Yet more voting machine problems

[freesw]

From the "What were they thinking when they used Windows for these?" department:

http://dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/08/21/voting_machines.html?sid=101

Ohio's voting machine glitch exposed
Touch-screens can't be fixed before election, Brunner says
Thursday, August 21, 2008 8:34 PM
By Mark Niquette
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The maker of touch-screen voting machines used in half of Ohio's counties has admitted that its own programming error is to blame for votes being dropped in some counties.

The problem can't be fixed before the Nov. 4 election, so Premier Election Solutions and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner are issuing guidelines to counties for how to avoid the problem.

"We will continue to monitor the situation and provide boards of elections with the instruction and support they need to ensure an orderly and efficient election and an accurate count of Ohioans' votes," Brunner said in a memo released today.

Premier, formerly Diebold Election Systems, initially speculated that the problem was a conflict between its system and anti-virus software.

But in a letter Tuesday to Brunner, Premier President David Byrd admitted that further testing showed a source-code error that can cause votes not to be recorded when memory cards are uploaded to computer servers under certain circumstances.

"We are indeed distressed that our previous analysis of this issue was in error," Byrd wrote.

Brunner is suing to recover the millions of taxpayer dollars spent to buy Premier touch-screens after she said an investigation this year showed that votes in at least 11 counties had been dropped in recent elections.

Elections workers discovered the missing votes, but not until many hours later in most cases, Brunner said. The malfunction first was discovered in Butler County in April, she said.

Forty-four counties, including Licking and Fairfield in central Ohio, use Premier touch-screens. Franklin County uses touch-screens from a different manufacturer.

Critics of Premier and touch-screen voting in general have long argued that the systems aren't secure and can't be trusted. Brunner herself has advocated moving Ohio toward optically scanned paper ballots.

But Premier spokesman Chris Riggall said the programming problem had gone undetected after years of use and both federal and state testing. He stressed that the systems are secure in conjunction with other election safeguards in place.

Shannon Leininger, president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials and director of the Ashland County Board of Elections - which uses the Premier touch-screens - said she's confident that problems can be avoided.

She noted that Brunner has been issuing directives recently dealing with security measures surrounding the election and is expected to address computer server security soon.

"This is something that we will watch very closely," Leininger said.

[COBRADOC]

Florida has lots of touch-screen voting machines for sale and they are all in perfect working order - their only problem is that they count the votes the way they were cast and not the way the state Democrat party wants the vote to be.

We bought them after the 2000 election when the Democrats weren't able to force a win for Gore and they demanded that the old punch-card system be replaced. So we bought touch-screen machines. Then, after the Democrats couldn't figure out how to stuff the ballot box with the new mechines, they lost again in 2004. So they screamed and yelled so loud that we ditched the touch-screen machines and this year will use marked ballots that are run through a scanner for counting.

Of course, the marked and scanned ballot makes it easy to stuff the box again, so the Dems are happy, so far. I don't know what the Dems will do if they loose Florida again this year - guess we'll being buying something new again for 2012.

In the mean time, we have lots of good touch-screen machines for sale.

[AZ-Mike]

These machines have the count stored on a removable drive (or card). There is a documentary out there (I will try to find it on Youtube or something) that shows how the cards/drives have executable code on them that can be altered to give votes to whomever the writer of the code wants.

The companies that make the machines denied there was code on the cards and that "hacking" them is not possible; the video shows otherwise.

It's called "Hacking Democracy" and here is a link to part one (nine total):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGHeuYrASMw

I am not watching it again, so if this isn't it let me know and I will hunt some more.

[COBRADOC]

These machines have the count stored on a removable drive (or card). There is a documentary out there (I will try to find it on Youtube or something) that shows how the cards/drives have executable code on them that can be altered to give votes to whomever the writer of the code wants.

The companies that make the machines denied there was code on the cards and that "hacking" them is not possible; the video shows otherwise.

It's called "Hacking Democracy" and here is a link to part one (nine total):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGHeuYrASMw

I am not watching it again, so if this isn't it let me know and I will hunt some more.

Mike, the link is still reliable. I can't speak for all of the incidents that are addressed in these tapes, but I can address the problem in 2000 presidential election in Palm Beach County, Florida - that's the one where the legally blind judge used a magnifying glass to look at the punch cards trying to “determine the voters intent”.

To make a long story short, the politics in Palm Beach County is controlled by the Democrats. The complete story is a lot longer and far more complicated, but here’s the basics of the 2000 election in Palm Beach County. There had been an attempt to stuff the ballot box with votes for Gore.

These bogus ballots came from an area of the county dominated by one particular ethnic group. However, the people that generated the bogus ballots punched the wrong slot on the card and instead of voting for Gore, they had instead voted for Pat Buchannan.

Unfortunately for them, they realized their mistake too late and right at 7:00 p.m. when the pools normally would have closed, they began raising a stink about the “butter-fly” ballot and the possibility of incorrectly punched cards, and that all the Buchannan votes from their precinct were in error. The problem was, they had closed the polls a few minutes early in that part of the county, and hadn’t gotten the word that Governor Jeb Bush had directed that the polls stay open for one more hour so that all polls in Florida would close at the same time (Florida spans part of two time zones). But since all polls were supposed to be open, none of the votes would have been counted, so these people had no way to know how many votes Buchannan had received unless they had prior knowledge of the votes?

As the indecision of Florida’s final votes floundered, local political brokers moved to cover up their screw-up, then the media got involved, and things went down hill from there.

As for the results of Florida's 2004 election with the touch-screen machines, it was probably the most accurant and non-corrupt election in the history of the State of Florida.

[gossman]

Voting has always had the chance for fraud, LBJ was accused early in his political days of messing with elections in Texas. I do feel that vote by mail (which we have in Oregon) and electronic voting machines increase the possiblity and offer greater chances that the voting can be rigged. But I feel that it is more common than we think that in some precincts there is fraud. Too tempting and where people are involved, cheaters will always be active.