Incite

Florida Shifts to Voting Machines with a Paper Trail

Finally, Floriday is moving to more reliable - and verifiable - voting machines with paper trails.  Other states are making the change as well.

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., Feb. 1 — Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Florida to Shift Voting System With Paper Trail - New York Time

technorati tags:politics, voting, e-voting, election, papertrail, touchscreen, Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Congress

A Corrupted Election - The Exit Polls Were Right

This article confirms that significant discrepancies between exit polls and voting tallies are accepted as a clear evidence of fraud by governments - our included - when they occur in other countries.  Why that was not discussed when that happened here is very troubling.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the “ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.” Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.

A Corrupted Election -- Despite What You've Heard, The Exit Polls Were Right

technorati tags:voting, e-voting, fraud, exitpolls, exit, polls, election, Bush, Kerry, Gore

Vote Recount to Settle Doubts?

Nader is going to give us our first look into how electronic voting machines actually performed in this election. He's asking for a recount in New Hampshire where several anomalies were reported. He's only asking for a recount in some counties with optical-scan machines - which is where most of the anomalies occurred - not where they used paper ballots.

Ida Briggs compared this year's votes with last years. She has been a statistical analyst of databases for the telecom industry as well as a software programmer for many years. There were enough oddities in the data to suggest a recount was in order - and they had a paper trail (established in 1994) which made a recount possible.

She chose to examine New Hampshire's data because Kerry won it, thus this will not be perceived as a way to overturn the election - which it isn't. She just wants to find out if there were any problems remaining, or if they've all been sorted out.

Most people would have expected John Kerry's performance at the polls this year to be similar to Al Gore's in 2000. And in 229 out of 300 voting districts, or wards as they're called in New Hampshire, that was the case. Kerry either matched the percentage of votes that Gore received in 2000 in those wards or did better than Gore. But in 71 wards, Briggs found, Bush did better in 2004 than he did in 2000.

When Briggs broke the 71 wards down by voting equipment -- separating wards into those that used traditional paper ballots and those that used optical-scan machines -- she discovered that 73 percent of the wards used optical-scan equipment, while only 27 percent used traditional paper ballots. Even more interesting was the breakdown per brand of voting equipment. New Hampshire wards used optical-scan equipment made by Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software. About 62 percent of the wards with anomalous results used Diebold machines.

"Which is pretty high," Briggs said. "Especially in comparison to hand-counted paper ballots, which accounted for only 27 percent of the out-of-trend wards."
....

"The numbers could be real," Briggs said. "But to be this dramatically outside of the trend raises some red flags."

Computer Loses 4,500 Votes

The reports of voting machine errors are coming in. The errors are not being flagged - or prevented - by the machines, as they should be. Here are a couple:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- 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 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Read more: Wired News: E-Vote Glitch Inflates Bush Total

Voting: Hackers May be Targeting Central Computers

Three hours are missing from the central computer "audit log" in the Sept. 14th election in King County, Washington. This log is supposed to be a continuously generated record of what happens in the computer - no breaks. There are other sings of possible hacking.

MONDAY Nov 1 2004: New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. “Turning off” the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

Read more: Black Box Voting

E-Voting Tests Get Failing Grade

Our procedures for testing voting machine software are primitive and do not discover major flaws in the software. They need to be made much more stringent.

Last year, computer scientists found that the Diebold system still possessed the same flaws Jones had flagged six years earlier, despite subsequent rounds of testing.

"I thought surely something must have changed in all of that time," Jones said. "There's really very little excuse for the examiners not to have noticed."

Read more: Wired News: E-Voting Tests Get Failing Grade

E-Vote Vendors Hand Over Software

Several of the major voting machine makers have agreed to turn over their software to the National Software Reference Library. Their software comprises 90% of the voting software to be used in this year's elections. They are turning over the object code, not the source code. This means officials cannot check to see if the software itself has errors or is doing what it is supposed to do.

This is a good first step.

NIST's voting software library was established too late this year to examine software that has already been loaded onto locked voting machines, so election officials won't be able to verify that they have unchanged, certified software before Tuesday's election.

But if questions about the veracity of a voting system arise after the election, computer forensic experts will be able to compare the software used on machines with the software in the NIST library to see if the software was altered. They can do this by comparing cryptographic hash files, which are digital fingerprints that identify the integrity of software. Like human fingerprints, no two digital fingerprints taken from software are identical.

Read more: Wired News: E-Vote Vendors Hand Over Software

Computer problems in Broward Early Voting Sites

They are having voting machine problems in Florida already. The systems have not been adequately worked out. Rev. Jesse Jackson was at Florida A&M recommending the students vote early to help get the kinks out of the system. This is going to be a great election.

Susan Emert waited for two hours - starting at 8:20 a.m. -- before she finally had to leave for work.

"They had all the time from when they said the voting machines will be used, all the time to perfect them, and here we are, up the creek," she said, throwing her arms wildly up in the air. "This is really another black eye for the county. I'm so fed up."

Link: Sun-Sentinel.com - Computer problems reported at Broward early voting sites

VOTE!

It's not too late to register - this election is very important!

A note from our civic-minded friends at AIVF today: November 2nd is fast approaching, and that means it will be time to vote in the 2004 Presidential Election. It is not too late to register to vote. With the help of www.november2.org and www.yourvotematters.org AIVF is offering an easy solution if you have not registered yet....

Link: Indie Newswire Insider - VOTE!

Overseas Voter Website Censored by U.S. Government

Voting is the foundation of our democracy yet we seem to be discouraging people from voting:

The International Herald Tribune reported on September 20th that "the Pentagon has begun restricting international access to the official Web site intended to help overseas absentee voters cast ballots." Pentagon spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke confirmed that a number of Internet service providers worldwide had been blacklisted "to thwart hackers." Such measures are generally recognized to be ineffective against hackers while blocking legitimate users.

Apparently, the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) website is now blocked to civilians overseas trying to find out how to obtain absentee ballots in at least 25 countries--including Japan, France, Great Britain, and Spain--although military personnel overseas have other mechanisms for requesting absentee ballots.

Read more: Overseas Voter Website Censored by U.S. Government