Questions about the reliability of electronic ballots

[papau]

Nov. 2, 2004, in the presidential election, an estimated 29% of voters had access to electronic voting machines, up from 13% in 2000......per..Election Data Services

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-voting3jan03,0,457648.story?track=tottext
From the Los Angeles Times
THE STATE
Voting System Results Still Out
Questions about the reliability of electronic ballots combine with changing regulations to fuel confusion and debate over technology.
By Noam N. Levey
Times Staff Writer

January 3, 2006



Indiana's largest county has sued the company that sold it electronic voting machines. Across the border in Ohio, the same company has sued the state.

"It's been crazy," said San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas, who said he is returning to paper ballots because the state refused to recertify more than 10,000 electronic machines the county bought two years ago. "Everyone is in uncharted territory here."
<snip>

Although the Help America Vote Act set up a federal commission to assist the states, the Election Assistance Commission did not come into existence until 2004, more than a year late. And only in December did it release voluntary voting-machine guidelines.<snip>

In Orange County, thousands of voters got the wrong ballots when they tried to use the county's electronic machines in March 2004.

In coastal Carteret County, N.C., more than 4,400 electronic votes were lost in the November 2004 election, throwing at least one close statewide race into uncertainty for more than two months.

And in Dade County, Fla., home to Miami and a central battleground in the disputed 2000 presidential election, the elections chief resigned earlier this year amid revelations that a coding glitch in the county's 3-year-old electronic voting system had resulted in hundreds of lost votes in six elections.

The new elections chief, Lester Sola, is talking about replacing the $24.5-million system with paper ballots that can be counted by an optical scanner.<snip>

[papau]

1. other facts

Two years ago, California's then-secretary of state, Democrat Kevin Shelley, announced that electronic voting machines would be required to produce a paper record of each vote. Today, more than half the states require such records, according to Verified Voting.

Officials have also begun putting new demands on manufacturers to prove that their systems cannot be compromised.

Last month, Shelley's successor, Republican Bruce McPherson, ordered more testing on a popular Diebold machine used by several of California's largest counties.

In Leon County, Fla., home to the state capital of Tallahassee, elections supervisor Ion Sancho announced in mid-December he was scrapping a Diebold system after he said computer experts had successfully hacked into it. <snip>

California's Orange County is retrofitting its voting machines with printers, a task that Neal Kelley, acting registrar of voters, said will require the county to cut open thousands of machines. Voters there will use paper ballots for an April special election to fill a state Senate seat.

Other California counties have pulled electronic systems out of service while the state reevaluates whether the machines are vulnerable to hacking.<snip>


Los Angeles County uses some Diebold touch-screen machines for early voting but decided three years ago to defer spending $100 million on a new electronic system until the technology became more reliable and regulations stabilized. The county turned to the InkaVote system — paper ballots marked with an ink stamp and then optically scanned — to replace the punch cards used since the late 1960s.<snip>

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[Wilms]

5. VotersUnite has an archived version of the article.

http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=6518

[kster]

2. Kick-n-recommended.nt

[Stevepol]

3. K&R!!

[kster]

4. kick..nt

[Tace]

6. Pen And Paper -- So Low-Tech

It's strange to read all these stories about states trying to find the right technology to conduct elections. The paper ballot is the obvious answer.

Sure, tabulating will be slower -- but so what? I'll wait a day or two for the results, if I know that they will reflect the will of the people.

[pat_k]

7. Start the mantra: Kerry WON in 2004. Gore WON in 2000.

Kerry won the 2004 election. Gore won the 2000 election. We did not elect Bush.

We don't need to explain. We don't need to justify. We don't need to cite exit polls or statistics.

We just need to assert the Truth with Confidence.

Asserting truth, simply and directly, is far more powerful than all the reasoned explainations in the world.

We KNOW Kerry Won. We KNOW Gore Won. Any attempt to prove otherwise is laughable. (Particularly since the "experts" made it impossible to audit DREs). If anyone insists on proof, just point them to Mark Crispin Miller's "Fooled Again" -- no need to talk about the overwhelming list of horrors.

We must break through the denial that infects people who should know better (The Nation, Mother Jones, ACLU, and so on). The more of us that call them on their cowardly denial, the sooner we will break through. And when the folks on "our side" are speaking with one voice, we will be heard.

It doesn't matter if they call us names. We don't need to be defensive. Just open our mouths and tell the truth. Let them sputter and defend. When they do, they are on our turf.