NY's Testing Lab's Accreditation Pulled - Again

For the second time in two years the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) have announced their intention to suspend the accreditation of New York's electronic voting system testing lab, SysTest, Inc. for "failing to comply with program standards."

In a statement released yesterday the New York State Board of Elections announced that SysTest's loss of accreditation would force it to consider the suspension of the software based voting sytems certification testing in New York since the Board requires that all certification testing be performed by an accredited lab.

Although it is likely that this development will delay the certification of the new voting systems past 2009, this is no guarantee that the DOJ will not order the implementation of uncertified voting machines. We must continue to be vigilant.

If you have not done so sign the petition to save out levers and pass it along to your friends.

Write to the State Board of Elections and ask them to stop the "certification" program.

It's now been reported from several sources that when told of the certification problems with these systems, DOJ officials are "speechless."

- Joanne Lukacher

Mission: Possible -- Fight NOW to Retain New York's Lever Voting System!

Under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the ambiguous directives of the Help America Vote Act, and compelled by the state's legislative response, The Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005, New York has been harried to replace its reliable lever voting machines with uncertified -- and uncertifiable -- software-driven electronic vote counting systems. This needless yet stubborn campaign to dismantle our secure lever voting system has amounted to a veritable crusade waged by some, in the face of wary election commissioners and despite ever increasing alarm about the vulnerabilities of the electronic systems. In order to inform our members, so they may better express their concerns to their election officials and legislative representatives, Election Transparency Coalition offers the following brief history of events:

Help Save New York's Lever Voting System!

In October 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that among other things, created the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC). HAVA required the EAC to produce voluntary federal voting system standards. It took three and a half years for the first set of these standards to be published in the Federal Register in April 2006. New York proceeded to adopt these voluntary guidelines along with its own set of State standards to certify new voting systems to replace our time tested, reliable lever machines with computers, as required by the State's Election Reform and Modernization Act of 2005 (ERMA) -- but NOT required by HAVA.

To date, no voting system the State of NY (or any other state) has tested has even come close to meeting these standards, although the standards themselves are considered to be far too lax by most computer scientists who have studied them. Our tried and true lever machines continue to function well, and we are about to use them in the 2008 Presidential election. Almost all of their parts are standard items carried by hardware stores, while the balance of the parts can be produced by machine shops. The outlook for replacing the levers in 2009 remains doubtful due to continued problems and delays in the certification process. This has been reported on a weekly basis to the US Dept. of Justice (the DoJ -- who are suing the State Board of Elections) and to the federal judge in their case.

And it's no wonder. In November 2006, just seven months after the current federal standards were published, computer security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who under HAVA, advised the EAC on the writing of the standards, published a paper on the need for voting systems to be "software independent." The authors clearly stated that "experience in testing software and systems has shown that testing to high degrees of security and reliability is from a practical perspective not possible." [emphasis added]

But the NY State Board of Elections, its vendors, its testing labs, its not-for-profit watchdog -- the New York State Technology Enterprise Corporation (NYSTEC), and even the DoJ itself, have nevertheless been attempting the impossible. We appreciate their efforts and we feel their pain, but we also believe it's time they faced reality. And they are.

As State Election Commissioner Gregory Peterson said at the Oct. 3, 2008 Board meeting in Albany:

What do we do? Go back to lever machines which probably work better than anything else we've ever had. I'm not saying I advocate that. However, if you have something that works and something that doesn't work, I vote for the thing that works.

Well, we the People of the Empire State, who are perhaps able to speak more freely, are in fact advocating for what works.

While the State will have to return about $50-million in HAVA funds to Uncle Sam, we believe it's a small price to pay for our Constitutional right to vote, to know how our votes will be counted, and to see that our votes will be given full force and effect by way of the lever voting machines. Such things will never be possible with software, which by its very nature is not observable. And this is unconstitutional in our great State.

We are therefore asking the State of New York to:

• end this impossible "certification" mission;
• return the $50-million Title I HAVA funds to the United States;
• continue to deploy ballot marking devices for voters with special needs to comply with HAVA using the remaining $170-million of Title II funds available for this and other purposes; and
• allow the voters of New York to continue to vote in free, fair, transparent and secure elections by retaining our lever voting system.

Your State and County Election Commissioners, who have sworn an oath to protect the voters of New York, have the necessary influence to end this madness. The Legislature will heed their advice, just as they did in 2007 when the commissioners asked for ERMA to be amended to remove any date certain for the replacement of lever machines. And the US Dept. of Justice would not have a case for the replacement of lever voting machines if we simply give back a small fraction of our $220-million of HAVA money. This is indeed a small price to pay to preserve our rights and to avoid the kind of electoral chaos we have been seeing in other states and recently, even in the nation's capitol.

Sincerely,

Andi Novick, Esq.
Founder, Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Thomas L. Tedeschi, Esq.
Election Attorney
Queens, NY

Susan Greenhalgh
Communications and Strategy Consultant
Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Teresa Hommel
WheresThePaper.org
http://wheresthepaper.org

Howard Stanislevic
E-Voter Education Project
http://e-voter.blogspot.com

Joanne Lukacher
Executive Director
Election Transparency Coalition of NY
http://www.re-mediaetc.org

Re-media Election Transparency Coalition on Election Defense Radio

Andi Novick and Rady Ananda interviewed on September 17th Election Defense Radio on the case for retaining the lever machines in New York. Link at:

ElectionDefenseRadio_2008.09.17.mp3

Fatally Flawed Systems Await Voters

'Fatally Flawed' Systems Await Voters: 'Drastic Change Needed'

By Rady Ananda

Original version posted at OpEdNews.

A new paper, and video, has been issued by the Computer Security Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This group contributed to voting system reviews conducted by Ohio and California last year. The 11-page paper was presented in July at the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis held in Seattle. Much of it is comprehensible to most voters. The Group also prepared a 17-minute video, presented in two parts that illustrates several attacks, and shows how security seals are ineffective.

The paper clarifies that security is lacking in both Sequoia and ES&S voting systems: "the electronic voting systems that we have reviewed are neither secure nor well-designed." It spends time discussing the certification process which does not and cannot adequately secure a software driven voting system:

"While most critical systems are continuously scrutinized and evaluated for safety and correctness, electronic voting systems are not subject to the same level of scrutiny. A number of recent studies have shown that most (if not all) of the electronic voting systems being used today are fatally flawed and that their quality does not match the importance of the task that they are supposed to carry out." (emphasis added)

This conclusion corroborates many prior statements made by security experts. Twelve such quotes are reproduced here. The UCSB paper states:

"All voting systems recently analyzed by independent security testers have been found to contain fatal security flaws that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the voting process."
...

"Our experience suggests that there is a need for a drastic change in the way in which electronic systems are designed, developed, and tested.
...

"Unless electronic voting systems are held up to standards that are commensurate with the criticality of the tasks they have to perform, the very core of our democracy is in danger."
(emphasis added)

While detailing many of the vulnerabilities in touchscreen (DRE) voting systems, which more than half the states have outlawed1, the paper specifically discusses optical scan systems:

"Evaluations of the various optical scanners offered by both vendors followed much the same pattern of the previous voting system components. A patent disregard for cryptographic authentication and integrity checks allows attackers to overwrite a system's firmware with malicious versions and modify or construct election data to be processed by an EMS.

"Physical security measures were also lacking. In particular, the ES&S scanner lock was easily picked with a paper clip during our tests, while the "unpickable" lock on the Sequoia scanner was bypassed by removing a few screws and pulling out the lock cylinder from the scanner's chassis by hand. In both cases, this allows an attacker to access machine internals to potentially execute arbitrary code."

The Computer Security Group at UCSB issued a statement introducing this information, reposted with permission:

Evaluating the Security of Electronic Voting Systems: Are your votes really counted?

Electronic voting systems have been introduced to improve the voting process. Since their inception, they have been controversial, because both the technologists and the general public realized that they were losing direct control over an important part of the voting process: counting the votes.

A quote attributed to Stalin says: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." It is clear that voting systems represent a critical component of a democracy.

Although the consequences of a malfunctioning electronic voting system are not as readily apparent as those for air traffic control or nuclear power plant control systems, they are just as important, because the well-being of a society depends on them. While most critical systems are continuously scrutinized and evaluated for safety and correctness, electronic voting systems are not subject to the same level of scrutiny.

A number of recent studies have shown that most (if not all) of the electronic voting systems being used today are fatally flawed, and that their quality does not match the importance of the task that they are supposed to carry out.

In the Summer of 2007, the Security Group of UCSB participated in the Top-To-Bottom Review (TTBR) of the electronic voting systems used in California.

The Report

Our team focused on the security analysis of the Sequoia voting system. Our public report can be found here . We found a number of major flaws that can be exploited to compromise the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the voting process. In particular, we developed a virus-like software that can spread across the voting system, modifying the firmware of the voting machines. The modified firmware is able to steal votes even in the presence of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT).

The Paper

We wrote a paper that describes our methodology and our findings: Are Your Votes Really Counted? Testing the Security of Real-world Electronic Voting Systems, D. Balzarotti, G. Banks, M. Cova, V. Felmetsger, R. Kemmerer, W. Robertson, F. Valeur, and G. Vigna, in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Seattle, WA July 2008.

The Movie

We also prepared a movie that shows how the virus-like attack would be carried out, and exemplifies the different scenarios that our malicious firmware would exploit. The video shows how one can use a simple USB key to infect the laptop used to prepare the cards that initialize the various voting devices. As a result, the cards are loaded with a malicious software component.

When a card is inserted in a voting terminal, the malicious software exploits a vulnerability in the terminal loading procedure and installs a modified firmware, effectively "brainwashing" the terminal. Later, when the terminal is used by the voters to cast their votes, the firmware uses a number of different techniques to modify the contents of the ballots being cast.

The movie also shows that the physical security measures being used to limit access to essential parts of the voting systems are ineffective.

In the end, voters will decide whether to continue voting on systems that over 50 scientific studies, comments and testimony have warned are not securable. That decision will be made by whether they participate in a system that leaves no rational basis for confidence. Or, elections will be decided by computer hackers.

Much thanks to John Gideon of VotersUnite.org for his Daily Voting News feed.

1 Election Data Services President Kimball Brace said touch screens would be used statewide this fall in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Nevada, Utah, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina, and in significant parts of or pockets of a dozen other states, according to an August 15, 2008 McClatchy article.

Sequoia's Sinking Ship

by Rady Ananda

Cross posted at OpEdNews

"Right now, there is not a single voting system on the market or in use anywhere in the country that meets current federal voting standards, and very few people realize it." ~ Douglas Kellner, New York State Board of Elections Commissioner (AP)


From New York to New Jersey, from D.C. to Florida, Sequoia Voting Systems continue to fail. Vendor response is, we're not at fault and don't you dare study our product. That's because experts tell us in report after report these machines are fatally flawed by design, lacking the most basic security protocols. Yet, election managers continue to use them, and "voter advocacy" groups continue to support their use. A recent University of California (Santa Barbara) paper by the Computer Security Group warned that "the very core of our democracy is in danger."

Designed-to-be-hacked is what we discovered in our own investigation. The physical security of Sequoia's optical scan ballot marking device is designed with a slotted hole that allows up to ten cardstock ballots to be stuffed at once into the locked ballot box. Here's exclusive video.

New York's state level election officials also tend to blame election workers when Sequoia's machines fail. New York tested out its shiny new $12,000 Ballot Marking Device made by Sequoia-Dominion in the September 9th election. When state election commissioners tried to vote on the machines, the BMDs didn't work. At the Sept. 17th NY SBOE meeting, Anna Svizzzero, Director of Election Operations, advised better training of poll workers was needed.

Of 3,350 BMDs deployed in the Sept. 9th election, only 1,333 people voted on them. Only one voter used the BMD in Ulster County – John Decker (D-Highland), who complained that he first watched the 20-minute instructional video and then it took another 20 minutes to vote on the machine. McClatchy reports:

"Decker said he couldn't believe that it took him so long to vote and would like to see the county retain the older lever pull machines."

In Nassau County, 126 BMDs were deployed but only twelve voters used them, reported Nassau County Elections Commissioner, William Biamonte. Making his job even tougher, Sequoia failed to deliver the BMD's privacy materials until the Saturday before the election – after the machines had already been deployed. Twenty technicians had to be dispatched to deliver and install the materials.

Faulty design, hackable software, lengthy voting process and an inability to accurately count the votes won't stop the League of Women Voters of New York State from insisting these machines be used, and promoted for use.

Tempers flared at the end of Friday's NY SBOE meeting when the NY LWV accused election officials in four counties of dissuading voters from using the new software driven optical scan ballot marking devices. Naming Buffalo, Binghamton (Broome), Utica, and Albany, they charged:

"The counties are actively discouraging voters who are not disabled from using the ballot marking devices."

Phew, smart commissioners, even if they are violating state-mandates that all voters can use the BMDs. Maybe they're avoiding hand counts. This year, NY election officials must hand count the ballots cast on BMDs since Sequoia still hasn't been certified for use in NY.

Sequoia admits to hundreds of document discrepancies – that's where they provide one thing but the document says something else; or they provide and document something that New York specifically forbids.

The League also reported that the Albany County LWV co-president "was asked to produce evidence of disability." Because she's not disabled, she lied in order to use the new BMD. Not a smart admission to make in the public record, especially after accusing counties of violating NY election rules.

The NY SBOE was highly skeptical of the League's reports, prompting another LWV rep to became hostile. Commissioner Evelyn Aquilla practically called them liars:

"We'd like to have that in writing, because, you know what? We didn't see that anywhere. Not any place.... To say that every single commissioner did that, across the state, I don't know if that's true or not, because we saw, I saw four different ... counties, and I never saw that anywhere. I went into at least twelve places."

The New York League of Women Voters wholly supports the use of software driven optical scanners, despite scientific condemnation. They must have been ignoring the papers, too, that amplified our breaking story on July 1st when we reported that Sequoia's BMD failure rate in Nassau County stood at 85%. Two weeks later, Wired.com reported a 50% statewide failure rate. Failure rate be damned, the League wants these machines in use. But then, the League of Women Voters also supported paperless touchscreen voting systems until June of 2004.


Sequoia Fails around the Nation


Florida's Palm Beach County, right now, reports that 12,000 votes were not counted by Sequoia's optical scanners in its unending nightmare of conflicting results from the August election. That's where 3,400 votes (or 3500, depending on which news article you read) went missing, then were found, and now 12,000 more ballots have been found that the machines didn't count. This is an ongoing fiasco. Today's manual recount of 12,000 ambiguous votes "turned up an additional 159 uncounted ballots." South Florida's Sun Sentinel reported that "software issues" with Sequoia's optical scanners were to blame.

But the Palm Beach Post reports today that election officials will run another recount through the $5.5 million voting system:

County Commissioner Jess Santamaria questioned the reliability of the machines the county bought from Sequoia Voting Systems.

"I do have serious concerns," said Santamaria, who also serves on the canvassing board. "My concern affects this election and the November election as well. I don't see how we can have confidence in this system."

John Gideon of VotersUnite.org summarizes the situation this way:

“The county now wants to do another machine recount of the recount of the recount and may also ask to do another hand recount of the newly requested machine recount.”

The August vote count troubles follow the June snafu, also in Palm Beach County, when the scanners failed to count 14% of the ballots. At that time, Palm Beach officials were looking to pay Sequoia more money to take over more of the ballot counting process. In January's presidential primary, "defective cartridges" prevented Palm Beach from posting results for several hours. Yet, still, no one in Palm Beach is considering junking the machines, although voters reportedly did dump Elections Director, Arthur Anderson.

Washington, D.C. election officials have had enough, and have subpoenaed Sequoia records to explain why over 12,000 "phantom votes" appeared in the software driven results from this month's primary. When D.C. officials ran the supposedly "faulty cartridges” through the same software, three different results were produced. When they hand counted three precincts, none of the totals matched Sequoia's reported totals.

Better to seize the machines and run a forensic investigation; although, that didn't work out too well when New Jersey tried it earlier this year.

In New Jersey's February 5th primary, Sequoia's AVC Advantage touchscreen voting system produced conflicting vote totals from its own internal memory. When the numbers didn't add up, Union County officials sought the expertise of Princeton University computer security scientists. They caught errors in 60 precincts. Computer scientist Ed Felten produced the tapes showing those errors, and refutes Sequoia's explanations (blaming the pollworkers) for why their computer can't add. Felten concludes:

"Sequoia's own explanation makes clear that they made an engineering error that caused the voting machine to behave incorrectly."

New Jersey officials seized the machines via subpoena, which Sequoia sought to prevent. Sequoia threatened to sue Union if they studied the machines that Union owns. Union County dropped the investigation. Better to have expensive, faulty counting devices than an expensive lawsuit, I guess. Ed Felten explains this case in the second video embedded in this article, starting at about 4:23.

A month later, Sequoia's website was hacked and defaced.

The Computer Security Group at UCSB may be in trouble for posting that How-to-Hack Sequoia video, but only democracy loyalists would warn the public so instructionally. No doubt, the November 2008 election will be determined by computer hackers, or enough citizens will show up to hand count the ballots after the next round of ridiculous totals are reported. Let's not forget the negative 25 million votes reported for John Kerry in one precinct in Youngstown, Ohio in 2004. That had to be a red flag sent up by a loyalist.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia plan to use Sequoia Voting Systems in what is shaping up to be the third questionable presidential "election" in a row.


Note from the editor:

Is the prospect of yet another questionable "election" result at all related to the following report from the Army Times (via democracynow.org.):

Army Unit to Deploy in October for Domestic Operations

Beginning in October, the Army plans to station an active unit inside the United States for the first time to serve as an on-call federal response in times of emergency. The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent thirty-five of the last sixty months in Iraq, but now the unit is training for domestic operations. The unit will soon be under the day-to-day control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The Army Times reports this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to Northern Command. The paper says the Army unit may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.

-jl

The Press, Obama and the Forgotten Legacy of The Civil Rights Movement: Voting Rights

Author and professor of Media Studies at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller will speak at Vassar College (Main Building, Villard Room) on September 8th at 5:30 sponsored by the college's American Studies Program. Here, in a letter to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Bob Herbert of the New York Times, Professor Miller reminds us of the media's (and indeed the candidate's) glaring neglect to report and fight the present day abuses of the core objective of the Civil Rights Movement: the right of all Americans to vote and to have our vote counted.

- Joanne Lukacher

Democracy Without Tears: An open letter to Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert

I wrote this in response to Robinson's "So Many Miles from Selma," and Herbert's "Champagne and Tears," which columns ran in the Washington Post and New York Times, respectively...

MCM

Messrs. Robinson and Herbert,

Your latest columns are quite moving, and I agree with them, but there's a glaring problem with them, too. I noticed the same defect in Seb. Obama's speech on Thursday night: a speech that also moved me very much, although that problem is a big one--maybe fatal.

Specifically, you both invoke the long, hard fight for civil rights for African-Americans, yet without any reference to that movement's main concern: the right to vote. In your column, Mr. Robinson, you fail to mention that the march on Selma was an effort on behalf of voting rights; and your piece, Mr. Herbert, although powerfully recalling the grim history of racist violence against black citizens, devotes not one word to the major purpose of that violence, which was to keep those people disenfranchised.

Such silence is remarkable--especially since, in his acceptance speech, Obama too invoked the civil rights movement in the same bizarrely expurgated way. In pointing out that he was speaking on the anniversary of King's great speech in Washington, the candidate did not make clear, or even hint, that the ultimate concern behind that speech (and the entire event in 1963) was to secure the right to vote for African-Americans.

Now, while it is surely right to celebrate Obama's nomination--and, indeed, apprioprate to shed some tears of joy at this historic hour--it is a grave mistake to see that win as evidence that we've left Selma far behind. It is a grave and dangerous mistake, because the Bush regime has nullified those victories won decades ago, through an unprecedented program of old-fashioned vote suppression and high-tech election fraud.

Under this regime, the very entities that once worked to enlarge the franchise--the Department of Justice, Congress and the Supreme Court--are working now to narrow it as much as possible; and, in collusion with the GOP (both state and national) and Diebold/Premier, ES&S, Hart InterCivic and a host of other private companies controlled by the Republicans (and often closely linked to the religious right), those three great powers have also made it perilously easy to erase or change those votes that do get cast, or simply to concoct however many votes might be required.

Through such subversive work the Bush Republicans have seized control not only in the White House, but also in the House and Senate, and in several state governments (including those in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia). And now there's every evidence that they intend to do the same thing yet again; and for that, too, "tears are entirely appropriate"--and not just because Obama might well "lose" (despite his popularity). If Rove et al. steal this election, too, it will mean that American democracy is really dead and gone, and no amount of crying will restore it.

What we need more than tears, therefore, is to confront the truth about all this, and let the people know the facts about the Bush regime's election "victories." This is something that the Democrats (or most of them, the party's recent nominees included) will not and/or cannot do. Therefore it is especially important that the media begin to do its job; and so I turn to both of you.

I may be wrong, but I don't think that you, Mr. Robinson, have ever said a word about this issue, either in your column or on television; whereas you, Mr. Herbert, did write an excellent column on it some three years ago. Unfortunately, such long silence is no aberration, since nearly all your colleagues in the US press have likewise kept their eyes closed to this all-important issue, blacking out the topic so completely and consistently that one might think that they'd been ordered not to deal with it. Whatever might explain this silence, you two can help end it at long last; and I promise you that you will be amazed by all the evidence of fraud--staggered by how much of it there is, and by how strong it is--if you will only take a look at some of it.

I would be more than glad to send you a copy of my own new book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008--a collection of 14 essays by a range of first-rate scholars, journalists and activists, on many aspects of the Bush regime's ongoing electoral subversion. I also urge you to get hold of Richard Hayes Phillips' Witness to a Crime, which documents decisively the theft of the 2004 election in Ohio. Phillips studied all the paper ballots in 18 counties, and with his team took thousands of digital photographs, which make quite clear that the Bush machine altered thousands of votes in the incumbents' favor. (The book comes with a CD, so that you can see the evidence yourself. It is available via http://www.witnesstoacrime.com.)

Above all, however, you should check out the revelations of Stephen Spoonamore--a lifelong Republican, erstwhile member of McCain's campaign, and a prominent expert on computer fraud. Spoonamore has copious hard evidence revealing Bush/Cheney stole a number of key races, starting with Florida eight years ago. He has named names, and has the goods to back up every claim; and he knows quite a lot about the plans to make McCain America's next president (which is the reason why he quit McCain's campaign). You can begin to learn more about him, and his testimony, at http://www.rovecybergate.com.

This email is long enough, so let me thank you both for reading through the whole of it. And thanks too for your very moving columns--and for considering how you might help to save this next election, not just for Obama, or the Democrats, but all of us who still believe that We the People ought to rule.

Mark Crispin Miller

Lost Votes and Lame Excuses - Part 1

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped... (Washington Post, August 21st, 2008)

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years... [my emphasis] The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier [formerly known as Diebold.]

True to form the vendor's first response to complaints from election officials was to blame the state employees and pollworkers.

As recently as May, Premier said the problem was not of its making but stemmed from anti-virus software that Ohio had installed on its machines. It also briefly said the mistakes could have come from human mistakes. Further testing by Ohio elections officials and then high volume tests by Premier uncovered the programming error.

In the wake of Premier's admission, the Secretary of State of Connecticut announced the widest audit of election results since the state's switch to optical scanner voting machines. One in three machines used in the recent primaries will be audited.

The disclosure is also stirring new worries that an unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.

McClatchey Newspaper's Greg Gordon provides a run-down of the process which led to the specious certification of electronic voting machines based on "qualified" reports list issued by the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) who relied on the ratings reports of private testing laboratories with whom vendors secretly negotiated payments ... helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements.

The lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed by a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.

The HBO film Hacking Democracy provides a glimpse of the dubious reliability of the testing process as examined by Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris. (Relevant section bgins at 5:30.)







And kudos to New York State Election Commission co-chair Doug Kellner for the quote of the week. Responding to the Premier/Diebold revelations Mr. Kellner said (via McClatchey)it's now clear that a "qualified" rating from NASED is "meaningless ...a piece of toilet paper."

- Joanne Lukacher