Republicans who cheated California on electricity, or the Republicans who have cheated mutual fund holders out of what's looking to add up to billions (okay, there may be a few Democrats among executives in those industries - perhaps 5%)? With the Republicans particularly adept at cycling people between public and private office, we should assume that their ethics in public office are uniformly different than when they're in private "enterprise"?

You can't deny this about individual Republicans: they're enterprising. And so, history shows, have been the Democrats. It's not a conspiracy theory that's the problem here, it's the notion that history has been repealed and our current vote counters are angels.

Yeah, right.