Sarasota’s Herald-Tribune highlights why it’s imperative to get election results right on Election Night…
Democrat Christine Jennings was pinning her hopes of winning the 13th District congressional seat on the Democratic majority in Congress.
But a month after essentially abandoning her legal challenge in a Florida court, Jennings is finding her gamble to rely on Congress could take far longer than her supporters had hoped.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office is set to tell Congress on Thursday that it needs until September just to determine what other audits, investigations, and court proceedings have already turned up. Then, the GAO would go before Congress again to determine how much additional time, if any, it needs to produce a formal report for Congress with its own research, said Nancy Kingsbury, a spokeswoman for the GAO.
That would hardly conclude the investigation. The report would need to be vetted by a task force and then voted on by a full committee in Congress before it could then go before the full U.S. House, which has final say over the dispute.
That would all have to happen in the eight weeks between Labor Day and the targeted adjournment on Oct. 27 for the rest of the year.
The Congressional challenge is due to problems with touch-screen DRE voting systems in the district which resulted in 18,000 lost votes, in a race certified as having been “won” by the Republican Vern Buchanan over the Democrat Christine Jennings by a 369 vote margin. Even the machine vendor (ES&S)’s own expert in court admitted that Jennings would have most likely won were it not for problems with their touch-screen DRE voting machines during the race.
A recent study of DRE voting systems found that two-thirds of voters didn’t bother to check their review screens at the end of the voting process on such systems, and that even if they check them, they do not notice votes that have been flipped by the system. The study concludes that paper trail records, printed out after the review screen on DREs, would similarly not be noticed or checked for accuracy. Those findings confirm earlier results from an MIT/Caltech study which looked at similar issues.
The embarrassments caused by the District 13 race in Florida helped lead the Republican-controlled House and Senate in Florida to finally legislate a ban on DRE touch-screen voting machines altogether.
Supporters of Rush Holt’s HR811 Election Reform bill in the U.S. House, however, have said that it’s impossible to get a similar ban in the Democratically-controlled House and Senate, so they’ve refused to add such a ban to their sweeping bill. Those who have made the claim that a DRE ban could never win passage in the Democratically-controlled House and Senate have yet to offer any evidence for that claim, or even offer a single name of a supporter of the bill who would vote against it if it included such a ban.
The bill currently has 216 co-sponsors, although ComputerWorld today confirmed our report from earlier this week that Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) plans to withdraw his co-sponsorship of the bill.
The FL-13 election, meanwhile, was held back in November of 2006. The earliest timetable detailed in the Herald-Trib article, quoted above, would result in a decision on the matter by October of 2007. The Republican Vern Buchanan, who most likely lost the race by nearly everyone’s (but his and Sean Hannity’s) estimation, continues to vote with the GOP caucus in the House while the Democratic candidate, whom Sarasota voters had tried to send to the U.S. House, bides her time in Florida.
Whois the highest crankin thub?
Under votes or over votes can happen on any system.
It is the software bugs, not the hardware configuration that is at the heart of this particular matter IMO.
If we had open source code we could pinpoint the bug in short order.
Imagine the blogs and websites that will show up to scrutinize electronic voting machine software if S. 559 becomes law! Secret vote counting will become history!
This slow-walking, playing out the 2-year clock on FL-13 is inexcusable. No matter who is in charge, even the Mickey Mouse party, they should understand that the person ELECTED should serve, and if the election is fatally flawed, hold another. Immediately. Like, last December.
As for your comment, Dredd, sorry. Open source can analyze the code that is purported to be running on Election Day.
That can be slightly useful. But, right now, it takes one or a few minutes access to a machine to CHANGE what is running on the system. So, your nicely-vetted source code may or may not be running on Election Day, depending on who has had access to it. In many jurisdictions (CA and Harris County, TX that I know of), it is tradition for pollworkers to take electronic voting machines HOME with them before elections. Sleepovers, Brad calls ’em. That is some serious access, sometimes for days.
I invite you, and everyone, to read my piece.
Peering Through Chinks in the Armor of High-Tech Elections
by Pokey Anderson
May 27, 2007
Voters Unite.org
PDF:
http://www.votersunite.org/info...ThruChinks.pdf
Poll workers and citizens shouldn’t have to know about rootkits and encryption keys and buffer overflows to protect our votes from wholesale theft with a few keystrokes. This piece gives A-to-Z, documented explanations of why high-tech voting systems cannot be secured for elections. For laypeople as well as the technically-minded.
Pokey,
I have read your piece and send it around for many to read. Thank you very much for the great detail.
But PLEASE fix your number one sentence of the “Even if….” section.
You have left out a “no” and need to fix it so that it reads properly. I’m sure you intended to say
Even if no malicious code were found…
Thanks loads
Pat
So, what did the Republicans find out about Rush Holt in their data mining efforts that they then used to get him to PRETEND to fix the voting machine debacle? It truly is HAVA all over again. Under the cover of “fixing” a problem, they will enhance the “fix.”
Sigh. My partner and I just interviewed Mrs. Jennings last week at the Sarasota Commissioners Board Meeting, and were disappointed to learn, as Brad reports, that the GAO is just now setting up the “protocol” for this investigation (?!), despite Mrs. Jennings claim that “we are at the finish line”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQs02C88h9o
(Dredd–this was in response to a question we asked re: why can’t the County conduct it’s own independent investigation on it’s own machines?)
ALSO OF INTEREST: Kathy Dent, who was expected to give her recommendations to the Board, was a no-show (pneumonia). Our new video features JUNE 6 footage from Dent’s presentation via her envoy, Scott Farrington, who cited “no evidence” of Dent’s ‘cozy’ relationship with ES&S–(they love the “no evidence” line of defense, don’t they tho’?) interspersed with our RECOUNT clips from November that highlight ES&S influence on our recount AND audit/ plus another funky Dent Press conference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDzg8tS3lo4
(Editor’s note: This video will be updated as I gather ALL the evidence we have of their public displays of affection.)
As it turns out, Mrs. Dent didn’t actually recommend ANY VOTING SYSTEM, but instead submitted a one page document citing the cost of three systems–the price tag for ES&S was so significantly different (approx. 200,000 dollars less than Diebold) that it prompted all kinds of peppery questions for poor Scott Farrington from the Commissioners, who felt this was clearly the industry’s attempt to “steer” their decision (video and documentation pending/ working on it today.)
To the Commissioners credit, they weren’t buying it:
Jon Thaxton’s brief summation (“I have lost faith in ES&S entirely): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_ARDOyzcQ
Brad~your report today heals me a bit. I can’t express how sick I am that ol’ Vern, our CAR SALESMAN ELECT, is my Non-Non in Congress. I feel like I have no representation at all, (and maybe I never did); but nausea overwhelms me everytime our facetious friends at MOVEON.ORG (who I have given up trying to alert about this) keep sending me “contact your representative TODAY!” actions despite the glaring irony.
Now I just delete them.
(Great piece, Pokey–I saved it and will forward to my sleepy Sarasota neighbors.)
To Pat Gracian —
Thanks for sending my piece around.
Oh how I hate typos! Brad can tell you.
That actually was not a typo, but I can see how it may look like one. Finding NO malicious code doesn’t mean there is none, so it’s not as simple as adding a NO. I’ll think about whether there’s a clearer way to express it.
Thanks!