The original co-sponsors of legislation in the House of Representatives to require “paper records” on Electronic Voting Machines and many other security measures and improvements to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, have sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to other members citing the landmark report recently released by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the myriad security problems found after a year-long investigation into those machines.
In a letter from last Wednesday obtained by The BRAD BLOG, Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Tom Davis (R-VA) asked colleagues to join them in support of H.R. 550, known as the “The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act”.
In their letter, the congressmen point out several of the key findings in the GAO report leading off with a quote from it that reads “. . . computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.” [emphasis in original]
The legislation, which currently has more than 150 bi-partisan co-sponsors, has been languishing for some time as House Leadership has kept it from coming up for debate on the House floor or committee mark-up. H.R. 550 is currently “pending” in the House Administrative Committee, according to Holt’s Communications Director, Patrick G. Eddington, but it has received “no debate, mark-up or hearing” as of yet. He added, “no Committee has specifically addressed H.R. 550.”
H.R. 550 was introduced in April of this year. It was a reintroduction of a predecessor bill, H.R. 2239, which was first introduced in 2003, but was similarly never debated or voted on in any House committee.
The House Administrative Committee is chaired by Ohio Republican Bob Ney who held hearings last March on “Ohio Election Irregularities” in which he called only one witness from any “Voting Rights” group. That group, the self-proclaimed “non-partisan” American Center for Voting Rights, had been formed only days before the hearing, and as reporting by BRAD BLOG has revealed, was formed by two high-level Bush/Cheney/RNC operatives. Ney is also reported to be currently under investigation by the DoJ for his involvement in the ongoing Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
Amongst several other points cited in the letter from the GAO reports’s findings: Ballot definitions on Electronic Voting Machines may be altered so that “the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate.”; Programming errror in a Pennsylvania county resulted in an undervote percentage of 80% in some precincts; An “unknown number of disenfranchised voters” as documented by California voting officials; Election monitors in a Florida county discovering a “flaw” in an Electronic Voting Machine ballot that allowed “ballots to be added to the canvas totals multiple times without being detected.”; An Electronic Voting system in Ohio added nearly 4,000 votes for Bush in just one precinct during the ’04 Presidential Election.
Though the GAO report was non-partisan, requested by the Chairmen and ranking members of three different U.S. House Committees, and was released last month after a year-long investigation along with a rare bi-partisan joint press release which lauded it, not a single wire service or mainstream American newspaper to date, that we know of, has devoted a single paragraph reporting on its release or the information contained within.
The complete text of Holt and Davis’ letter to colleagues follows [emphasis in original] …
“. . . computer programs could access these cast vote files
and alter them
without the system recording this action in its audit logs.”
GAO Report: ELECTIONS: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to be Completed – September 2005
Dear Colleague:
In May of 2004, the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Government Reform Committee, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on Science asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the security of electronic voting systems because “[e]xperts have indicated that [the software used in electronic voting machines] has security gaps that could potentially allow unscrupulous individuals to alter the vote count, unlawfully impacting election results while leaving no paper trail or other auditable evidence”. The GAO issued its report in response to that request in September 2005. Its findings included the following:
With respect to system failures noted during elections, the GAO concluded that “[w]hile each of these problems was noted in an operational environment, the root cause was not known in all cases.” In addition, it stated that “ . . . election officials in one state noted that when voting machines malfunctioned and started generating error messages during an election, state technicians were unable to diagnose and resolve the problems because the vendor’s documentation provided no information about what the error messages meant, or how to fix the problems.” One independent testing authority (ITA) official stated that its “testing does not guarantee that voting systems are secure and reliable.”
The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550) would amend the Help America Vote Act to protect the electoral system from those risks, in time for the general election in 2006. In addition, it would create a uniform national standard for independent auditability of election results, by mandating that the voter-verified paper record – the only record verified by the voters rather than by the machines — be treated as the vote of record. That way, voters in every state will be confident that the results reported in every other state will be of equal verifiability and integrity.
The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act had 50 original bipartisan cosponsors when it was introduced in February, and now it has almost 160. It has been endorsed by VerifiedVoting.org as the “gold standard” of verifiability legislation. If we do not pass this legislation, we may as well outlaw recounts in federal elections. For more information or to become a cosponsor, please contact Michelle Mulder of Representative Holt’s staff at (###) ###-#### or [removed]@mail.house.gov.
Sincerely,
RUSH HOLT
Member of Congress
TOM DAVIS
Member of Congress
Hell no, just shut down the Congress and force it onto the floor for a VOTE!!!!!
What the hell is wrong with the spineless Davis and Holt!???? Shut down Congress!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look at the idiotic display they’re trying today, to get the democrats on record as being "cut & run"(when its the opposite..). They need to just force the whole Congress to take it to a vote and soon.
Doug E.
so much for reform….
Oh well, mabye after the next …ahem…election- placebo-type-thing, they’ll form a ‘commission’ to ‘investigate’, and of course exonerate Diebold.
The Green Party (you know, the people who live in a
state of envy of red-state bliss) have called for the
media to quit ignoring the GAO report.
http://green.gpus.org/
They cite Brad’s article about the New Mexico lawsuit.
Wow, it is refreshing that some in congress know the GAO Report exists.
Seems that the MSM is unaware of the GAO report.
For those interested, a PDF version is available for viewing on the GAO website (link here).
Time for a third party. I don’t like living in a fascist country. The media can’t report voter fraud because of the fascist govt. It’s our leaders in congress who should be turned out for going along and getting along while thousands are being tortured and killed for what. To make money. I knew we were sunk during the ’04 pres. debates when the dems. never mentioned the strong push by Bushco to cut out overtime for first responders. If U.S. had known how this one law would undermine our security, they would have known there are traitors in the W.H.
I have a simple suggestion for ANY Democrat who is invited onto a television or radio program:
MENTION THE GAO REPORT. Whether or NOT you are asked about it. Spring it on them, so they end up "covering" it, whether they want to or not.
Obviously, this works best if the program is live..
Joe Biden: You are being given yet more air time on Sunday morning this week: How about it?
And Chris Dodd: Recant your (private) claim that you "looked into it" and found "nothing there" — the GAO Report PROVES YOU WRONG. Admit it — and SAY something about the GAO Report this Sunday.
Etc., Democrats. Get smart, get strategic, go on the offense, EVERY chance you get.
Thank you.
If you want to talk to them about it and hopefully get it mentioned on air, by somebody repeatedly mail them here:
senator@dorgan.senate.gov
senator@boxer.senate.gov
Doug E.
Don’t count on Congressman Tom Davis for any real help on voting issues; he is the eternal opportunist try to disguise his "hip and head" ties to the House Republican leadership.
He is from a swing district that includes much of Springfield Virginia area and depends on the independent and Democratic voters to carry that district under the disguise that he is a "moderate or even liberal Republican". He talks the moderate line to his constituents but votes the hard-right conservative positions.
Up to now, he has had only weak and underfunded opponents; if the Democrats can get Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Gerry Connally to run against Davis in the current political climate, Davis’s political career will be short-circuited. Every one around here recognizes that Davis is setting himself up to succeed Senator John Warner when Warner retires.
Davis is trying to establish his "conservative credentials" within the Virginia Republican Party so that he will stand a chance in a Republican primary election where he will most likely face former Governor Jim Gilmore. Even though Gilmore has been widely recognized as a less than competent governor, he is loved by the religious right in Virginia for his intervention in the Hugh Finn right-to-die case (very similar to the Schiavo case in Florida) and on other regious right issues.
Please pardon my interjection (off subject), but this piece of news is refreshing; finally someone is demanding accountability:
A computer hacker will be trying to break into one of California’s electronic voting machines next week, with the full cooperation of the secretary of state.
Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, will be trying to demonstrate that voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems are vulnerable to attacks by computer hackers seeking to manipulate the results of an election.
"This is part of our security mission,” said Nghia Nguyen Demovic, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office. "We want to make sure that every vote is counted and registered correctly.”
The stakes are high for Diebold, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of electronic voting systems. The company is trying to get its new voting system approved for use in California, the nation’s biggest market, but Secretary of State Bruce McPherson refused certification after 20 percent of the new, printer-equipped voting machines malfunctioned during a July test in San Joaquin County.
"The secretary said that performance wasn’t good enough,” Demovic said.
The new security test, tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, will play a role in Diebold’s future certification efforts.
Last May, Hursti and another computer security expert tested a Diebold system for the elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. They quickly broke into the system, changed the voting results and inserted a new program that flashed the message "Are we having fun yet?" on the computer screens.
"Granted the same access as an employee of our office, it was possible to enter the computer, alter election results and exit the system without any physical record of this action,” said Ion Sancho, the election supervisor, in a report on the county’s Web site.
The California test will use a randomly selected voting machine from one of the 17 counties that use a Diebold system — either touch screen or optical scan machines. The original plan for the test would have used a machine provided by Diebold, something opposed by the state and the critics of the company.
"We want to test a machine that’s already been used in a California election,” said Jim March, an investigator for Black Box Voting, the consumer group bringing in Hursti for the test. "We want to avoid a so-called ‘lab queen,’ a voting machine specially rigged for the test.”
Black Box Voting and other groups have complained that the programs loaded into the Diebold machines can be undetectably changed to provide a specific election result. Officials of the company argue their machines provide secure, accurate results.
Officials of the company did not return telephone calls Wednesday.
Diebold has been a popular target, for those worried about the security of electronic voting and for Democrats complaining about the company’s links to the Republican Party.
In 2003, the head of Diebold’s parent company, a major backer of President Bush, wrote a fund-raising letter to Republicans, saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The company was trying to sell voting machines in Ohio at the time and Democrats saw the letter as more than just the usual effort to raise campaign cash. The complaints grew even louder when Bush edged Democratic Sen. John Kerry in Ohio in the 2004 election marked by widespread complaints in that state of alleged voting irregularities.
The company also has a checkered record in California. Problems with the company’s electronic voting system caused disruptions at 180 Alameda County precincts during the March 2004 primary election. During the October 2003 recall election, several thousand votes for Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante in Alameda County were somehow electronically transferred to Southern California Socialist John Burton.
In May 2004, then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley yanked certification of the Diebold machines in four counties and restricted their use in 10 other counties until their security and reliability could be improved.
The state has mandated that all electronic voting machines have a paper-ballot backup to record votes by the June 2006 primary.
What the hell’s the matter with us!! We’re all fed up with Diebold stealing the election on Fla and Ohio. Boycott the bastards! If Diebold’s banking computer system ran like their voting machines they would be broke. Hey, – sounds good to me.