link:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/1954.html?1109033474Black Box Voting will pick up the last of 12 boxes of public records from Snohomish County, Washington this week. The records consist of internal audit logs and "trouble reports" from Snohomish County touch-screen voters.
An e-mail obtained in the request, written from Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger to San Bernardino (CA) County Registrar Scott Konopasek indicated that Snohomish County had experienced quite a few "calibration problems" where the touch-screen put votes onscreen that differed from the voter's choice.
Black Box Voting has obtained about eight voter's reports of touch-screens marking votes for the wrong candidate.
- In one report, the voter said that votes were on the screen for Bush before he even had a chance to touch the screen.
- Other reports indicated that voters had to "correct" the votes repeatedly.
- In one case, the voter was instructed to press a spot on the screen above the box for the candidate she wanted.
- Another voter was told that the problem might be corrected if she pressed "very lightly only."
Yet, these voter reports are clearly only the tip of the iceberg. Bev Harris examined the internal touch-screen logs from approximately 950 Snohomish County touch-screens. Voting machine internal logs report that
"calibrations" were performed on the machines 100 times while the election was in progress. Presumably only technicians can recalibrate the screen, and one would expect that the screen would not be recalibrated unless it was performing incorrectly. In Snohomish County, the actual number of calibrations was apparently more than ten times the number of voter reports.
Internal logs from the touch-screens show a large number of other anomalies, clustering especially on the Tulalip Indian Reservation and the Cascade Elementary School polling places, as well as some other locations. Black Box Voting is completing an audit of these "mystery anomalies" and will then seek permission to conduct tests to see if they can be replicated, in order to evaluate what was going on with the voter and votes while the internal workings of the machine appeared to be malfunctioning.
Though Snohomish County has been exceptionally cooperative with the Nov. 2 records request, it appears that a small number of records are also missing from the documents produced. In one case, there is a notation that a poll tape is being "held." (No further information was offered as to why the tape was not forthcoming.)
Black Box Voting is taking the Snohomish County documents to Jeremiah Akin in Riverside County, California for his examination, because Riverside has been obstructive with its own records, and the Snohomish records provide a fairly complete set. Akin has developed expertise in examining Sequoia systems, and has expressed interest in seeing a set of records from a cooperative Sequoia touch-screen county.
Additional work has been done on Snohomish County by VotersUnite.org (
http://www.votersunite.org).
An attorney, Paul Lehto, is currently taking on the role of a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Snohomish County touch-screens, on the grounds that the touch-screens force votes to be counted in secret, a violation of the law.
The records from Snohomish County will be used in Riverside, California to help teach local citizens techniques for auditing elections on Sequoia touch-screens, and the techniques learned from Snohomish County will also be applied to Palm Beach County, Florida.