New Common Cause E-Voting Report: "Malfunction and Malfeasance"

[Hissyspit]

Via E-Mail:

Dear ,

There are about four months to go before Americans cast their ballots in another important national election. Will our votes be counted as we cast them? Will our votes be counted at all?

We are working hard to avoid a recurrence of the voting mess in recent elections. We need you support.

http://www.commoncause.org/SecureElections

The support of our activists gave us the resources to do an exhaustive report on electronic voting machines. Read our new report, Malfunction and Malfeasance: A Report on the Electronic Voting Machine Debacle. You'll learn more about one of the major unresolved problems in our election system. The report not only explains what the problems are, but lays out seven recommendations for our elected officials and for you, the voter.

With your generous support, we can do more. We will keep pushing to pass legislation in Congress and in the states. We will produce more reports - reports that will not just sit on a shelf (or our website), but will be used to galvanize the public and elected leaders to fix this problem.

Thank you for all you do.

Malfunction and Malfeasance:
A Report on the Electronic Voting Machine Debacle

This report surveys four major studies that reviewed DRE voting machine security and reliability. Two of the reports involved extensive review of more than 80 academic, technical, and industry reports on DREs. Each report concluded DRE machines to be vulnerable to malfunction and also to tampering in which a computer-savvy hacker with minimal access to the machine could introduce malicious code to the DRE software and change the results of an election. Such manipulation could be undetectable. In machines equipped with a modem, it could even be done from a remote location.

Furthermore, there have been at least seven reported occasions since 2002 in which electronic voting machines added or removed votes in real elections, calling into question the final results of a race. For example, this spring, as states across the country conducted primary elections, a programming error caused a DRE in Tarrant County, Texas, to record an additional 100,000 votes that were never actually cast. The election outcome is being challenged by a candidate who lost by 6,000 votes.

Despite the security problems and serious malfunctions, in November DRE machines will be used in 37 states, with 39 percent of voters expected to vote on them. In many of these states, there are no adequate safeguards in place. State law either does not require the voting system to produce a voter-verified paper ballot or does not require a statistically meaningful and transparent audit process. These states are at risk of compromised elections due to DRE malfunction or tampering.

This report includes a chart detailing the status of each state, along with a chart detailing the level of risk for voters in each state, and chart showing which medium and high risk states allow no-excuse absentee voting.

To address these problems, Common Cause makes eight recommendations:

- Congress should immediately pass HR 550, "The Voter Confidence
and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005."
- States should pass laws or adopt regulations requiring all voting
systems to produce a voter verifiable paper ballot and mandate
that at least a random two percent of voting jurisdictions conduct
public audits of their voting systems.
- Election officials should take necessary steps to safeguard machines
prior to Election Day.
- State election officials should, wherever possible, immediately retrofit...

MORE AT LINK

[PATRICK]

1. The true picture is simple and libelous

Cooking book software with backdoors needs to be complex, glitchy and prone to many excuses that hide intentionality. The first crooked geeks at ES &S established the methodology. Common sense innocent open source companies came in when the advance ground had been seized. A variety of methods mean a variety of hands and variety of capabilities and a variety of complicity so the logic fit in and expanded with all the physical fraud and hardware mishandling. One dirty hand taints the other and everything they touch...

Now we are in an electoral death spiral since the forbidden fruit, the ultimate cheat machine is mirrored on every plane of electoral fraud by increased impunity and expansion. Trying to get a single hand on this mess misses most of the picture and the full intentions, the blatant lack of any enforcement or will to enforce, or any accountability worth anything at all. The mess succeeds as mess, one crime spins off and away and is blatantly shielded by another.

To follow the money you can add follow the fraudsters. Election commissioners determine how the precincts work- or don't- the machinery and the suppression and gaming of registration. Legislatures game the laws governing the same, setting the stage for suppression, straw dogs and purchases. Local pols directly use the potential. For ignoramuses not meant to be among the higher ups, it is about intimidation, long lines, holding up or fixing the counts and assorted old fashioned skulduggery. Individual chosen few, when everyone knows about "hackability" anyway can easily be led into the votecard rigging and a few simple keystrokes- as much as you can teach a hack to hack anyway without everyone getting into trouble.

Then there are the control teams who run the whole picture but more specifically have some restricted responsibility for tabulation fraud and more secret backdoors. The higher and more national the theft, the fewer and more organized the hands. Hopefully the public won't realize there must be such a tight, targeted network because of the horrendous horde of fraudsters at all the lower clandestine circles. The upper circle fraud does not simply go with the job of being the GOP designate no matter who knows about its existence. It belongs to a proprietary few who never intended Diebold or the GOP to pass it on. It has become part of the power scene and without it, the unpopular GOP is in great danger. We ARE in the realm of conspiracy here and of secrets not revealed as simply as the DRE shortcomings themselves, but it seems that only the pathos multiplies with each new revelation of part of the Great Fraud, and wearisomely framed as another peculiar "problem" to be fixed and not a vast attack to be met broadly and on every front. And like a miserable war, those most responsible are untouched above the lazy puppet strings.

It works as a pyramidal conspiracy. It poses as an opportune mess. It functions in event to the utter destruction of the vote and of democracy. And the "It" is national election practices patchwork of fertile fraud potential added to with new patches of new horrors, and criticizing one patch does not easily reject it- or change the bigger It at all.

[BeFree]

2. Powerful stuff, Patrick

I suggest you post it in it's own thread. It really is powerful.

[PATRICK]

3. I guess I'll

journalize it for some future internet archaeologists.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. this report is also a sort of report-card

I like the way the report categorizes
states as either

high risk
medium risk
or
low risk

based on use of paperless electronic machines and or whether the state
has any sort of automatic audits.

This is really a good report for use in the high or medium risk states.

The politicians get embarrassed when their states are publicly given a
low grade in something.

Great report!

[Febble]

5. This is excellent

A good set of recommendations at the end, too

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

6. here are names of contributors to the report!

Acknowledgements

The Common Cause team responsible for this report consisted of: Matt Shaffer, chief researcher; Barbara Burt and Susannah Goodman, writers; Mary Boyle, Edwin Davis, and Jenny Flanagan, readers; and Stephen Steigleder, research assistant.

The following people contributed ideas, information, or comments to this report:

Doug Chapin, Rich Garella,John Gideon, Eleanor LeCain, John McCarthy, Toby Moore, Michelle Mulder, Lawrence Norden, Spencer Overton, Lawrence Rockefeller, Warren Stewart, and Tova Wang.

We are grateful for their insights but all mistakes are ours alone.
Please note that our acknowledgement of their contributions does not necessarily mean
they endorse our recommendations.
We are especially indebted to Pam Smith of Verified Voting. She and her colleagues provided the information that made the charts possible. Pam also generously shared her vast knowledge of this issue to help us make sense of the current voting machine debacle.

[Einsteinia]

7. Again, AGAIN, What price for increased accessibility?

This "solution" simply isn't worth it. Not only can Diebold's "Vote Remote" signature matching device be callibrated up or down be turned into a vote spoilage device, and the even Oregon's best of class system has never been audited to see if it works as well as they think, but also no matter what State's interpretation of this concept is used, they ALL depend on the U.S. Post Office.

Here's a nice little compendium with a subjective rankings of their relative pros and cons.

http://www.califelectprotect.net/No_to_Mail.pdf