Judge Suppresses Report On Voting Systems

Irvu writes "A New Jersey Superior Court Judge has prohibited the release of an analysis conducted on the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting system. This report arose out of a lawsuit challenging on constitutional grounds the use of these systems. The study was conducted by Andrew Appel on behalf of the plaintiffs, after the judge in the case ordered the company to permit it. That same judge has now withheld it indefinitely from the public record on a verbal order."

Comments

Sounds like Sequoia is trying to avoid bad press

[morgan_greywolf]

According to TFA the judge was reluctant to suppress the report. The lawyers for Sequoia Voting Systems, which was not a party to the lawsuit, basically told the Court some BS about the report, and the judge, wanting to be fair to Sequoia, reluctantly agreed to suppress it for now. My guess is that a redacted version, which strikes out Sequoia's trade secret information, will eventually be released.

Conspiracy theorists need to put away their tinfoil hats on this one. It's pretty obvious what's going on here.

Trade secrets are by definition never published!

[Z-MaxX]

This has little to do with trade secrets, which are often published, and which are protected by patents.

You are completely and totally wrong on this.

FACTS

1. Trade secrets are never published. In fact the holder of a trade secret fails to protect it well enough and it is discovered, then it becomes public domain information.

2. Trade secrets and patents are mutually exclusive concepts. You either (a) choose to make something a trade secret and keep it secret, or (b) choose to publish information and patent the thing.

The reason patents were introduced is to create an incentive for companies to knowledge of an invention with the world around, and in exchange for that, the government gives the inventor exclusive rights to make money from that invention for a reasonable and limited time.

References

Patent or trade secret?
  Patent, Trademark, and Trade Secret

Re:this does not look good for the judge.

[jean-guy69]

1 man "expert witness" review of source code ?

If you cared to read the article, you would have learn that Andrew appel led an examination team including himself and 5 other computer scientists (Maia Ginsburg, Harri Hursti, Brian Kernighan, Chris Richards, and Gang Tan).

Author just another Dem Activist

[RenderSeven]

Andy Appel donated $4000 to Kerry http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/09/13/news/10683.shtml and originally complained that his voting machine had an extra vote for Obama. Now that the primary is over his conspiracy theory has switched to focusing on an extra vote for Republicans. Andy would probably like the machine just fine if it had an extra vote for Clinton.

Donating $4000 to Democrats hardly gives me a warm 'n fuzzy that Andy Appel's report or blog can be trusted to be objective. Since he is basically the plaintif as well, he has no reason to be objective either. That's fine I guess, but the media reports and his own blog suggest he is some kind of independant expert retained by the court, which is absolutely untrue and misleading.

And screw our objective /. editors that immediately tagged the story with "onemorevoteformccain", although a recent check says they thought better of it.

Re:Wikileaks?

[Zcar]

Maybe so, but a New Jersey judge has no authority to do so. Article I Section 4 and Article II Section 1 of the US Constitution give ultimate authority over the time of elections to Congress. The Congressional and Presidential elections must occur the Tuesday after the first Monday in November according to 2 USC 1, 2 USC 7 and 3 USC 1 (3 USC 2 seems to give a little wriggle room, but only for Electors).

We have a good idea what is in the report

[grandpa-geek]

It probably doesn't make the machines look any better than the report on Sequoia machines done by the California Secretary of State (http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm) or the recent followup done by UCSB, including a video showing how even a paper trail version can be compromised (http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/).

We know these machines are garbage, are easily manipulated, compromise the determination of the "consent of the governed", and thereby are threats to our democracy.

Tampering with voting machines and voting result reporting has been the basis of George Bush's presidency and has led to Republican victories in senate and governorship elections. For example, look at
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html
  and
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/Documents_reveal_Georgia_was_warned_of_0730.html
  and

http://web6.duc.auburn.edu/~gundljh/Baldwin.pdf

It will probably take many years to discover the scope of Republican election fraud. Eventually, history will record that banking deregulation, unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthy, failure to pursue alternative energy development (as a favor to the oil and gas industry), and many other of our nation's problems had their roots in voting machine manipulation.

Re:this does not look good for the judge.

[Mr. Slippery]

OK, so where do you plan to get enough money

Same way governments get money for anything else: taxes.

I know those on the far right like to believe that somehow if we keep cutting taxes we'll raise government revenue - sort of like how internet bubble entrepreneurs would lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume. But it doesn't work that way.

Now, later, maybe some of that expense can be made up with lawsuits against the companies that provided the defective voting machines. And maybe money will have to be moved out of other expenditures to balance the books. But right now, in the next month New Jersey must take on this expense of replacing those defective machines; hand-counted paper ballots are the cheapest way to do so.

The Constitution guarantees each state a republican (small-r!) form of government; accurate balloting is a necessary precondition for that. If necessary, then, the federal government must provide emergency funding (probably in the form of a loan).

Reliable voting is not an option, it is a necessity. The money can be raised.

to 1) print all the ballots, on machines we don;t have to print them on

What, the state government doesn't have fscking laser printers? Or couldn't get a rush order done at a commercial printer? C'mon.

and get them to all the polling centers.

What, the state government doesn't have fscking cars and trucks? Or couldn't get FedEx to do the deliveries? C'mon.

Then, we'd have to manually recount all those ballots, twice.

So? Canada does it; if a nation of 33 million can do it, a state of 8 1/2 million can too.

Of course, all this is what what happen in a sane and democratic society. In our crazy corporate plutocracy, I expect that New Jersey will somehow end up giving more money to the vendors and will go ahead and conduct a meaningless, unreliable election.

Much easier if we know the machines faults, can take the elction on existing equipment, then cross check the machine's security

Cross-check them against what? If we had verifiable receipts to validate the machines against, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

Besides, there's not enough certified election officials to handle it, and we could not get enough volunteers in time trained and ready to handle the counting.

Nonsense. Counting ballots hardly requires extensive training. Hire a bunch of teenagers at a bit above minimum wage. Or, does NJ have a "volunteer" hour requirement for high school students? I'm opposed to them, but if it's in place, this would be a great opportunity for the kids to burn that off.

These machines are not centrally networked, so to have en effect on even 5% of the election total, someone would have to hacke dozens of machines each at hundreds of polling sites.

The problem is not, or at least not just, "hackers" messing with these machines. The problem is that they are broken when they leave the factory, as New Jersey's past experience with them shows.

Re:once again...

[T.E.D.]

Technically that was against the *county* government.

I believe the last armed revolt against the Federal government was the Green Corn Rebellion in 1917. It happened in that old reliable hotbed of left-wing activity, Oklahoma.