This week brought an interesting and troublesome variety of news stories. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times' Jordan Rau reported in this article about how new voter registration database laws resulting from the Help America Vote Act and an agreement signed by California Secretary of State and the Department of Justice have created a stringent verification process resulting in the blockage of large numbers of new registrations. According to Rau's article, Los Angeles County has seen 43 percent of its new registrations in the past few months rejected in the new system, which requires an exact match of the name provided on the registration card and on a driver's license.
A related issue that is growing more controversial is over the push by some politicians and in several states to require identification at the polls. This commentary by Lorraine C. Minnite, a political science professor at Barnard College, examines the claims of widespread voter fraud being made to justify the ID requirement, and finds them lacking. In her piece, Minnite tells how she looked at news coverage over a five-year period in six states with the most leniant voter registration systems and found only eleven cases of reported attempts of voter fraud. Her commentary provides other statistics suggesting that an ID requirement would have a disproportionate impact on the poor and people of color.
And last, but not least, some big news out of Pennsylvania, where Mike Shamos, longtime certification expert for that state recently conducted certification testing of Sequoia's Advantage full-face touchscreen voting machine and vote counting system. These machines are different from the Edge machines used in California, and don't produce a voter-verified paper audit trail. On Monday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published this article by Jerome L. Sherman that discusses Shamos' testing plans as well as his years-old bet to give $10,000 to anyone who can hack into a touch screen voting machine undetected.
It appears that Dr. Shamos may have won his own bet. On Wednesday Tracie Mauriello reported in the Post-Gazette in this article that Dr. Shamos halted the testing on Wednesday after he found that he could tamper with the results. Today's Philadelphia Inquirer also features this story by Jeff Shields and Nancy Petersen, titled "Voting software vulnerable to hackers". Excerpts from both articles are featured below.
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(from the Post-Gazette)
Dr. Shamos encountered yesterday's problem during a test for vote tampering. In an instant, he said, he was able to transform a handful of votes into thousands.
Developers quickly fixed the problem by replacing a file in the tabulation software, but that didn't alleviate Dr. Shamos' concerns. A malicious hacker could easily make the same switch, allowing votes to be changed, he said.
"What control is there over the software package if different files can be swapped in and out?" he asked.
Also yesterday, Dr. Shamos uncovered a series of unusual error messages and a fluke that causes the program to shut down when the "print" button is used.
A day earlier, he detected a problem transferring data between voting machines and the tabulation software. That problem has since been fixed.
Larry Tonelli, Sequoia's state manager for Pennsylvania and New York, said he was confident the latest problem can be resolved, too.
"We know the hardware is fine. It's been out there for eight or nine years so we're moving ahead with training and shipping machines [to Allegheny County]. The software doesn't need to work until just before the election so we've got time. It's no big deal," he said.
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(from the Philadelphia Inquirer)
The problem arose not in individual voting machines, but in a central control unit that compiles votes from each precinct.
Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview he was able to hack in and change totals during a state test. The machines are also being purchased by Allegheny County.
"I found that by altering one file I could change vote totals from 10 to over 8,000," he said. "It easily let me do that, so the security mechanisms associated with county central are deficient."
In another test involving a referendum question, the system would not allow a "no" vote.
"I told them to do a comprehensive fix and a comprehensive test and come back in two weeks," he said. "If they fix it, we can distribute one copy to Allegheny County and one copy to Montgomery County and we're good to go."
Allegheny is buying 2,800 machines, and Montgomery is upgrading software in its existing 1,050 machines. There are no problems with the machines that are in each precinct, he said.
Michelle Shafer, a spokeswoma for Sequoia, said the company, based in California, was confident the software would pass a second test. She said the environment in which Shamos encountered problems was not a typical voting situation.
"Someone had full, unfettered access to the voting software, which would not be the case in an actual election," Shafer said.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
County voting plans come into focus at Prop. 41 board meeting
Yesterday I attended the California Voting Modernization Board (VMB) meeting at the Secretary of State's office in Sacramento. This board was established through Prop. 41, which voters passed in 2002 to provide counties with money to upgrade their voting equipment.
Many of the early funding awards made by the board were for counties to use all electronic voting equipment in polling places, and the amounts were huge. It was quite a contrast yesterday. Several counties that received funding approval yesterday are not using the full amount of Prop. 41 money they are entitled to, and of the seven on the agenda, all but one is using their funds to pay for paper-based voting systems. For three counties, this includes the Automark, a paper-based assistive voting device marketed by ES&S.
There has been a lot of pressure for counties to go all-electronic -- from vendors, from the large amounts of state and federal funds made available, and most recently, from the looming Help America Vote Act deadline requiring any HAVA funds spent after January 1, 2007 to be used solely for equipment that is accessible to all voters. It could not be used to support voting machinery, such as in-precinct optical scans for paper-based systems that help reduce paper-ballot marking errors like overvotes.
There are administrative concerns as well. The one county on the agenda that has gone all-electronic was Inyo, which purchased 45 Sequoia Edge electronic voting machines and 56 VeriVote paper trail printers. VMB staffer Jana Lean reported that the county only considered DREs for polling places and that it would be too complicated for pollworkers to use different systems.
But there are a number of California counties that have held on to paper voting systems and are retaining them even though have access to funds to buy more equipment. Many of the counties are upgrading to in-precinct optical scan voting systems, and ballots will be scanned at the precinct so that voters have an opportunity to correct mistakes.
None of the counties up on the agenda yesterday are planning to purchase more than one assistive device per polling place. The issue of how many assistive devices are needed at polling places has come up lately, especially in Alameda County, where the acting registrar of voters is pressing to have two electronic voting machines per polling place. Although this would be a reduction over what Alameda has previously had, which is all-electronic, it still strikes many as excessive.
I took a look recently at Sacramento County's experience using ES&S Automarks in about a third of its polling places last November. Registrar of Voters Jill LaVine reported to the California Senate at a February hearing that nearly 1,000 votes were cast on the Automarks across the county. Any voter who wanted to use the Automark could do so, and pollworkers said that many wanted to try it out because it was new. By my estimates, if the Automark had been available in all Sacramento polling places, ballots cast using these devices would have accounted for about 1.6 percent of all the ballots cast at the polls (and this is even in the case where all voters, and not just those with disabilities, are allowed to use it). It's fair to assume that the percentage of assistive-device ballots that will be cast in most counties will amount to no more than one or two percent of all the polling place ballots.
Most county registrars already know this. And, regardless of the percentage of users, providing all voters the ability to cast a secret ballot without assistance is not only a desired goal, but also a federal and state mandate.
But the statistics from Sacramento bear out the fact that one device per polling place ought to be sufficient to meet accessibility needs. It turns out there may be another reason why Alameda and some other Diebold counties may want two electronic voting machines per polling place. The way Diebold's electronic balloting is currently designed and certified requires two TSx machines to function -- one to program the ballot activation card, and another for casting the votes.
The counties going with Diebold who were on the agenda yesterday include El Dorado and Sierra, which is the second-smallest county in the state and is doing all-mail balloting this June. As for El Dorado, it's unclear how many TSx machines or what extra Diebold equipment might be necessary for the accessible units to operate. El Dorado, like Alameda, is planning to lease TSx machines from San Diego County, which purchased 10,000 of them back in 2004 but does not plan to go all-electronic this June.
San Luis Obispo County has taken on the added challenge of using equipment from two different vendors -- Diebold for in-precinct optical scan paper balloting, and ES&S Automarks for accessibility. I asked the county's registrar before the meeting about whether she'd managed to get Diebold to cooperate with ES&S in her county, since I have read reports from other states that Diebold has objected to combining its equipment with other vendors. The answer was no, and the plan is that if San Luis Obispo can't machine-count the Automark paper ballots they will count them by hand.
Overall, there continues to be a fair amount of uncertainty going forward in California as we move toward voting systems that are both secure and accessible. But headway is definitely being made. More details about county plans are included in the staff reports available on the VMB site.
Many of the early funding awards made by the board were for counties to use all electronic voting equipment in polling places, and the amounts were huge. It was quite a contrast yesterday. Several counties that received funding approval yesterday are not using the full amount of Prop. 41 money they are entitled to, and of the seven on the agenda, all but one is using their funds to pay for paper-based voting systems. For three counties, this includes the Automark, a paper-based assistive voting device marketed by ES&S.
There has been a lot of pressure for counties to go all-electronic -- from vendors, from the large amounts of state and federal funds made available, and most recently, from the looming Help America Vote Act deadline requiring any HAVA funds spent after January 1, 2007 to be used solely for equipment that is accessible to all voters. It could not be used to support voting machinery, such as in-precinct optical scans for paper-based systems that help reduce paper-ballot marking errors like overvotes.
There are administrative concerns as well. The one county on the agenda that has gone all-electronic was Inyo, which purchased 45 Sequoia Edge electronic voting machines and 56 VeriVote paper trail printers. VMB staffer Jana Lean reported that the county only considered DREs for polling places and that it would be too complicated for pollworkers to use different systems.
But there are a number of California counties that have held on to paper voting systems and are retaining them even though have access to funds to buy more equipment. Many of the counties are upgrading to in-precinct optical scan voting systems, and ballots will be scanned at the precinct so that voters have an opportunity to correct mistakes.
None of the counties up on the agenda yesterday are planning to purchase more than one assistive device per polling place. The issue of how many assistive devices are needed at polling places has come up lately, especially in Alameda County, where the acting registrar of voters is pressing to have two electronic voting machines per polling place. Although this would be a reduction over what Alameda has previously had, which is all-electronic, it still strikes many as excessive.
I took a look recently at Sacramento County's experience using ES&S Automarks in about a third of its polling places last November. Registrar of Voters Jill LaVine reported to the California Senate at a February hearing that nearly 1,000 votes were cast on the Automarks across the county. Any voter who wanted to use the Automark could do so, and pollworkers said that many wanted to try it out because it was new. By my estimates, if the Automark had been available in all Sacramento polling places, ballots cast using these devices would have accounted for about 1.6 percent of all the ballots cast at the polls (and this is even in the case where all voters, and not just those with disabilities, are allowed to use it). It's fair to assume that the percentage of assistive-device ballots that will be cast in most counties will amount to no more than one or two percent of all the polling place ballots.
Most county registrars already know this. And, regardless of the percentage of users, providing all voters the ability to cast a secret ballot without assistance is not only a desired goal, but also a federal and state mandate.
But the statistics from Sacramento bear out the fact that one device per polling place ought to be sufficient to meet accessibility needs. It turns out there may be another reason why Alameda and some other Diebold counties may want two electronic voting machines per polling place. The way Diebold's electronic balloting is currently designed and certified requires two TSx machines to function -- one to program the ballot activation card, and another for casting the votes.
The counties going with Diebold who were on the agenda yesterday include El Dorado and Sierra, which is the second-smallest county in the state and is doing all-mail balloting this June. As for El Dorado, it's unclear how many TSx machines or what extra Diebold equipment might be necessary for the accessible units to operate. El Dorado, like Alameda, is planning to lease TSx machines from San Diego County, which purchased 10,000 of them back in 2004 but does not plan to go all-electronic this June.
San Luis Obispo County has taken on the added challenge of using equipment from two different vendors -- Diebold for in-precinct optical scan paper balloting, and ES&S Automarks for accessibility. I asked the county's registrar before the meeting about whether she'd managed to get Diebold to cooperate with ES&S in her county, since I have read reports from other states that Diebold has objected to combining its equipment with other vendors. The answer was no, and the plan is that if San Luis Obispo can't machine-count the Automark paper ballots they will count them by hand.
Overall, there continues to be a fair amount of uncertainty going forward in California as we move toward voting systems that are both secure and accessible. But headway is definitely being made. More details about county plans are included in the staff reports available on the VMB site.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Diebold in the spotlight - again - as counties make plans for the upcoming election
This week's LA City Beat features this article by reporter and author Andrew Gumbel, highlighting Leon County, FL election supervisor Ion Sancho's courageous efforts to ensure secure voting in his county. Sancho made national news late last year when he allowed Finnish computer programmer Harri Hursti to attempt a hack of Diebold's optical scan voting system. Hursti's attempts worked, leaving Sancho and many others deeply concerned about voting system security.
The Hursti hack in Leon County was followed by a review of some of Diebold's voting system software by California's Voting System Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB). That committee found sixteen new software problems with the Diebold software they inspected, and recommended procedures that, if carefully implemented, they said could mitigate the vulnerabilities. Secretary McPherson certified Diebold's newest voting system with conditions based on the VSTAAB report.
Meanwhile, over in San Joaquin County, Registrar of Voters and Diebold customer Debbie Hench engaged in some revisionist history this week when she told her local newspaper, the Stockton Record, in this article by Greg Kane, that "The state tested this system seven ways to Sunday. They didn't find anything wrong." Nothing could be further from the truth. While it can certainly be debated whether the conditions Secretary McPherson placed on Diebold's system are sufficient, there is no question that the conditions were imposed in the first place due to security concerns identified by the VSTAAB group.
Several Diebold counties are pulling back on their acquisition of new equipment from their current vendor. According to this article by Rebecca Bender of the Eureka Reporter, Humboldt County is now planning to use the Vote-PAD, a non-technical assistive device that Yolo county has also selected to meet the federal accessibility requirement. Up until recently, the game plan in Humboldt was to place one Diebold TSx machine per polling place to comply with the federal law. And next door, in Mendocino County, registrar of voters Marsha Wharf this week said she has consolidated her county's polling places so that more than half the voters will now reside in mail-in precincts, which will drastically reduce the number of accessible units the county needs. According to this article by Mike Adair in The Willits News, "Wharf said approximately 21,700 people in the county will be able to vote at polling places, while another 26,475 will have no other option than to mail their ballots. The 171 precincts that will vote by mail all have fewer than 250 registered voters, she added. All precincts with more than 250 people will provide polling places."
Humboldt and Mendocino are two of the eighteen counties named as defendents in the Voter Action lawsuit filed this week. But even before the lawsuit, several of the counties currently using Diebold equipment were already moving to reduce their reliance on Diebold products, and some have switched or are switching to entirely different vendors. According to documents available from the Voting Modernization Board's web site, Fresno County is switching from Diebold to ES&S, Tulare County is switching from Diebold to Sequoia, and San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are going to use the ES&S Automark rather than the Diebold TSx to comply with the federal accessibility law.
The Hursti hack in Leon County was followed by a review of some of Diebold's voting system software by California's Voting System Technology Assessment Advisory Board (VSTAAB). That committee found sixteen new software problems with the Diebold software they inspected, and recommended procedures that, if carefully implemented, they said could mitigate the vulnerabilities. Secretary McPherson certified Diebold's newest voting system with conditions based on the VSTAAB report.
Meanwhile, over in San Joaquin County, Registrar of Voters and Diebold customer Debbie Hench engaged in some revisionist history this week when she told her local newspaper, the Stockton Record, in this article by Greg Kane, that "The state tested this system seven ways to Sunday. They didn't find anything wrong." Nothing could be further from the truth. While it can certainly be debated whether the conditions Secretary McPherson placed on Diebold's system are sufficient, there is no question that the conditions were imposed in the first place due to security concerns identified by the VSTAAB group.
Several Diebold counties are pulling back on their acquisition of new equipment from their current vendor. According to this article by Rebecca Bender of the Eureka Reporter, Humboldt County is now planning to use the Vote-PAD, a non-technical assistive device that Yolo county has also selected to meet the federal accessibility requirement. Up until recently, the game plan in Humboldt was to place one Diebold TSx machine per polling place to comply with the federal law. And next door, in Mendocino County, registrar of voters Marsha Wharf this week said she has consolidated her county's polling places so that more than half the voters will now reside in mail-in precincts, which will drastically reduce the number of accessible units the county needs. According to this article by Mike Adair in The Willits News, "Wharf said approximately 21,700 people in the county will be able to vote at polling places, while another 26,475 will have no other option than to mail their ballots. The 171 precincts that will vote by mail all have fewer than 250 registered voters, she added. All precincts with more than 250 people will provide polling places."
Humboldt and Mendocino are two of the eighteen counties named as defendents in the Voter Action lawsuit filed this week. But even before the lawsuit, several of the counties currently using Diebold equipment were already moving to reduce their reliance on Diebold products, and some have switched or are switching to entirely different vendors. According to documents available from the Voting Modernization Board's web site, Fresno County is switching from Diebold to ES&S, Tulare County is switching from Diebold to Sequoia, and San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties are going to use the ES&S Automark rather than the Diebold TSx to comply with the federal accessibility law.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
New CA Lawsuit Against Diebold's Electronic Voting Machines
Today the nonprofit group Voter Action filed a lawsuit against California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson as well as eighteen counties for certifying and using voting equipment made by Diebold. The lead attorney on the lawsuit is Lowell Finley, who previously brought a successful case against Diebold on behalf of Bev Harris and Jim March of Black Box Voting. That case was joined by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Alameda County, and settled out of court for $2.6 million. (See my November 11, 2004 blog entry for details on the settlement).
Given Mr. Finley's track record, it's worthwhile to pay attention to his claims, which include that the equipment in question, the Diebold TSX electronic voting machine (with voter-verified paper audit trail printer) does not adequately meet the needs of disabled voters, nor does it meet the current, 2002 federal voting system standards, which prohibit the use of interpreted code in voting equipment software.
Other compelling claims include one that the voter-verified paper record produced by the the TSx cannot fulfill the demands of California's one percent manual count law, which is designed to publicly verify the accuracy of software vote counts, and another that counties are circumventing the one percent rule by omitting absentee and early-voting ballots in the manual count. Voter Action has provided the legal documents filed today on its web site. See this AP story by David Kravets for more details. Excerpts are featured below.
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The group Voter Action filed the lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that Diebold's touchscreen voting machines lack adequate security and aren't easily used by the disabled.
Machines made by Diebold Election Systems, based in Allen, Texas, are slated to be used in as many as 18 of California's 52 counties this November.
"We can't have trustworthy elections with Diebold's touch-screen voting machines," said Lowell Finley, an attorney representing about a dozen voters. "They are easily hacked."
Last month, California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson gave conditional approval to use the disputed voting machine - the AccuVote-TSX.
The Secretary of State's office said in December that the Diebold machines failed one of the 10 criteria he established for voting machines because the source coding, or computer language, on their memory cards was not reviewed by independent investigators.
But McPherson authorized the machines as long as counties take security precautions, including keeping a written log of who has control of the machines' memory cards.
McPherson spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns said the devices "are safe for use."
Diebold spokesman David Bear said there are 50,000 of the disputed models used in Utah, Mississippi, California and "a spattering of other states."
"The system has been thoroughly tested," Bear said.
Diebold is one of four electronic voting companies McPherson has allowed to operate in California.
State Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, said, "The secretary of state gave Diebold the green light to sell its machines in this state even though its machines don't meet the standards we put into law."
No court date has been set for the lawsuit.
The suit names the counties of Alameda, Fresno, Humbolt, Kern, Lassen, Los Angeles, Marin, Mendocino, Modoc, Placer, Plumas, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Siskiyou, Trinity and Tulare.
The case is Holder v. McPherson, 06-506171.
Given Mr. Finley's track record, it's worthwhile to pay attention to his claims, which include that the equipment in question, the Diebold TSX electronic voting machine (with voter-verified paper audit trail printer) does not adequately meet the needs of disabled voters, nor does it meet the current, 2002 federal voting system standards, which prohibit the use of interpreted code in voting equipment software.
Other compelling claims include one that the voter-verified paper record produced by the the TSx cannot fulfill the demands of California's one percent manual count law, which is designed to publicly verify the accuracy of software vote counts, and another that counties are circumventing the one percent rule by omitting absentee and early-voting ballots in the manual count. Voter Action has provided the legal documents filed today on its web site. See this AP story by David Kravets for more details. Excerpts are featured below.
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The group Voter Action filed the lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court alleging that Diebold's touchscreen voting machines lack adequate security and aren't easily used by the disabled.
Machines made by Diebold Election Systems, based in Allen, Texas, are slated to be used in as many as 18 of California's 52 counties this November.
"We can't have trustworthy elections with Diebold's touch-screen voting machines," said Lowell Finley, an attorney representing about a dozen voters. "They are easily hacked."
Last month, California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson gave conditional approval to use the disputed voting machine - the AccuVote-TSX.
The Secretary of State's office said in December that the Diebold machines failed one of the 10 criteria he established for voting machines because the source coding, or computer language, on their memory cards was not reviewed by independent investigators.
But McPherson authorized the machines as long as counties take security precautions, including keeping a written log of who has control of the machines' memory cards.
McPherson spokeswoman Jennifer Kerns said the devices "are safe for use."
Diebold spokesman David Bear said there are 50,000 of the disputed models used in Utah, Mississippi, California and "a spattering of other states."
"The system has been thoroughly tested," Bear said.
Diebold is one of four electronic voting companies McPherson has allowed to operate in California.
State Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, the chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, said, "The secretary of state gave Diebold the green light to sell its machines in this state even though its machines don't meet the standards we put into law."
No court date has been set for the lawsuit.
The suit names the counties of Alameda, Fresno, Humbolt, Kern, Lassen, Los Angeles, Marin, Mendocino, Modoc, Placer, Plumas, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Siskiyou, Trinity and Tulare.
The case is Holder v. McPherson, 06-506171.
Sequoia Touchscreen with Paper Trail Certified, With Conditions
Yesterday California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson announced that he has certified voting equipment manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. The equipment includes Sequoia's electronic voting machine with a voter-verified paper audit trail printer, which is designed to satisfy both the federal accessibility and state security laws.
As reported today in the Oakland Tribune, it is uncertain whether counties will purchase the newly certified equipment before the June 6 California Primary election. According to the article, Sequoia has "informed many counties that it needs three or more months to deliver after a sale."
A few counties that owned earlier models of Sequoia's touchscreens without the paper trail printer will need to either use paper ballots in June, modify their existing equipment with a printer unit, or purchase entirely new machines before the June Primary. Riverside County chose the last option, and has already taken delivery of the new equipment. In Shasta, however, the registrar of voters put her board of supervisors on notice a few weeks back that she may fail to comply with the state paper trail law.
Like the recent Diebold certification, Sequoia's came with conditions, many of which focus on the physical security of the removable memory card used in both vendors' electronic voting machines. There are new questions being raised, however, about whether these kinds of measures are adequate. Harri Hursti, the finish computer programmer who exposed security weaknesses in Diebold's optical scan voting system, recently traveled to Utah to take a close look at Diebold's latest electronic voting machine, the TSx. Access to the TSx was granted to Mr. Hursti by Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk. More details about this developing story are available from Bev Harris' Black Box Voting web site.
As reported today in the Oakland Tribune, it is uncertain whether counties will purchase the newly certified equipment before the June 6 California Primary election. According to the article, Sequoia has "informed many counties that it needs three or more months to deliver after a sale."
A few counties that owned earlier models of Sequoia's touchscreens without the paper trail printer will need to either use paper ballots in June, modify their existing equipment with a printer unit, or purchase entirely new machines before the June Primary. Riverside County chose the last option, and has already taken delivery of the new equipment. In Shasta, however, the registrar of voters put her board of supervisors on notice a few weeks back that she may fail to comply with the state paper trail law.
Like the recent Diebold certification, Sequoia's came with conditions, many of which focus on the physical security of the removable memory card used in both vendors' electronic voting machines. There are new questions being raised, however, about whether these kinds of measures are adequate. Harri Hursti, the finish computer programmer who exposed security weaknesses in Diebold's optical scan voting system, recently traveled to Utah to take a close look at Diebold's latest electronic voting machine, the TSx. Access to the TSx was granted to Mr. Hursti by Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk. More details about this developing story are available from Bev Harris' Black Box Voting web site.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Alameda supervisors vote 3-2 to move forward on new voting equipment
Yesterday the Alameda County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to grant their acting county registrar, Elaine Ginnold, permission to move forward on contract negotiations with two potential voting equipment vendors. The board members expressed reluctance to move forward and several wanted to consider options other than those presented by the registrar. But after a four-hour public meeting Monday night and more than an hour spent on this item during yesterday's weekly hearing, they went with the registrar's recommendation.
Ms. Ginnold wants the county to purchase two touchscreens per polling place for accessibility needs (despite the fact that federal law only requires there be one machine). When board members asked her if they could purchase a minimal amount of equipment for this year's election and delay making a large purchase at this time, Ms. Ginnold informed them that the Help America Vote Act requires that everything purchased after January 1, 2007, must be accessible. This was not an accurate description of the law, and is the second time I'm aware of that Ms. Ginnold has misled her board of supervisors about their equipment options. (The first instance was at the June 2005 hearing when she erroneously told her board that going with paper ballots and a limited number of touchscreens in each polling place could create an equal protection problem. See my June 29, 2005 blog entry for more details.)
Several supervisors commended the activists who attended the meeting for bringing important issues to light. They also made it clear that their decision yesterday is not final, since the results of the next round of negotiations will have to come back to the board for consideration and possible approval. Audio webcasts of Monday and Tuesday's meetings are available from the county's web site. More coverage of yesterday's hearing is featured in this article by Ian Hoffman in today's Oakland Tribune. Excerpts are featured below.
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Four years after buying new Diebold voting machines for $12 million, Alameda County is headed back into the market to negotiate for up to $17.8 million in new voting machinery.
With an impassioned debate spanning two days, county supervisors anguished over sagging public confidence in voting and uncertainty in the technology, then found themselves divided over how to handle elections for coming years.
"This is not the purchasing of a new vehicle fleet," board President Keith Carson said. "This is fundamental to all the rights of every citizen in the county."
"There's too many unknown things," Supervisor Gail Steele said. "This $17 million is a huge amount of money with the uncertainty that we have."
But when the county's elections chief warned that delays could trigger new federal requirements and force the county into filling its polling places with more electronic voting equipment, Alice Lai-Bitker joined supervisors Nate Miley and Scott Haggerty in pressing ahead with the purchase negotiations.
"There's a consequence to waiting," Acting Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold said. "If we're going to change voting systems, we have to change now so we can train voters and workers."
County elections and contracts officials will negotiate with Allen, Texas-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. and Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, the two voting-machine makers rated highest by a panel of voting advocates, residents and county officials.
The winning company would provide a system that principally handles paper ballots with optical ballot scanners plus two ATM-like touch-screen voting machines in each polling place like those the county uses now, the latter to meet federal mandates for handicapped-accessible voting equipment. The touch screens would print a backup record of the electronic ballot for voters to check and elections workers to use in recounts.
The decision marks a turning point for Alameda County and a noteworthy moment in the national debate over voting technology. Federal voting-reform law passed after the 2000 election debacle in Florida requires all U.S. counties to buy accessible voting equipment, and the machines that most easily accommodate the broadest array of disabled voters are highly computerized.
Yet the migration to fully computerized voting, fueled with billions in federal grant dollars, has collided with concern over vote manipulation and computer breakdowns.
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In June, for the first time in four years, the overwhelming majority of ballots cast in Alameda County will be on paper, and while Diebold remains highly rated as a vendor, its local political stock is low.
"I'm not supportive of Diebold, especially given all the problems that they continue to have," Carson said.
Steele, who led the board in buying the Diebold touch screens, now has her doubts and voted against negotiating for the new machines.
"I like voting on a touch screen, and I believe technologically speaking that we can get to a place where it can be made secure," she said.
For now, however, "I am persuaded that these people have not got a good system in place. The technology's not right."
On Monday night and again Tuesday, electronic-voting critics urged the county supervisors to hold off and instead conduct a cost-benefit study of all voting technologies, including hand-counted paper ballots.
"How could you even consider Diebold? Diebold is well-known (to be) partisan," said activist Phoebe Sorgen. "It's a $17.8 million scam. Please say no to the machines that count our ballots in secret."
Ginnold, the elections chief, said that if the county fails to buy its planned "hybrid" system of mostly optical scanners by January, the federal Help America Vote Act would require that any new system be fully accessible to disabled voters. In general, that would mean every machine in every polling place would have to be a touch screen, she said.
What the law actually says is that after January 2007, no federal funds may be used to purchase new voting systems that are not fully accessible to disabled voters.
"That statement took some options off the table that several supervisors wanted to consider," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. "This board in Alameda has put more into trying to understand this issue than any other board in the state. They asked good questions, and I'm not convinced they got good answers."
Ms. Ginnold wants the county to purchase two touchscreens per polling place for accessibility needs (despite the fact that federal law only requires there be one machine). When board members asked her if they could purchase a minimal amount of equipment for this year's election and delay making a large purchase at this time, Ms. Ginnold informed them that the Help America Vote Act requires that everything purchased after January 1, 2007, must be accessible. This was not an accurate description of the law, and is the second time I'm aware of that Ms. Ginnold has misled her board of supervisors about their equipment options. (The first instance was at the June 2005 hearing when she erroneously told her board that going with paper ballots and a limited number of touchscreens in each polling place could create an equal protection problem. See my June 29, 2005 blog entry for more details.)
Several supervisors commended the activists who attended the meeting for bringing important issues to light. They also made it clear that their decision yesterday is not final, since the results of the next round of negotiations will have to come back to the board for consideration and possible approval. Audio webcasts of Monday and Tuesday's meetings are available from the county's web site. More coverage of yesterday's hearing is featured in this article by Ian Hoffman in today's Oakland Tribune. Excerpts are featured below.
-----------
Four years after buying new Diebold voting machines for $12 million, Alameda County is headed back into the market to negotiate for up to $17.8 million in new voting machinery.
With an impassioned debate spanning two days, county supervisors anguished over sagging public confidence in voting and uncertainty in the technology, then found themselves divided over how to handle elections for coming years.
"This is not the purchasing of a new vehicle fleet," board President Keith Carson said. "This is fundamental to all the rights of every citizen in the county."
"There's too many unknown things," Supervisor Gail Steele said. "This $17 million is a huge amount of money with the uncertainty that we have."
But when the county's elections chief warned that delays could trigger new federal requirements and force the county into filling its polling places with more electronic voting equipment, Alice Lai-Bitker joined supervisors Nate Miley and Scott Haggerty in pressing ahead with the purchase negotiations.
"There's a consequence to waiting," Acting Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold said. "If we're going to change voting systems, we have to change now so we can train voters and workers."
County elections and contracts officials will negotiate with Allen, Texas-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. and Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, the two voting-machine makers rated highest by a panel of voting advocates, residents and county officials.
The winning company would provide a system that principally handles paper ballots with optical ballot scanners plus two ATM-like touch-screen voting machines in each polling place like those the county uses now, the latter to meet federal mandates for handicapped-accessible voting equipment. The touch screens would print a backup record of the electronic ballot for voters to check and elections workers to use in recounts.
The decision marks a turning point for Alameda County and a noteworthy moment in the national debate over voting technology. Federal voting-reform law passed after the 2000 election debacle in Florida requires all U.S. counties to buy accessible voting equipment, and the machines that most easily accommodate the broadest array of disabled voters are highly computerized.
Yet the migration to fully computerized voting, fueled with billions in federal grant dollars, has collided with concern over vote manipulation and computer breakdowns.
---
In June, for the first time in four years, the overwhelming majority of ballots cast in Alameda County will be on paper, and while Diebold remains highly rated as a vendor, its local political stock is low.
"I'm not supportive of Diebold, especially given all the problems that they continue to have," Carson said.
Steele, who led the board in buying the Diebold touch screens, now has her doubts and voted against negotiating for the new machines.
"I like voting on a touch screen, and I believe technologically speaking that we can get to a place where it can be made secure," she said.
For now, however, "I am persuaded that these people have not got a good system in place. The technology's not right."
On Monday night and again Tuesday, electronic-voting critics urged the county supervisors to hold off and instead conduct a cost-benefit study of all voting technologies, including hand-counted paper ballots.
"How could you even consider Diebold? Diebold is well-known (to be) partisan," said activist Phoebe Sorgen. "It's a $17.8 million scam. Please say no to the machines that count our ballots in secret."
Ginnold, the elections chief, said that if the county fails to buy its planned "hybrid" system of mostly optical scanners by January, the federal Help America Vote Act would require that any new system be fully accessible to disabled voters. In general, that would mean every machine in every polling place would have to be a touch screen, she said.
What the law actually says is that after January 2007, no federal funds may be used to purchase new voting systems that are not fully accessible to disabled voters.
"That statement took some options off the table that several supervisors wanted to consider," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. "This board in Alameda has put more into trying to understand this issue than any other board in the state. They asked good questions, and I'm not convinced they got good answers."
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
More news on the case against Diebold whistleblower
Yesterday's Oakland Tribune features this article by Ian Hoffman about Stephen Heller, the former employee of Diebold's law firm, Jones Day. Mr. Heller leaked Diebold's legal documents to the Oakland Tribune in 2004, and he is now being prosecuted by Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley. Excerpts from the article are featured below.
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One night early in 2004, a few weeks before the presidential primary, a Van Nuys actor making ends meet temping as a word processor listened on headphones as a young lawyer laid out a defense for Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s use of unapproved voting software in Alameda County.
Sitting at a computer terminal on the 45th floor of a Los Angeles skyscraper, Steve Heller transcribed the lawyer's taped memo suggesting that Diebold could claim the software was a new, "experimental" voting system, even though it had handled two Alameda County elections in 2003.
Heller led a quiet life in the San Fernando Valley with his wife, dog and an occasional supporting role in film, TV or commercials, usually cast as someone's neighbor or dad, which is what he looks like. He was an "experienced and competent" word processor but no "heavyweight" in the eyes of his night-shift supervisor, who doubted Heller knew his computer commands were recorded.
Heller is a self-confessed "news junkie." In an interview, he declined to talk about the case but said, "I would not describe myself at all as an activist" on electronic voting or anything else.
Yet the night after hearing the Diebold defense proposal, according to investigators who recreated his actions from computer logs, Heller went back to work inside the word processing center at the law firm Jones Day and began printing every document he could access that its attorneys had created for Diebold - 107 memos, charts, actions plans and e-mails.
One memo warned that Diebold could be prosecuted for illegally handling votes on Election Day. In a draft letter, Jones Day attorneys studiously avoided telling California elections officials of Diebold changes in a voting system component that ended up failing in presidential elections. In one e-mail, Jones Day advised Diebold of the need for sweeping civil and criminal defenses, billed at up to $450,000 a month.
In a meeting in a Ventura County park, the documents landed in the hands of Diebold's most vociferous critics at BlackBoxVoting.org. From there, some were faxed to a documentary filmmaker for attempted hand-delivery to then-California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley in Manhattan.
The Oakland Tribune reported on the memos, and almost overnight they appeared on Web sites from Washington to California to New Zealand, then elsewhere. Two weeks later, Shelley withdrew his earlier approval of Diebold's flagship touchscreen voting system, calling the firm's behavior "fraudulent" and "despicable." It took more than two years and numerous improvements before Diebold again could sell its electronic-voting products in California.
Heller himself remained largely unknown until two weeks ago when the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office charged him with a computer crime, second-degree burglary and receiving stolen goods — offenses carrying up to four years in prison - and propelled him to folk hero status among voting reform advocates, computer scientists and critics of electronic voting.
The case poses the value of whistleblowing about an industry that zealously guards its secrets and counts the nation's vote against a bedrock principle of the legal profession, the sanctity of confidentiality that allows clients to share their troubles with their lawyer.
Publication of Jones Day's confidential Diebold work, firm lawyers told investigators, was "a grievous violation" that damaged a top 25 client worth millions of dollars a year in billings.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some leaders of the Association of Computer Machinists, the nation's oldest group of computer engineers and scientists, are seeking pro-bono defense for Heller.
"He found evidence that the problems that people were complaining about, and that Diebold was belittling, were real and that Diebold was skirting the rules," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.
"I think people are really heartsick," she said. "This is a guy who the people of California should be thanking and yet he's facing litigation titled 'People vs. Heller.'"
Protest e-mails and phone calls have been pouring into the offices of the Los Angeles district attorney, most of them from outside California.
---
Officials at the district attorney's office say Heller has no criminal record and probably would get probation if convicted. But he would lose his right to vote.
----------
One night early in 2004, a few weeks before the presidential primary, a Van Nuys actor making ends meet temping as a word processor listened on headphones as a young lawyer laid out a defense for Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s use of unapproved voting software in Alameda County.
Sitting at a computer terminal on the 45th floor of a Los Angeles skyscraper, Steve Heller transcribed the lawyer's taped memo suggesting that Diebold could claim the software was a new, "experimental" voting system, even though it had handled two Alameda County elections in 2003.
Heller led a quiet life in the San Fernando Valley with his wife, dog and an occasional supporting role in film, TV or commercials, usually cast as someone's neighbor or dad, which is what he looks like. He was an "experienced and competent" word processor but no "heavyweight" in the eyes of his night-shift supervisor, who doubted Heller knew his computer commands were recorded.
Heller is a self-confessed "news junkie." In an interview, he declined to talk about the case but said, "I would not describe myself at all as an activist" on electronic voting or anything else.
Yet the night after hearing the Diebold defense proposal, according to investigators who recreated his actions from computer logs, Heller went back to work inside the word processing center at the law firm Jones Day and began printing every document he could access that its attorneys had created for Diebold - 107 memos, charts, actions plans and e-mails.
One memo warned that Diebold could be prosecuted for illegally handling votes on Election Day. In a draft letter, Jones Day attorneys studiously avoided telling California elections officials of Diebold changes in a voting system component that ended up failing in presidential elections. In one e-mail, Jones Day advised Diebold of the need for sweeping civil and criminal defenses, billed at up to $450,000 a month.
In a meeting in a Ventura County park, the documents landed in the hands of Diebold's most vociferous critics at BlackBoxVoting.org. From there, some were faxed to a documentary filmmaker for attempted hand-delivery to then-California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley in Manhattan.
The Oakland Tribune reported on the memos, and almost overnight they appeared on Web sites from Washington to California to New Zealand, then elsewhere. Two weeks later, Shelley withdrew his earlier approval of Diebold's flagship touchscreen voting system, calling the firm's behavior "fraudulent" and "despicable." It took more than two years and numerous improvements before Diebold again could sell its electronic-voting products in California.
Heller himself remained largely unknown until two weeks ago when the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office charged him with a computer crime, second-degree burglary and receiving stolen goods — offenses carrying up to four years in prison - and propelled him to folk hero status among voting reform advocates, computer scientists and critics of electronic voting.
The case poses the value of whistleblowing about an industry that zealously guards its secrets and counts the nation's vote against a bedrock principle of the legal profession, the sanctity of confidentiality that allows clients to share their troubles with their lawyer.
Publication of Jones Day's confidential Diebold work, firm lawyers told investigators, was "a grievous violation" that damaged a top 25 client worth millions of dollars a year in billings.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and some leaders of the Association of Computer Machinists, the nation's oldest group of computer engineers and scientists, are seeking pro-bono defense for Heller.
"He found evidence that the problems that people were complaining about, and that Diebold was belittling, were real and that Diebold was skirting the rules," said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.
"I think people are really heartsick," she said. "This is a guy who the people of California should be thanking and yet he's facing litigation titled 'People vs. Heller.'"
Protest e-mails and phone calls have been pouring into the offices of the Los Angeles district attorney, most of them from outside California.
---
Officials at the district attorney's office say Heller has no criminal record and probably would get probation if convicted. But he would lose his right to vote.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Hart Intercivic eSlate with paper trail is certified
Last Friday, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson issued this news release announcing that he has certified Hart InterCivic's eSlate voting system. The upgraded machine, which previously has been used in Orange County, now comes with a printer that produces a voter-verified paper audit trail as required by state law.
The news release did not provide much detail about the Hart certification, but it does only mention the eSlate, Hart's electronic voting machine. Another system Hart had up for certification in California is a new version of its paper-based optical scan voting system, called eScan. The Secretary of State's staff reported it did not do well in testing and did not recommend it for certification.
I took a look at Tarrant County, Texas' election web site and found this page which says that the county did in fact just switch to the eScan system for paper balloting in the most recent election where the final vote count was initially off by a reported 100,000 votes (more details are in the blog entry below). The folks in Texas trying to figure out what went wrong might benefit from reading the California Secretary of State's staff report on the Hart system, which summarizes the problems encountered during the volume test on the eScan, which is an in-precinct ballot scanner. The report states that of the 50 eScans tested, "42 percent of the machines experienced an error condition at least once that could not be handled by the operating system and required the eScan to be rebooted."
For those keeping track, this brings to three the number of vendors with California-certified voting systems that meet both the federal accessibility and state voter-verified paper audit trail requirement: Diebold (the TSx was recently granted conditional certification); ES&S (manufacturer of the Automark, an accessible paper-ballot marking device); and Hart. Sequoia's application for full certification is still pending (their equipment is currently conditionally-certified and cannot yet be legally used in a California primary election).
The news release did not provide much detail about the Hart certification, but it does only mention the eSlate, Hart's electronic voting machine. Another system Hart had up for certification in California is a new version of its paper-based optical scan voting system, called eScan. The Secretary of State's staff reported it did not do well in testing and did not recommend it for certification.
I took a look at Tarrant County, Texas' election web site and found this page which says that the county did in fact just switch to the eScan system for paper balloting in the most recent election where the final vote count was initially off by a reported 100,000 votes (more details are in the blog entry below). The folks in Texas trying to figure out what went wrong might benefit from reading the California Secretary of State's staff report on the Hart system, which summarizes the problems encountered during the volume test on the eScan, which is an in-precinct ballot scanner. The report states that of the 50 eScans tested, "42 percent of the machines experienced an error condition at least once that could not be handled by the operating system and required the eScan to be rebooted."
For those keeping track, this brings to three the number of vendors with California-certified voting systems that meet both the federal accessibility and state voter-verified paper audit trail requirement: Diebold (the TSx was recently granted conditional certification); ES&S (manufacturer of the Automark, an accessible paper-ballot marking device); and Hart. Sequoia's application for full certification is still pending (their equipment is currently conditionally-certified and cannot yet be legally used in a California primary election).
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