Friday, October 29, 2010
North Carolina Republicans File Lawsuit Against Electronic Voting Machine Failures
 The Brad Blog has just broken a story over the lawsuit the North Carolina Republican Party has filed against the State Board of Elections over the use and failures of the electronic touch screen voting machines. Amongst the allegations is the votes being cast for Republican candidates are being flipped to Democratic candidates instead. The Daily Comet also reported. Below is an excerpt from The Brad Blog on this breaking story:
"This afternoon, Legal Counsel for the North Carolina Republican State
Executive Committee sent a letter [PDF] to the NC State Board of Elections threatening legal action if their "demands" were not "immediately" met for taking a number of specific actions to mitigate reported touch-screen voting problems describes as "significantly more widespread than the NC GOP initially understood."
The GOP attorney, John E. Branch III writes that the voting system problems should have been addressed prior to the early voting period "and, to the extent they were not, the touch screen systems should have been been banned."
The problems in contention are related to reports of the state's ES&S iVotronic e-voting systems reportedly showing votes as flipping from Republicans to Democrats on the screen. The threat from the state GOP comes on the heels of complaints made last week in two different NC counties, Craven and New Hanover. Those reports were a switch from previous years when voters in dozens of states had reported votes flipping largely from Democratic to Republican. Branch charges that the party has "received word" that similar problems have emerged in "Mecklenburg...Randolph...Cumberland, Wilson, Pender, Forsyth, Lenoir and other
counties," which all similarly use the oft-failed, 100% unverifiable ES&S touch-screen voting machines. The same systems are also used in more than a
dozen other states...
In a sharply worded response [PDF] to Branch's letter late this afternoon, Gary O.
Bartlett, Executive Director of the State Board of Elections charges the GOP
letter was "apparently intended to elevate isolated occurrences with touch screen voting equipment into a crisis of confidence in the integrity of the election." Bartlett downplayed the concerns, as elections officials usually do, describing them as "no different than ones that must be addressed in every election."
North Carolina Election Integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, Director of NC Coalition for Verified Voting and editor of Voting News tells The BRAD BLOG that vote flipping in the state "has historically been from GOP to DEM". She also notes the acrimony between the state Republicans and the Board of Elections, explaining that many of the county BoEs have a Democratic majority and that the state's largest local e-voting vendor, Print Elect, who program the machines in a number of counties, is a "BIG donor to the DEM Governor".
In truth, however, there is no way to know how any touch-screen voting machine actually records a vote during an election. What is shown to voters on both the screen and the so-called "paper trail" printed out along side it (on many such systems) may not reflect the way the votes are actually recorded internally. To that end, there is no way to know that any vote has ever been recorded accurately, as per any voters intent, for any candidate or initiative on any ballot in any actual election using a touch-screen voting machine.
The ES&S iVotronics were indeed certified at the federal level, but by contractors selected and paid for by the vendor themselves and who tested the systems in secrecy. Subsequent independent analysis, by a number of states, have found "serious" flaws in the systems. A study released by the state of Florida in 2007 found the systems were vulnerable to viral vote-flipping attacks. The state eventually decertified the systems after 18,000 votes were lost all together during a 2006 U.S. House special election decided in favor of the Republican by just 369 votes.
One of the "DEMANDS" listed in the GOP attorney's letter to the State Board of Elections is for an order to be issued requiring poll workers to keep a record of complaints (which Bartlett says they already do), but to include "the identify of the voter, the time the voter voted, the specific voting machine used by the voter, and the nature of the voter's complaint" in such incident reports.
Such a requirement, however, would likely result in the loss of privacy for that voter's secret ballot. That's just one more problem to add to the ever growing list of reasons why, as the GOP's Branch correctly noted, "the touch screen systems should have been been banned." In addition to North Carolina, the ES&S iVotronic is used, according to VerifiedVoting.org's database at polling places in Arkansas, Washington D.C., Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
• 10/28/10 Letter from NC GOP to NC's State Board of Elections [PDF]• 10/28/10 Response to NC GOP from NC's State Board of Elections [PDF]"
Read the full story at The Brad Blog.
This is interesting news because in the past years, it has mainly been Democratic state or independent organizations that have been raising this concern on the lack of transparency and intergrity of electronic voting machines. It is GREAT news that a Republican organization is finally taking this issue of election fraud seriously. As AuditAZ has stated over and over again, election integrity is not about the Right or Left. It is about right and wrong. No democracy can ensue when votes cannot be counted accurately, transparently, and one vote per person. Labels: Diebold, election fraud, election integrity, ES and S, Republican Party, voting rights
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Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Ask Congressman Grijalva and Pastor to Revise Holt Reform Bill
While we need to contact all our Congressional representation, Congressmen Grijalva and Pastor are co-sponsors of this bill so it is especially important we contact them and insist on the needed amendments, including banning DREs.
Holt's Election Reform Bill HR 811 Urgently Needs Reform By Voters Unite
March 2, 2007 Ask your Congressmember to amend HR 811.
(Originally published at PDA)
There are many good provisions in the new election reform bill (HR 811 introduced by Congressman Rush Holt D-NJ), called the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.” For example, it would ban wireless communications to reduce the possibility of some types of hacking; it would prevent Diebold, Sequoia, and other voting machine companies from using secret software on the voting machines; and it would require partial hand counts to check the accuracy of the machines.
However, the primary problem with the bill is that it allows the continued use of Direct Record Electronic (DRE), or “touch screen” voting machines, as long as they print out a copy of the electronic record of your vote for you to approve (called a “voter-verified paper audit trail” or “VVPAT”). But this “band-aid” cannot solve the systemic problems inherent to DREs. Democracy demands that DREs be banned from all American elections.
It has been said of those calling for a “ban DREs” amendment to HR 811 that we intend to “kill” the bill. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do not seek to remove this bill from consideration; we seek to correct a fundamental omission, which we believe presents a grave danger to all future elections.
Why do we consider a ban on DREs an essential requirement? Because DREs constitute a new and subtle form of high tech voter suppression. Consider: - DREs (often called “touch screens”) cause long lines, forcing many legally registered voters to leave without being able to cast a vote, when too few machines are provided or the machines are delivered late, fail to start up, or break down. When voters make their selections on paper ballots, voting doesn’t depend on the availability of a machine.
- DREs disrupt the electoral process, as they have in the still-contested Jennings/Buchanan U.S. Congressional election in Sarasota, Florida, as well as in many less publicized races across the country. If the voters had voted on paper ballots, there would be no more speculation about the 18,000 missing votes. The ballots would be available for inspection. VVPATs (“paper trails”) would not have solved the problem in Sarasota.
- DREs change voters’ selections from one candidate to the opponent, with no way for the voter to know if the right candidate was ultimately recorded inside the computer’s memory.
- DREs confuse and cause anxiety for voters who aren’t computer-savvy, many of them elderly.
- DREs confuse pollworkers, who often have to call on technicians for help during the election, causing further delays for voters.
- DREs disenfranchise minorities, as shown by the plunge in undervote rates of Native Americans and Hispanics in New Mexico when the state banned DREs and converted to paper ballots counted with optical scan technology.
- DREs make ethnic profiling possible when voters are asked to choose between English and an alternate language, since software in the machines behaves differently based on the language chosen.
- A DRE "ballot" is only an invisible, intangible record in computer memory, secret from the voter, rather than a paper the voter can know exists by seeing or touching it.
- With DREs, it is impossible to determine voter intent in recounts or investigations, because there is no original, observable record of the vote.
- DREs are too complex and too high-tech for ordinary citizens to understand, effectively monitor, or measure for accuracy. They eliminate the electorate from vital aspects of the electoral process.
- A printed copy of the electronic vote record (VVPAT) does not correct any of these problems. What’s more, studies show that most voters do not even look at the VVPAT to make sure it matches their selections on the screen. When they do, it’s difficult to notice errors.
- With DREs, the voting public has no basis for confidence in election outcomes, which causes a lack of trust in our American democracy. This, alone, is a grave threat to the health and security of our nation.
A reform in our election systems is needed NOW, but the new technology proposed by Rush Holt’s HR 811 HAS NOT YET BEEN INVENTED.
The bill, as written, would foster a fresh round of DRE development, rushed to market and certain to continue the technology's historical pattern of disenfranchising voters as well as wasting taxpayer dollars.
Tried and true technology is available now to convert the entire country to paper ballots. New Mexico’s smooth and speedy transition from DREs to optical scan paper ballots proves it.
Generations of Americans have fought long and hard to win the right to vote, and we must always remain vigilant to combat new attempts to disenfranchise voters. Today we are faced with a new, high-tech form of voter suppression – DREs. If HR 811 is to protect the precious right to vote, it must be amended to ban their use.
For links to more information see http://www.votersunite.org/info/2007ElectionReform.asp
Labels: DREs, election integrity, election reform, Grijalva, Holt bill HR811, Pastor, voters unite, voting rights
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