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Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
The fact that the company is using legal threats to suppress investigation into the errors is a good argument for using open source equipment that anyone can inspect. I do NOT trust a proprietary solution.
Currently hooked on AMP
What do you think the chance of this affecting the use of voting machines is? How often is anything of great significance altered due evidence being presented that it is inadequate?
Rationality is on the defensive. It certainly doesn't have much place in public policy any more. In every aspect of life, people are being convinced that the universe is not subject to laws which can inform our actions by predicting consequences, but that we are at the mercy of outside forces beyond our understanding, let alone control.
The 'Invisible hand' of the market means we must accept everything capitalism throws at us. The 'Intelligent designer' controls all life and we must not meddle with it. The natural rhythms or the Earth/Sun are responsible for global warming, so environmentalism is futile.
In the face of such a widespread campaign to render people helpless and reason impotent, no amount of evidence will achieve anything.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story ... ...
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1267
"Let's assume the Democrat party is assigned option switch 6 while the Republican Party is assigned options switch 12. If a Democrat voter arrives, the poll worker presses the "6 button followed by the green "Activate" button. The Democrat contests are activated and the voter votes the ballot. "
Then the following comment nails it:
"Rich Kulawiec Says:
March 20th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I'm working through this explanation with a paper-and-pencil mockup, but meanwhile I'll note Sequoia's use of the right-wing code phrase "Democrat Party" instead of "Democratic Party". It seems to have become fashionable of late among some to use this term as a thinly-veiled insult, then deny that it's intentional. Given how carefully [at least some portions of] this explanation seem to be worded, I don't for a moment believe this is a mistake."
In this case there are almost certainly multiple errors, one of which is the design error sequoia explained that causes the wrong ballot to be recorded.
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.