The three companies who make the machines won't let anyone look at how the software counts votes, so there's no way of knowing if votes are being counted at all.
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More election machine problemsby Madeline Zane, Unknown News
Nov. 10, 2003
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Not to beat a dead horse (and then refuse to count his vote), but here's a quick recap: the new electronic voting machines have buggy software, are easy to hack, and prevent any sort of recount.
The three companies who make the machines won't let anyone look at how the software counts votes, so there's no way of knowing if votes are being counted at all.
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A bill in Congress requires all new voting machines to leave a paper trail so recounts are possible. Here's just a few more reasons this might be the only way to ever have any confidence that elections are actually being conducted at all:
. New touch-screen voting system investigated
Solano County, California may have used electronic voting machines with uncertified software on them. Even though this violates state law, there is absolutely nothing that officials can do to remedy the situation, since the new machines make recounts absolutely impossible.
. Fairfax Judge orders logs of voting machines inspected
In Fairfax County, Virginia, a post-election test seems to take at least 1% of vote away from candidate who lost by a margin of less than 1%. Election results slowest in recent memory. Officials still laughably claim that the machines all worked fine.
. Group calls for decertification of Maryland touch screen voting machines
Maryland voters call for state to de-certify the voting machines it bought after same machines cause massive, unfixable problems in nearby Fairfax County, VA.
. What you can do: Verified Voting
Tell your alleged representatives to get up off their campaign contributions and vote for the paper trail bill!
New touch-screen voting system investigatedby Warren Lutz, Daily Republic [Fairfield, CA]
Nov. 6, 2003
FAIRFIELD, Ca. — As Solano County prepares to send punch-card voting to the grave, its new touchscreen voting system is generating a bit of controversy.
Registrar of Voters Laura Winslow said Wednesday she is waiting to hear from Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's office on whether the new machines are actually certified by the state or not.
"We're looking into it," said Doug Stone, a Shelley spokesperson, when asked whether machines used in Alameda County Tuesday — the same machines Solano County hopes to use — were certified. A member of Shelley's voter system panel has alleged they were not.
Stone said the panel recommended approving Diebold's AccuVote-TSx machines prior to Tuesday's election after the machines met the state's testing requirements. "However, the panel didn't get to the report, and this issue is still being examined," he said.
Although using uncertified voting equipment violates state law, Stone said a finding to that effect would not nullify election results where the machines were used.
California decided to get rid of punch card voting by 2006. Solano County, which plans to switch to touchscreen voting by next March's primary election, initially bought the AccuVote-TS, then later upgraded to the lighter and newer AccuVote-TSx model.
"If for some reason the state did not certify the new equipment, we'd use the previous version," Winslow said. "So I don't see it would impact our installation for the primary."
Earlier this week, Supervisor Barbara Kondylis asked the county's elections department to look into the certification issue after being contacted by several concerned voters in her district.
"With anything, you hear little rumblings in the air, and as it starts to swell, you pay more and more attention," Kondylis said.
Kondylis said she doesn't have a preference for paper-based or touchscreen voting, but wants to know if there are problems.
"I've always left this up to the experts we pay good money to to figure this out," she said.
Officials from the company could not be reached for comment.
Kim Alexander, founder and president of the California Voter Foundation, said the certification matter underscores the problem with paperless voting. She hopes Solano County will reconsider using such a system.
"It's not transparent," Alexander said. "Once the voter presses the 'cast ballot' button, there's no way of knowing that the votes registered . . . are the same votes that the voter intended to cast."
"Because there's no paper record of the ballot produced, there's no audit trail," she said.
Published by
Daily Republic [Fairfield, CA]
Fairfax Judge orders logs of voting machines inspectedby David Cho, Washington Post
Nov. 6, 2003
It took more than 21 hours from the time polls closed Tuesday night for Fairfax County, the putative high-tech capital of the region, to get final election results from its new, computerized vote machines.
Widespread problems in the system, which the county paid $3.5 million to install, also opened the door to possible election challenges by party leaders and candidates.
School Board member Rita S. Thompson (R), who lost a close race to retain her at-large seat, said yesterday that the new computers might have taken votes from her. Voters in three precincts reported that when they attempted to vote for her, the machines initially displayed an "x" next to her name but then, after a few seconds, the "x" disappeared.
In response to Thompson's complaints, county officials tested one of the machines in question yesterday and discovered that it seemed to subtract a vote for Thompson in about "one out of a hundred tries," said Margaret K. Luca, secretary of the county Board of Elections.
"It's hard not to think that I have been robbed," said Thompson, whose 77,796 recorded votes left her 1,662 shy of reelection. She is considering her next step, and said she was wary of challenging the election results: "I'm not sure the county as a whole is up for that. I'm not sure I'm up for that."
Meanwhile, attorneys for local Republicans and GOP candidate Mychele B. Brickner, who lost her bid to chair the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, went before a Circuit Court judge yesterday morning, asking him to keep 10 voting machines under lock and key and not to include their tabulations in the results. The machines, from nine precincts scattered across the county, broke down about midday Tuesday and were brought to the county government center for repairs and then returned to the polls — a violation of election law, Republicans argued.
The judge said the activity logs of all 10 machines will be inspected this week, with members of both major parties present.
"It's like Florida in many ways," said the Republicans' attorney, Christopher T. Craig, referring to that state's 2000 presidential ballot-counting controversy. "This is about ballot integrity. . . . A lot of people have been telling us they couldn't vote for someone. . . . I have been hearing that there are a lot of problems" with the county's new WINvote computer technology.
As more details emerged yesterday, county officials defended the system. Luca insisted that most of the problems had less to do with computer glitches than human error.
"The new machines get an A-plus," she said. "It's the plan to collect the vote that gets the failing grade."
Fairfax purchased the 1,000 touch-screen vote machines this year from Advanced Voting Solutions of Frisco, Tex. The machines, which resemble laptop computers, were used countywide Tuesday for the first time, and the problems that resulted mirrored what occurred in Montgomery County last year when similar new technology was used. The equipment in Montgomery County was blamed for delayed results and confusion at the polls.
Fairfax officials had confidently promised that their machinery would work much better, citing a battery of tests conducted last week. They also predicted that the system would greatly speed the reporting of results.
Instead, it churned out one of the slowest vote counts in memory.
Much of the delay occurred at 7 p.m. when the polls closed. Most of the county's 223 precincts attempted to send in their computer tallies at once, overloading the system. Many poll officials ended up calling in their numbers, but some couldn't get through and instead drove their results to the county government center.
In at least 19 precincts, results were officially sealed in the mistaken assumption that they had been sent by computer modem, officials said yesterday. Sealed results cannot be opened unless all three election board members are present, which led to further delays.
In addition, software errors kept the results from two precincts from being posted until about 4:30 yesterday afternoon.
"Everyone seems to be aghast at how this could happen," Thompson said. "But this seems like something you could have had the foresight to see."
John Service, 50, of North Springfield said it took him four or five tries to register his vote for Thompson, and he wondered whether some voters were disenfranchised. "I am concerned about voters who might have been in a rush and didn't go back and check to make sure all the names [they intended to vote for] appeared on the final ballot," he said.
The glitches forced a handful of precincts to return to paper ballots. And even at polls where computer problems didn't arise, voter unfamiliarity with the technology created long lines.
Some voters gave up — a thought that crossed Jeff Fisher's mind.
Fisher, 43, of Annandale said he almost walked out of his polling place when a woman in front of him spent 10 minutes getting through the ballot.
Others, though, wondered why so many people had problems with the machines. "I thought it was very easy to vote, and I'm not even that bright of a kid," Al Richards, 61, of Falls Church said.
Published by
Washington Post
Group calls for decertification of Maryland touch screen voting machinesby Michael Duck, Fox News
Nov. 6, 2003
An activist group critical of Maryland's touch-screen voting machines wants the state Board of Elections to decertify the system because it doesn't create a paper trail.
The formal complaint, made by the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland, cited machine breakdowns in Fairfax County, Va., elections Tuesday as evidence of the voting equipment's weakness.
"If they had a paper audit trail, it would be very easy" to determine if any tampering occurred while machines were being fixed, said Kevin Zeese, the complaint's author. "Now they have to try to piece it back together."
Maryland's voting system had no reported problems in the five cities using it Tuesday. But the difficulties in Fairfax County prompted a lawsuit and added fuel to the Maryland debate over the machines, which has raged since a July Johns Hopkins University study said the machine's software was open to attacks from hackers.
Machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems has improved its software security, and state officials plan to install the machines statewide by 2006.
Zeese's group agrees with the Hopkins study's conclusion that the machines should be modified to create a paper record of each vote. The paper trail could be used in recounts or random audits of the machines' accuracy.
"This argument has gone back to the early '30s or '20s when we first implemented mechanical voting machines," said Donna Duncan, the state board election management director.
Voting machines must pass a battery of tests to verify their performance, making a secondary paper system unnecessary, she said.
The state elections board has not yet received Zeese's formal complaint, Duncan said.
"There is no open counting or transparency in the election," Zeese's complaint charges, adding that Maryland is ceding its vote-counting responsibility to Diebold, a private company.
"Even the state Board of Elections does not know what's in the software," Zeese said. "We're supposed to have open vote counts in this country."
California halted certification of Diebold machines indefinitely, the complaint said.
While Fairfax's troubled machines are similar, the WINvote machines are manufactured by a different company, Advanced Voting Solutions of Texas.
Fairfax County Republicans filed suit Tuesday after nine touch-screen voting machines malfunctioned. Authorities took the faulty machines to the County Government Center and then returned them to polling places, according to an Associated Press report of the lawsuit's claims.
Fairfax officials now must track down hundreds of votes cast on the malfunctioning machines without the benefit of hard copies, Zeese said.
Maryland policies forbid removing voting machines from polling places and returning them, said David Heller, a project manager for the Maryland elections board.
"We don't want to give the impression to voters that we're off behind a curtain manipulating the machine," Heller said.
In a situation similar to Fairfax, machines would just be turned off and left at the polling place while spares are brought in, Heller said. The computer memory cards from the malfunctioning machines would be counted with all the others, he said.
Maryland is continually reviewing its election procedures, and may look at the Fairfax situation to see if it holds any lessons for the state, Duncan said.
Zeese led a protest in Takoma Park during the city's municipal election Tuesday. He voted on a Diebold machine, but he also lodged an informal complaint arguing that he couldn't verify his vote was tabulated.
Election officials said they received rave reviews about the machines' performance Tuesday, especially in Salisbury and Chestertown, where voters had never used them before.
Six other Maryland municipalities declined to use the machines in their Tuesday elections for a variety of reasons.
Published by
Fox News
What you can do:
Verified Voting
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