E-voting faces new scrutiny

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in November, up from 32 million in 2002 and 20 million in 2000. In October, the U.S. Senate voted to increase from $500 million to $1.5 billion the budget for grants to states for election reform improvements mandated under HAVA.

Despite some critics' predictions of widespread and major problems, electronic voting machines made a respectable showing in the U.S. elections. Though issues cropped up in almost every state that used e-voting machines, all were relatively minor, and most could be attributed to poorly trained poll workers, problems caused by voters or other circumstances, according to poll observers.

Known glitches include a transmission error in the battleground state of Ohio that gave President Bush almost 4,000 phantom votes in the preliminary results posted online, the secretary of state's office in Ohio acknowledged. Meanwhile, data from Florida has raised eyebrows and led to at least one analysis that claimed the result of voting there is statistically implausible.

Analysis of voter behavior
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley published on Friday a statistical analysis of irregularities in Florida voter behavior that contends voting patterns favored Bush to the tune of 130,000 to 260,000 votes.

The report analyzed the statistical relationships between Florida's Nov. 2 results and a variety of factors, including historical trends in Florida, racial factors and county size. According to the analysis, people using e-voting machines tended to favor Bush in proportion to the number of registered Democrats in each county.

The group stressed that results were not proof of any errors in counting the vote but merely suggested that some link existed between the type of machine used to tally votes and the margin by which Bush won.

"Without a paper trail, statistical comparisons of jurisdictions that used e-voting are the only tool available to diagnose problems with the new technology," the researchers said in the report.

Paperless e-voting machines accounted for 29 percent of the Nov. 2 vote tally, according to VerifiedVoting.org.

"There were widespread malfunctions and errors, and we're pleased that the GAO will apparently be investigating these incidents, and hopefully it will lead to improvement in regulation and technology," said Will Doherty executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation.

A representative for e-voting machine maker Hart InterCivic, which provided some 25,000 machines used in the November election, said the company welcomes the findings of the GAO.

"A lot of different studies have said a lot of different things, so if someone from the government wants to look at the results and get to the facts, then I think that's good," said Michelle Shafer, director of communications at Hart InterCivic. Shafer added that testing already occurs in many of the counties that use e-voting machines.

Representatives lobby for probe
Shortly after the election, five Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives began lobbying the GAO to conduct an independent investigation. In two letters, sent Nov. 5 and Nov. 8, Reps. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., and Robert Wexler, D-Fla., asked the GAO to investigate various complaints about election machine technology and procedural issues preventing some votes from being counted. Two other members of the House of Representatives, Robert Scott, D-Va., and Rush Holt, D-N.J., signed the Nov. 8 letter.

The lawmakers provided the GAO with some 57,000 incident reports that had been received by the House Judiciary Committee.

The representatives asked the GAO to move quickly while there was still evidence from the election to analyze.

"There is substantial concern that much of the primary evidence needed to evaluate these allegations will not be preserved without immediate action," they argued in the Nov. 8 letter.

Eight other members of the House of Representatives gave their support to the GAO request as well, the representatives said in their statement.

"The GAO is a fair and honest nonpartisan body, and we are hopeful that it will look at all the issues and problems that came up and will seriously consider recommending changes," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had previously called on the GAO recommendations to conduct independent testing of results from e-voting machines.

But she added that the GAO's recommendations would likely apply only to future elections. "Our expectation is that the GAO's study won't be completed in time to affect current results," she said.

[unknown unknown]

They never get it wrong when counting money

Many of these e-Voting machines also make systems used in finacial transactions (such as Diebold). If they can get the count right in fincial transactions why not in something equally important (our elections). I am a programmer my self and it doesn't seem like it should be all that hard to accurately count how many people voted Bush and how many voted Kerry (same for the election senators etc). It doesn't require alot of code to set up and interface that allows the user to pick on canidate or the other.

[granny6x]

18 Amazing Facts about this "Election"

Every American should know these 18 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

Did you know....?

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diebold
http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1647886
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator in a surprise upset, with votes counted by ES&S machines.
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26
http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
http://www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
http://theindependent.com/stories/052700/new_hagel27.html
8. Kenneth Blackwell co-chaired George Bush's Ohio election campaign. As Ohio secretary of state, he left no stone unturned to surpress the democratic vote.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/113004Y.shtml#1
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/894
http://67.15.90.110/article.pl?sid=04/10/29/1414219
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/041020evotestates/pfindex.html

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.diebold.com/solutions/default.htm

11. Exit polls are usually excellent predictors of election results. Reputable analyses could not find and explanation of the discrepancy between exit polls and results of the 2004 presidential election.
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/
http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/Unexplained_exit_poll_discrep_v00l.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/international/europe/23ukraine.html?ex=1102245800&ei=1&en=3a3c24b7e64fe49

12. A Diebold subsidiary employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers. These people helped write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/10/301469.shtml

13. Jeff Dean, senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
14. Jeff Dean was served jail time for planting back doors in his client's accounting software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/10/26/loc_elexoh.html
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!
(See the movie here with the chimp<http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov>.)
http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4874190

17. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.rise4news.net/extravotes.html
http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=950
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

18. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.
http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm
http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/tens_of_thousands.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.htmlhttp://uscountvotes.org/


Based on a list compiled by Angry Girl http://nightweed.com/usavotefacts.html
______________________________________________
Were American's votes were deliberately miscounted?

If this was done, it means, quite literally, that we are no longer living in a democracy.

When I read the list a few days ago, some of the allegations just seemed too preposterous to believe. Like:

"Jeff Dean, senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code...served jail time for planting back doors in his client's accounting software and using a 'high degree of sophistication' to evade detection over a period of 2 years."

I tracked down the author of the list, who graciously responded with a list of references for each allegation. I checked out this Jeff Dean thing in particular. It didn't take long to get to this:

According to the findings of fact in case no. 89-1-04034-1 (Washington State):
"...Defendant's thefts occurred over a 2 1/2 year period of time, there were multiple incidents, more than the standard range can account for, the actual monetary loss was substantially greater than typical for the offense, the crimes and their cover-up involved a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim, and the defendant used his position of trust and fiduciary responsibility as a computer systems and accounting consultant for the victim to facilitate the commission of the offenses."

Another one of the references led to a detailed account of the double database technique pioneered by Mr. Dean to enable electronically tabulated votes give a false total while still presenting accurate details in case of spot audits.

In combination with the constellation of undisputed circumstantial evidence and open conflicts of interest, these last details are just too damning to ignore.

A cloud over the validity of the American electoral process is not acceptable.