Guest Blogged by John Gideon
As reported on March 9 and March 10 by The BRAD BLOG the folks in Summit Co. OH have discovered massive problems with memory cards on ES&S Electronic Voting Machines in recent tests. Some 30% of the cards completely failed.
ES&S, the largest voting machine provider in the country, attributed the problem to low or dead batteries on the PCMCIA memory cards. At the time, we inquired as to whether other states using ES&S equipment might be experiencing similar problems. The reporter covering the story for the Akron Beacon Journal told us she was able to get no response from ES&S — but was then given an assurance that ES&S had contacted their customers to inform them about the concerns.
A week ago Tuesday, Texas experienced loads of problems (or “glitches” as Voting Machine Vendors and Election Officials enjoy minimizing them as) in their Primary Elections. Just a few of those reported in newspapers the day after are listed here.
Then yesterday the Akron Beacon Journal reported that, in fact, ES&S had contacted North Carolina. North Carolina, who lost some 4,500 votes completely via an electronic voting machine in Cartaret County during the 2004 Presidential Election, began checking their ES&S memory cards and have so far found more than 1,000 cards that to be bad!
Summit County, OH has also now confirmed that two-thirds of the cards failed due to “battery issues”; the rest failed due to “read-back errors”.
“The majority of them were read-back errors, not a battery issue,” Bryan Williams, director of the Summit County Board of Elections, said Wednesday.
“About one-third were battery errors. Two-thirds were read-back errors,” Williams added.
He said after new batteries were installed in the memory cards, many still failed to work.
Marijean Donofrio, deputy director of the Summit elections board, said memory cards reading “low battery” began to work properly when new batteries were installed. But others that read “dead battery” still did not work when the batteries were changed.
She said the more common problem was the “read-back error,” which occurred when testers were attempting to run a mock election. The memory cards could not read the data programmed onto them.
It is important to point out that North Carolina state law requires any voting vendor to alert the state if there is a problem found on any voting system in another state that may be a problem in North Carolina. The law worked very well or the state may never have been warned except by the voting activist community who raised the ‘red flag’.
Still unanswered is whether the recent myriad problems with ES&S systems in Texas had anything to do with the memory card failures. Also still unanswered is if there are any problems in other states like Indiana or West Virginia where primary elections are soon to be held and ES&S machines are in place.
ALSO: A newly released study of the reliability of voting systems shows that those voting systems studied and presently being sold across the country are one-third as reliable, at best, as an incandescent light bulb.
your v-voting machines are as reliable as your president LOL
J.E.B. for president in 2008 , batteries in memory cards how 1980’s , are you guys travelling back in time . how many failures did they have during the 2004 election and who did they favour ?
a chip off the old block
March 16, 2006 — The tall, lanky man who spawned George W. Bush may have been standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, 1963. George H. W. Bush is one of very few Americans who does not precisely remember where he was and what he was doing on the fateful Friday in November 1963. Of course, he would have had a foggy memory if he was an accessory to the crime. The Bush family are modern Borgias — cruel "human locusts" who devour and ruin everything in their path.
And today, Sancho received a letter from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sec. State Sue Cobb, threatening action by the state of Florida to take over Leon County elections.
I don’t post much, but I read this blog everyday. John Gideon, I certainly appreciate your contributions here! Hell, I appreciate everyone’s contributions here! I learn so much! I wish I had more time to post and become part of the 6 or 7 patriots here!
I live in the southern part of Ohio along the Ohio River. We have a small town newspaper (very Republican), that rarely prints my letters to the editor. We will be using ES&S Optical Scan equipment for the first time here in Meigs County and I doubt whether I will even show up to vote this year, knowing what I know about these machines! I have never missed a single election in almost 40 years!
They held a voting demonstration of these ES&S scanners this past Tuesday at a couple of local supermarkets. I printed off six pages, detailing the malfunctions and downright failures of ES&S Optical Scan equipment, dating back to 1998 in various states. I believe I got this information from "voters unite." I expected to present this evidence to our local director of the BOE, and to ask some probing questions of any ES&S representatives present.
To my surprise, there was only one man there demonstrating the use of the optical scanner. He identified himself as a retired Elections Official from Franklin County Ohio. He told my sister and I that ES&S had asked him to demonstrate the optical scanner for them in Meigs County. I found this highly suspect!
He explained to my sister and I (as if to children) that there is a square box inside the scanner that records our votes. I said, "Do you mean a memory card?" His eyes widened, and he answered, "Yes, they are memory cards." I asked him if he was aware of the ES&S memory cards in Summit County that experienced a high rate of failure just a couple of days ago? He said he had not heard of that. I explained about the second batch sent over by ES&S that experienced a similar failure rate, and also about the third batch that still registered a 10% failure rating!
I told him (very nicely) that this is still unacceptable. I gave him a comparison to an ATM machine. "You put in your card and ask for 100 dollars. 100 dollars is deducted from your account or credit card, but the machine only gives you 90 dollars! That is a 10% failure rate! Do we accept this as only fair, because after all, it is only a 10% failure rate?"
He was very quick to assure my sister and I that we didn’t even have to worry about malfunctioning memory cards because it is the "paper ballot" that would be counted! Yeah sure! When I asked him directly if our precincts would be counting paper ballets to compare to the machine count, he said he didn’t know how each precinct would handle it!!
Since there was a couple of people waiting to see the new machine, my sister and I had to say our good-byes, but not before I asked what his name was. "Mike Hackett", he replied.
I had never heard of Mike Hackett, so I did a little research when I came home and found that Michael Hackett, a Democrat, is or was the Franklin County’s deputy director under Matthew Damschroder, a Republican, who is the County Elections Director!
Bev Harris, I am so sorry I didn’t take your advice of always taking a video camera with me, but I didn’t have anyone with me, who would agree to operate one! My sister was terrified that I would create a scene! 🙂
Hey! My small town newspaper finally printed one of my letters to the editor! It is read by 2 counties in Ohio and 1 in WV., so at least it will get a little exposure. I provided links to my information, including a link to the GAO report, but they didn’t print the links. Here it is!
"I am seriously concerned about the upcoming elections. Do we need to worry about the way our votes are counted? According to a March 9, 2006 article in The Akron Beacon Journal, there was a "high failure rate" in the computer memory cards of the new optical-scan voting equipment at the Summit County Board of Elections.
Election Systems & Software (ES&S) had a second batch of cards sent to Akron on Tuesday, but those cards experienced a similar failure rate.
It is my understanding that Meigs County will be using the same ES&S optical-scan voting equipment as that of Summit County this May. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) now confirms that electronic voting machines provide an open door to flip an entire vote count without detection and could be done by just a handful of hackers.
When private corporations are allowed to count our votes instead of our local trusted election officials, will this signal the demise of democracy in America?"
Note: I didn’t know about the third batch when I submitted this letter.
The issue was the memory cards that go to the optical scanners. None have been used in an election in NC yet. The problem was found during testing. Most counties haven’t even received their memory cards.
NC is the only state that I know of with a law that requires voting machine companies to report any known problems to our State Board of Elections.
Thanks go to David Allen
( http://www.blackboxvoting.com ) who participated in drafting the legislation, and Justin Moore who advised the NC Legislature.
Thanks to John Gideon for making me aware of the Ohio problem, so I could follow up in NC.
I talked with Don Wright, NC’s General Counsel for the SBOE 7 days ago (March 10) about this. He advised me that ES&S communicated with the Board twice about the issue some bad memory cards being shipped to our state.
Don also advise me that some bad memory cards had been used for a demo, not election purposes in Wake. The cards were discovered. Machines worked fine with correct memory cards.
I am very pleased with our law, which allowed us to make sure this problem was dealt with.
Remember though, we citizens cannot stop dogging our officials, we have to keep an eye on them to make them do their jobs.
Also, consider what David Dill said –
Dr. David Dill of Stanford University said:
“Every voting system (perhaps every system of any kind) is insecure. Making
them more secure is a desirable secondary priority, but unless we focus everyone on ensuring both auditability and effective auditing, we’re just going to create an impossible muddle.
These are examples of why we’ll never be able to make sure that systems are correct or secure, and need to focus on checks and balances, especially auditability and auditing. I see no other implications for e-voting.”
Oh, I don’t mean to gloss over the problem about the memory cards, that is really bad.
None of the press knew about it in NC, and I wasn’t sure our State Board of Elections would follow up in spite of my contacts with them, via email and phone, so I did leak to a trusted reporter who asked them some probing questions.
Yes, the feared "probe". Not an anal probe though.
Or maybe it was.
Anyway, we got them on record publicly so that the SBOE would be forced to do something.
Meanwhile, on the other front in NC, we have
alot of people hoping the optical scanners will screw up, because they want to blame it on our paper ballot law, and our standards, and suggest weakening our standards so that Diebold and other vendors could peddle their wares.
That is a problem, because we would lose all of the good protections, and still end up with a toilet paper ballot on DRES.
Right now, we are in prevention, planning and implementation mode here in NC. We are staving off the opposition who wants to amend our law.
its not E-voting ,its v-voting ,as in virtual .
virtual
Simulated; performing the functions of something that
isn’t really there.
MMIIXX, #3 I think that article on Jeb and Sancho was dated 3/3, so today means 3/3
BTW good on all of you for bringing this stuff out into the public eye (Sherry, thats super)
As for me, I am writing to my county election supervisor
linking her to all of the latest articles
I haven’t heard a peep from her yet
Poor girl must be shivering in a corner in her office
Since I don’t watch MSM news anymore, is any of this astoundingly important news on CNN?
MMIIXX: Jeb Bush overstepping his boundries again? Like when he sent the Fla. State Police for Shiavo, against the local police, and caused a constitutional crisis?
THIS IS PROOF THAT JEB WILL BE LIKE HIS BROTHER IF HE STEALS HIS WAY INTO THE WHITE HOUSE! HE WILL ALSO BREAK THE LAW AND TRAMPLE OVER THE CONSTITUTION! WARNING, WILL ROBINSON! WARNING!
Dan
"Jeb Bush overstepping his boundries again?"
like when he ordered the investigation into the death of Senior FDOT Investigator Raymond Lemme to be shut down .Even thou Senior FDOT Investigator Raymond Lemme had said he had found crimes that "go all the way to the top" in Florida ,only days before his faked un-investigated suicide!
I am with MMIIXX on this. Batteries in PCMCIA Cards?! They get their power from the device they are put into.
The increasingly certain method for detecting election fraud is going to come from exit poll science:
"Exit polling is a well-developed science, informed by half a century of experience and continually improving methodology"
(link here, page 7, bold added). See also Polling and presidential Election Coverage, Lavrakas, Paul J, and Holley, Jack K., eds., Newbury Park, CA: Sage; pp. 83-99).
It is the number one weapon against fraudulent elections. But as with most fraud, the strength and the weakness in all systems is in the people of the system.
We know that "Edison/Mitofsky samples voters for a nationwide exit poll as well as for each state’s exit poll" (ibid).
We know then, where the attack to establish the coverup will come from. We can expect a major movement to corrupt Edison/Mitofsky from the inside. That is the pattern we see in the electronic voting machine industry.
Lets take a look around and check them out.