Diebold Added Secret Patch to Georgia E-Voting

Top Diebold corporation officials ordered workers to install secret files to Georgia’s electronic voting machines shortly before the 2002 Elections, at least two whistleblowers are now asserting. ... “With the primaries looming, [Chief of Diebold’s Election Division] Urosevich was personally distributing a ‘patch,’ a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program,” Rolling Stone Magazine reported. ... The “patch” was applied to about 5,000 polling places in Fulton and DeKalb Counties in 2002, Rolling Stone reported. Two patches were applied in June and July 2002 respectively while Behler worked in the Diebold warehouse. entire Atlanta Progressive News article

Video interview RFK on Hardball: Flash Format here… QuickTime format here…

Committee Finally Discusses HR 550 - Sort Of

(Note: A Majority Of Congress Has Co-sponsored HR 550) On the next-to-last day before Congress went into recess until after the November elections, a hearing was held on the security of electronic voting machines. Thursday’s hearing of the Committee on House Administration was orchestrated to establish that there is no consensus about the need for requiring an independent auditable means of verification on voting machines. While not explicitly a hearing on Rep. Rush Holt’s “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act” (HR 550), which is now co-sponsored by a majority of members of the House, there was little doubt that the bill’s overwhelming support had motivated Chairman Vernon Ehlers (R-MI, pictured at right) to schedule the hearing at all. Video Coverage

Interview: Professor Steven F. Freeman, Co-Author of Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?

interview here

Are the vendors still working out the kinks?

Election Machine Manufacturers Have Not Yet Completed Certification Requirements
--Norman P. Green, Chautauqua County Democratic Party election commissioner, learned at a meeting in Albany on Friday that no manufacturer had fully submitted all required items for certification by Friday. The final day for manufacturers to get all required equipment and documents in to be part of the first round of certified voting equipment is Friday, Sept. 29. ‘‘I was shocked to hear that not one single manufacturer has its total act together,’’ said Green.

Full story

This week's question:

President John F. Kennedy, said, "The good news is a democracy is inherently self-correcting." Question: Is this still true if votes are not counted accurately?

Linda Lamone and the myth of 100% Up-Time

I asked the state's elections administrator, Linda Lamone, whether Maryland wasn't just a bit too quick to adopt electronic voting. Doesn't the computer at your desk ever freeze up on you?

"No," she replied.

Never?

"No."

But surely people in your office have had that experience?

"No."

(Maybe we've found the solution to Maryland's voting problem: Everybody head on down to Linda Lamone's office, where the machines work 100 percent of the time.) Read the entire terse exchange and call for Paper Ballots here.

CNN's Lou Dobbs: E-Voting Machines Are Putting A Huge Burden On Taxpayers

Announce new report from the Brennan Center for Justice FULL TRANSCRIPT

NYVV Answers: Can New York Keep Lever Machines?

Long Island verified voting advocates have been asking me if New York State can keep it's lever machines, as proposed by Suffolk county executive Steve Levy in a recent Newsday article:
Mr. Levy argument for keeping levers runs into two big problems however -

1) New York State election law unambiguously declares that lever machines must be replaced by September 2007, and

2) The Department of Justice lawsuit settlement with the state of New York unambiguously declares that lever machines will be replaced by this same date.

Entire blog entry .

Voting machine details hidden

State tells counties to decide which devices they want before certification process is finished, Story here

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Candidate Vows to Challenge Results of Voting Problems in Maryland

Edwards contended that the vote tallies from more than three dozen electronic voting machines were left "unsecured" from 8 p.m. on Election Day until 5 p.m. the next day - nearly a day after the polls closed. "Nobody has been able to account for the whereabouts of the machines or the memory cards during the 21 hours after the polls closed," her attorney Jonathan S. Shurberg wrote Story here Get ready for legal challenges, because Edwards won this election.

New York State Schedule

Version 5.4 released on 9/1//06. The Tasks in question are these:

• Task 229 - The deadline for county orders - Deadline for counties to return ordering information to OGS - 10/31/06 (Note: Machines are NOT certified at this point!)
• Task 234 -(SBOE chooses for counties who are "non-compliant" i.e., who can't agree on equipment choice) Create orders for "non-compliant" counties - 11/15/06Task 222 - Certify/Reject machine - 12/21/06

Electronic voting machines fail to win over county clerk

Problems arose with the machines’ "paper trail" mechanism, which malfunctioned on Election Day. The problems didn’t affect the vote totals, but they created plenty of headaches at the polls. "I’m not at all interested in spending millions until there’s a better design," Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said. "And they were incredibly popular; people want me to buy more. But I think it’s too risky until there’s a lot more put into these paper trails."
Full Story here

Brennan Center - Paper Ballots better than FullFace DREs

Professor Selker and his team at MIT’s Media Lab have attempted to assess the extent to which voters who use such machines actually review the VVPT (paper trail) prior to casting their votes. In their testing, the authors found that no VVPT users reported any errors during the voting process though two existed for each ballot they used. At the end of the voting process, testers asked VVPT users whether they believed any errors existed on their paper record even if they did not report them. Only 8% answered yes. In contrast, users of an audio-based verification system reported errors at higher rates. 14% of users reported errors during the voting process, and 85% of users told testers that they believed errors existed in the record although they did not all report them.20 Additional research needs to be conducted to measure the efficiency of and voter confidence in these systems. But Dr. Selker’s research suggests that VVPTs may present significant usability problems that can prevent voters from identifying errors readily.

HAVA Godfather Pleads Guilty

Pollworkers for Democracy

Last chance to get up-close-and-persnal with lever-style voting machines. An election integrity project of the MMOB, Working Assets, VoteTrustUSA and affiliated groups, you can sign up with the project according to your county. You'll receive information about training conference calls where you'll be briefed on the goals of the project, and how to report any irregularities you see at the polls on election day. More info here.

Snow tried to deflect the question with a joke, suggesting that the reporter should serve as Bush's "emissary from Rolling Stone." But many citizens, journalists and elected officials are taking our four-month investigation of vote-rigging in Ohio far more seriously