[Voterescue] ***SPAM*** No secret ballot for ES&S, Diebold insiders!

[Vickie Karp]

E-Voting Game Over: Touch-Screen Voting Machines in Ohio Found to Reveal
Secret Ballot, Who Voted For What

Buckeye State Election Integrity Advocates Match Votes to Voters on the
State's ES&S Voting Systems

Systems from Other Companies, Such as Diebold, Have the Same Problem...No
Matter How Much Their Spokespeople Lie About It...

Posted By Brad Friedman On 20th August 2007 @ 10:10 In Diebold/Premier,
ES&S, Election Irregularities, Ohio, California, Sequoia Voting Systems,
Election Fraud | 4 Comments

By Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO...

Enough. Enough. Enough already with this nightmare. It's time to
decertify, ban, burn, crush, destroy all Direct Recording Electronic
(DRE) touch-screen voting machines. Period.

DREs should never be allowed for use in another American election.
Period.

Here's the lede from today's latest head-spinner [1], courtesy of Declan
McCullagh at C|NET News...

Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by
Election Systems and Software [2] and used across the country produce
time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's
results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual
votes.
...
Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain
two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a
time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of
paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in
which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker
who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
...
Moyer and fellow activist Jim Cropcho tested this by dropping by the
election office of Delaware County, about 20 miles north of Columbus, and
reviewing the results for a May 2006 vote to extend a property tax [3] to
fund mental retardation services (PDF [4]). Their results indicate who
voted "yes" and who voted "no"--and show that local couples (the Bennets,
for instance) didn't always see eye-to-eye on the tax.

ES&S machines are used in 38 states, and of course, the ES&S spokesperson
quoted in the article blames Ohio's procedures for allowing such records
to be viewed by the public in the first place. Remember, the voting
machine companies hate transparency and don't believe citizens should
have the right to see anything concerning their own democracy.

They will also try to distract from the fact that the greatest threat to
election integrity and security comes from election insiders --- such as
voting machine company employees and elections officials --- rather than
the public at large.

The well-reported and sourced C|NET article explains that the other major
voting machine companies, Sequoia and Diebold, both deny that the same
thing --- matching voters to votes --- is possible with their machines.
An unnamed Diebold spokesperson, as usual, goes so far as to lie about
the matter to the reporter, claiming they don't include time-stamps on
the records for security and privacy reason. He/she added, "We're very
sensitive to the integrity of the process."

That Diebold spokesperson is, of course, lying.

Last week, The BRAD BLOG detailed [5] fraudulent claims on Diebold's
website which said that on their touch-screen systems "the order of cast
ballots is scrambled to further insure ballot anonymity." That claim runs
counter to the findings of University of California's recent
"Top-to-Bottom Review" [6] of all certified voting systems in the state.
The UC findings [PDF] [7] on Diebold's voting system source code, as
commissioned by California's Sec. of State, Debra Bowen revealed
precisely the opposite to be the truth...

The UC study detailed a "Failure to protect ballot secrecy" in Diebold's
touchscreen AccuVote TSx voting machine. They report that "Both the
electronic and paper records of the Diebold AV-TSX contain enough
information to compromise the secrecy of the ballot. The AV-TSX records
votes in the order in which they are cast, and it records the time that
each vote is cast. As a result, it is possible for election workers who
have access to the electronic or paper records and who have observed the
order in which individuals have cast their ballots to discover how those
individuals voted."

The fraudulent claims posted to Diebold Election Systems, Inc.'s website,
have not be reposted since they took down the original site, and
re-opened late last week under as a newly renamed company. Their "new"
company is called Premier Elections Solutions, and their false claim
about the secrecy of ballots on the company's touch-screen voting systems
has been left off of the new site [8].

In today's C|NET article, UC computer science professor David Wagner
re-iterates the same concerns about privacy issues on the ballots of
Diebold/Premier's DRE voting systems:

David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of
California, Berkeley, said electronic storage of votes in the order that
voters cast them is a recurring problem with e-voting machines.

"This summer I learned that Diebold's AV-TSX touchscreen voting machine
stores a time stamp showing the time which each vote was cast--down to
the millisecond--along with the electronic record of that vote," Wagner
said in an e-mail message. "In particular, we discovered this as part of
the California top-to-bottom review and reported it in our public report
on the Diebold voting system. However, I had no idea that this kind of
information was available to the public as a public record."

While the voting machine companies blame Ohio for giving access to such
public records to mere mortals (eg. citizens who vote and have a right to
such information), changing the public records laws in Ohio and other
states in order to disallow citizens to access such things, wouldn't take
care of the problem either.

"Computer scientists and security experts say restricting the public's
access to e-voting paper trails by tinkering with open records laws is
insufficient," C|NET explains wisely, "it doesn't protect against, for
instance, an insider perusing the ballots and reconstructing them."

As we've tried to explain many times here, it's the unfettered access to
these systems and records by the election insiders --- such as elections
officials and voting machine company employees --- that we must be
primarily concerned about. Not the acccess of the general voting public.

That much is true, no matter how much the election insiders --- such as
elections officials and voting machine company employees who have such
unfettered access --- try to tell you, and the media, otherwise.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from The BRAD BLOG: http://www.bradblog.com

URL to article: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4980

URLs in this post:
[1] today's latest head-spinner:
http://news.com.com/E-voting+predicament+Not-so-secret+ballots/2100-1014_3-62033
23.html
[2] Election Systems and Software: http://www.essvote.com/
[3] property tax:
http://www.co.union.oh.us/MRDD/Levy/Levy_Fact_Sheet/levy_fact_sheet.html
[4] PDF: http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/electionsvoter/2006/pri/tax.pdf
[5] The BRAD BLOG detailed: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4951
[6] "Top-to-Bottom Review":
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm
[7] UC findings [PDF]:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/diebold-source-public-jul29.
pdf
[8] the new site: http://PremierElections.com

Click here to print.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://voterescue.org/pipermail/voterescue_voterescue.org/attachments/20070820/48eb77df/attachment.html