[lotuseclat79]

Computer glitches, breakdowns mar vote in several US states
Story here.

-- Tom

[bill.aam]

Jennings wastes no time in contesting her defeat in District 13 election

MANATEE - Barely two hours after the state certified the 13th Congressional District election results this morning, losing candidate Christine Jennings challenged them in court.

Jennings' lawyers contested the results in Leon County Circuit Court, contending a software glitch in Sarasota County's touch-screen voting machines caused them to miss thousands of votes cast in the race.

"This is a miscarriage of the democratic process," Jennings' lead attorney, Kendall Coffey, said at a news conference in Tallahassee.

The challenge was filed at about 11 a.m., two hours after the state Elections Canvassing Commission certified Republican Vern Buchanan's 369-vote victory over Jennings, a Democrat. The final result was 119,309 votes for Buchanan, 118,940 for Jennings.

Buchanan, before meeting with The Bradenton Herald's editorial board this morning, again called on Jennings to concede but said he expected the legal challenge.

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradent...s/16059830.htm

[lotuseclat79]

Federal Agency Faults Voting Machines
From Associated Press
December 01, 2006 3:29 PM EST

WASHINGTON - Paperless electronic voting machines in widespread use across the country may be vulnerable to errors or sabotage and cannot be made secure, a draft report by a federal agency said.

The report by researchers at the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology said the paperless voting machines - essentially notebook computers programmed to display ballot images and record voter choices - "in practical terms cannot be made secure."

"Many people, especially in the computer engineering and security community, assert that the (voting machines) are vulnerable to undetectable errors as well as malicious software attacks," the report said.

A key weakness is that there is no audit mechanism or paper trail to verify election results other than what the machine itself reports, the report said.

"Potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election," the report said.

After examining the issue, including volunteering as election workers at polling sites, NIST researchers said in their report that they concluded that they not know how to write "testable requirements" to make the machines secure and it is their recommendation that the machines "in practical terms cannot be made secure."

Many states bought the paperless electronic voting machines with money provided by Congress after the 2000 presidential election, whose disputed results went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Gail Porter, NIST's public affairs director, emphasized that the draft report is a "discussion document" whose conclusions and recommendations could change.

The report will be discussed at a meeting Monday by NIST's Technical Guidelines Development Committee at the agency's headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md. The committee is tasked under a law enacted by Congress in 2002 to advise the Election Assistance Commission on developing guidelines for voting systems.

Election experts applauded the report's findings.

"The new NIST report is confirmation that the mandatory verified voter trails the DNC and its Voting Rights Institute have championed are vital to restoring the confidence of the American people in their own democracy," Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, said in a statement Friday.

---

On the Net:

http://vote.nist.gov/

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Docs Point to E-Voting Bug in Contested Race
Article here.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

It's Time to Outlaw Paperless Electronic Voting in the U.S.
Article here.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Fifty states face voting machine lawsuits; “Uncounted” documents DRE issues
Article here.

he lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Fixing e-voting: the past, present, and future of voting technology
Ars Technica article here.

Friday's Security and Privacy Day at Stevens featured a keynote talk by Andrew Appel of Princeton, who gave an entertaining talk entitled "The Turing Machine in the voting booth," which placed concerns about computerized voting equipment in the context of the historical efforts to add security and confidence in voting. Appel also described problems with the security of modern voting machines based on his efforts to help improve voting in New Jersey.

Related stories linked from the above story on that webpage are:
* Congress finally considers aggressive e-voting overhaul
* New California e-voting measure uses hackers to test voting machine security
* House waters down e-voting code disclosure rules
* Diebold may leave e-voting business

-- Tom

P.S. Andrew Appel at Princeton is the author of several texts in the area of computer language compilers such as "Modern Compiler Implementation in C" with accompanying software online at Princeton. He is also the author of similarly titled books for the Java and ML language compilers.

[lotuseclat79]

Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines in California and Elsewhere
NY Times article correction dated July 31, 2007 appended here.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Ohio e-voting review makes a mockery of "recounts"
Article here.

This is surreal. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports (via TechDirt) that Ohio's Cuyahoga County—ground zero in the nationwide e-voting debacle that I've been chronicling here at Ars—is holding a "recount" of their November 6 local elections by going back to the memory cards in their Diebold touchscreen voting machines and reprinting all the paper ballots, so that they can tabulate paper copies of the votes in compliance with a law that defines the paper record as the only official record of the vote. How stupid is this idea?

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Ohio Study Confirms Voting Systems Vulnerabilities
Article here.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

1,000 pages of bad news: Ohio e-voting report released
Article dated December 17, 2007 here.

The results are now in from a thorough, $1.9 million test of the voting machines that Ohio has used in elections over the past few years, and they paint about as awful a picture of the state's electoral apparatus as one would expect given the stead stream of grim news out of counties like Cuyahoga. The two private-sector and three academic research teams that carried out the Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing (EVEREST) study of Ohio's e=voting systems did not mince words in the 86-page Executive report that they released this past Friday (or, if words were minced, then one can imagine that the unminced version wasn't family-friendly): "The findings of the various scientists engaged by Project EVEREST are disturbing. These findings do not lend themselves to sustained or increased confidence in Ohio's voting systems."

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Ohio Sec. of State: Electronic voting machines don't meet basic standards
Article here.

If you thought controversy over voting machines was a thing of the past, think again. Just in time for the 2008 election season, Colorado has decertified hundreds of faulty electronic voting machines for being error-prone and easily hacked. This news comes on the heels a massive study in Ohio that also found critical flaws in Buckeye State's voting machines.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Judge throws out Florida voting law
Article here.

A federal judge ordered state election officials to stop enforcing a 2-year-old voter registration law, ruling Tuesday that there is already proof that the change put in place by the GOP-controlled Florida Legislature has resulted in ``actual harm to real individuals.''

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Texas: Voting System Allows "Corrections"
Article here.

The Hart Intercivic voting system, used in at least 16 States, allows anyone with access and a passcode to modify vote totals from an election without leaving any record of the modification. Even worse, the same passcode resides on all machines and in every storage device, waiting to be extracted and exploited.

-- Tom

[lotuseclat79]

Can You Count on Voting Machines?
NY Times Sunday Magazine Aritcle (10 pages) by Clive Thompson here.

-- Tom