California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100

[Wilms]

Freedom to Tinker

… is your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices

California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100

March 26th, 2008 by Dan Wallach

California’s Secretary of State has been busy. It appears that ES&S (manufacturers of the Ink-a-Vote voting system, used in Los Angeles, as well as the iVotronic systems that made news in Sarasota, Florida in 2006) submitted its latest and greatest “Unity 3.0.1.1″ system for California certification. ES&S systems were also considered by Ohio’s study last year, which found a variety of security problems.

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The accessibility report is very well done and should be required reading for anybody wanting to understand accessibility issues from a broad perspective. They found:

* Physical access has some limitations.
* There are some personal safety hazards.
* Voters with severe manual dexterity impairments may not be able to independently remove the ballot from the AutoMARK and cast it.
* The keypad controls present challenges for some voters.
* It takes more time to vote with the audio interface.
* The audio ballot navigation can be confusing.
* Write-in difficulties frustrated some voters.
* The voting accuracy was limited by write-in failures.
* Many of the spoken instructions and prompts are inadequate.
* The system lacks support for good public hygiene.
* There were some reliability concerns.
* The vendor’s pollworker training and materials need improvement.

Yet still, they note that “We are not aware of any public device that has more flexibility in accommodating the wide range of physical and dexterity abilities that voters may have. The key, as always, is whether pollworkers and voters will be able to identify and implement the optimal input system without better guidance or expert support. In fact, it may be that the more flexible a system is, the more difficult it is for novices to navigate through the necessary choices for configuring the access options in order to arrive at the best solution.” One of their most striking findings was how long it took test subjects to use the system. Audio-only voters needed an average of almost 18 minutes to use the machine on a simplified ballot (minimum 10 minutes; maximum 35 minutes). Write-in votes were exceptionally difficult. And, again, this is arguably one of the best voting systems available, at least from an accessibility perspective.

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so much more

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1269

[kster]

1. We allow corporately owned MACHINES to count and store our ballots WE ARE F-CK-NG NUTS!

Demand that the Ballots be taken out of that M-TH-R F-CK-NG vote/counting machine and Hand Counted by "WE THE PEOPLE" before OUR ballots are allowed to leave the polling place (PERIOD)

You want Change thats how you get Change!!!


K&R

[Peace Patriot]

2. But how are they COUNTING the votes of the handicapped? Convenience and privacy

mean nothing--nothing!--if the votes are tallied by 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls, by a far rightwing corporation whose initial funder and major investor is billionaire nutjob Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things). A corporation--ES&S--which manufactures its voting machines for the U.S. 'market' in miserable sweatshops in the Philippines.* An arrogant robber baron corporation that claimed that its 'right' to profit from our election system, with its 'TRADE SECRET' code, trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted, even a stinko election like FLA-13 in 2006 (among other stinko elections).

And the others--Diebold, Sequoia--are no better. Diebold--run by partisan Bushites. Sequoia--which just threatened a Princeton professor and computer expert with a lawsuit, for daring to examine Sequoia's SECRET code at the request of state officials.

These are SCUMBAGS. FASCISTS. GLOBAL CORPORATE PREDATORS. 'Counting' all our votes with SECRET code. Get it?

It was the great American PROGRESSIVE majority in this country that recognized and fought for the rights of the handicapped. It wasn't Republicans. It wasn't Bushites. It wasn't fascist corporations. The leaders of some handicapped groups then turned around and allowed their groups to be used to inflict corporate-run electronic voting on all the rest of us. That is the horrible irony of the situation. And I hope the grass roots members of the handicapped groups realize what their leaders have done, and rise up and throw them out--just as the grass roots of the Democratic Party is doing to its pro-corporate, pro-war leadership, and what the grass roots of the Republican Party will also do, eventually, to Bushites. And we all need to realize what shuckin jive we are getting from corporate-occupied advocacy groups--whether it be the Democracy Leadership Council, the AARP, the League of Women Voters, the World Wildlife Fund, the Chalcedon foundation, Reverend Moon or Pat Robertson. We're all being had. Ordinary people are not being represented--our interests are not being served--in any corner of this global corporate predator political establishment. And 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting is THE major reason why.

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*See "The Trouble With Touchscreens," by Dan Rather, www.HD.net.

[kster]

3. Everything is a mess, the vote counting scam the economy its like the

rest of the world knows that the CROOKS in this country are not going to be able to keep the secret vote counting SCAM COVERED UP, so they are adjusting to an eventual true vote count coming from America, Something they or the markets have not seen in a good loooong time.

Rock on Peace Patriot! ;-)

[Bill Bored]

4. kick nt