[Mb-civic] E-VOTING 2006: The Approaching Train Wreck + Actions!

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

E-VOTING 2006: The Approaching Train Wreck  by John Gideon, 
VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA. 
Our Elections are Now Officially 'A National Disaster in the 
Making' 
Normally this space is taken with my ideas of what are the "Top 5" 
voting news stories for the week. Today I am going to use this space to 
talk about what I see as the beginning of a disaster in the making with 
our elections. This isn't the election fraud that some point to when they 
talk about the vendors and some elections officials. It's not about 
recounts or audits. This is a real, get your hands around it, happening 
problem that will disrupt our election process if we do not do something 
about it now. While we have been involved in all of our issues about 
Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or "touch-screen") voting machines 
or paper ballots the electronic voting machine vendors have been 
wreaking complete havoc across the country.

So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas 
there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has 
challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and 
known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some 
votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more 
votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart 
Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had 
to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters 
who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to 
withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting 
Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with 
results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters 
went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very 
successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines 
to "human errors" or "glitches". However, when you listen to people 
who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you 
get a very different picture.

As these primaries were being conducted Summit County Ohio 
announced that over 70% of the memory cards for their precinct based 
optical-scan machines would not work. The vendor, ES&S, announced 
that their memory card contractor had made mistakes on some cards 
and they would be replaced. Memory cards for electronic voting 
machines store vote tabulations amongst other things.

Apparently ES&S does not consider 'Quality Control' to be a worthwhile 
corporate value because they never bothered to check those cards. 
They replaced the bad cards and 20% of those cards failed. Now, this 
week, the newest batch of cards were delivered after being tested 
twice by ES&S. They were tested by the county who found that 4% of 
those cards failed. In the meantime all 1000 memory cards delivered 
to the state of North Carolina were replaced because of a large 
percentage of failures. There is no report, yet, of how many of the 
1000 memory cards are bad and will need replacement except that 
local counties still have not received their cards.

Meanwhile early voting began in Indiana and Nebraska. 69 of the 93 
counties in Nebraska have no paper ballots from their vendor, ES&S, 
and no ballot programming for their voting machines. 11 counties in 
Indiana have the same problems and they are threatening lawsuits. 
Prebel County Ohio reported they had not gotten their paper ballots. 
On March 29 the Texas Secretary of State sent an urgent 
memorandum to all county clerks, elections administrators and county 
chairs noting that many officials had not received electronic 
programming or paper ballots for primary runoff elections to be held on 
April 11. 
"We recognize that this kind of service from our certified voting 
systems vendors is completely unacceptable and disturbing," the 
memo states. "We will be pursuing all appropriate remedies from a 
state level that are available to us."
(continued bel
In Pennsylvania ES&S has become the main provider of voting 
systems and they are not able to deliver all machines that they are 
contracted to deliver to the counties in time for the primary. They are 
asking counties to accept a small percentage of the machines they 
need to conduct elections. In some instances counties may be left with 
fewer machines than they need to satisfy the accessibility mandates of 
HAVA and they will have to find another means of meeting that 
requirement. 
Why don't the states or counties speak out? Just this week Marion 
County Indiana  held a county council meeting and demanded that the 
local ES&S representative attend. Marion County's ballots for a school 
board position were received with no instructions printed for the voters. 
Instead ES&S sent an attorney with orders not to say anything except 
that the representative was involved in a conference call that began 15 
minutes before the council meeting and that he would not be able to 
attend.

Johnson County Clerk, Jill Jackson had this to say about their 
experience with ES&S: 
    "I guess what bothered us the most is that it's like it's no big 
    deal that they missed a statutory deadline," Jackson said of 
    ES&S. "They're a big company and it's like they don't care, that 
    they'll get (the ballots) to us when they get them done, and 
    that's not acceptable. I'm extremely disappointed in the vendor."
What is reported above is only what has been in the media. We now 
have reports from Nevada County, California that ES&S has missed its 
deadline for delivery of paper ballots to the county. They were due to 
be delivered on April 6. On April 7 the county registrar received 
Democratic ballots only and those were filled with errors and will need 
to be returned to ES&S. The county also has not had their ballot 
programming done, as promised.

In Wake County, North Carolina they have 218, just tested, ES&S M-
100 precinct based optical-scan machines. ES&S acceptance tested 
the 218 machines to their standards and failed 11 of those machines. 
The remaining 207 machines were delivered to a county contractor, 
InfoSentry, who tested those machines and failed 5. ES&S then 
delivered 11 machines to replace the machines they had failed and 
InfoSentry failed 2 of those. This represents a 7.8% failure rate or 18 
failures out of 229 machines received. Where is the quality control?

Why is this happening? It is very apparent that some of the voting 
machine vendors over-extended their ability to meet their contracts for 
machines and for ancillary services like paper ballot printing. These 
companies saw an opportunity to make a lot of money at the expense 
of the tax payers and they saw a deadline of 1 January 2006 that fit 
right in with their plans to get as much money as possible this year. 
The vendors are raking in the money through deceptive practices and 
shoddy workmanship. 

Dennis Vadura is the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine 
vendor that has filed for bankruptcy. He has this to say about the 
industry (emphasis added): 
    "I am not happy about the outcome, or the state of the industry. 
    I think that something needs to be done. I'm not sure what it is, 
    it probably doesn't include AccuPoll at this point, but I do not 
    feel that any of the vendors has a system that voters can 
    trust. I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, 
    stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at 
    the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad 
    fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I 
    also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting 
    a VVPAT [Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail] system requirement. 
    They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it."
Yesterday I heard a speech from my county auditor who is the head 
election official in my county in Washington state. She said that those 
who are raising concerns about voting and elections are just 
undermining the confidence of the voting public. What a naïve 
statement to make. We all need to be aware of what is happening to 
our elections. We all need to talk to our counties, states, and federal 
officials and let them know that we are headed for a disaster nationally. 
Maybe your county is in good shape but this is a national issue and a 
national disaster in the making.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 should have been 
changed to extend the dead-line for another year. Many of us argued 
for this but our arguments fell on deaf ears. Now our local elections 
officials are being held-up by vendors who know they have them over a 
barrel and that the counties must do something right now or face 
penalties from the Department of Justice.

This issue has nothing to do with security of voting machines or 
accuracy or voter verified paper ballots or some vendor CEO having 
ties to a political party. It is just about contractors who are out to grab 
every dollar they can get and they don't seem to care that our elections 
are going to suffer for their actions or inactions. And imagine, this is 
only the first year. Counties have HAVA funds to spend this year. What 
happens next year when those counties get the bills for technical 
assistance, ballot printing, maintenance, ballot programming, and 
machine storage? ES&S certainly doesn't care about that. They show 
that every day.

I often get asked, "What can I do?" Well, the time for action is now. 
Pass this article on to your local, state and federal elected officials and 
ask them to do a little reading of the media reports included in this 
article. They are far from being the only articles on this subject. Ask 
them how they are going to handle these problems when it comes time 
for their primaries. Don't let them tell you it won't happen there 
because it very easily can happen there or here or the next state over. 
We, you and I, need to take action on this now for the sake of our 
elections. We are headed for a train wreck.

Actions to Take Now 
All U.S. Citizens: Demand Fair Elections in Florida!
http://www.votetrustusa.org/Florida.htm

Nationwide: Support Emery County UT Clerk Bruce Funk 
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hoti
ssue=15

National: Pass HR 550 As Written! 
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hoti
ssue=1

National: Say No to Prohibited Software in Voting Machines!
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hoti
ssue=4


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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