Expect Resistance & Library Autonomous Zone

SB 11 Senate Bill - INTRODUCED

Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach), the incoming chairwoman of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee, has introduced a bill so that political candidates cannot take campaign contributions from voting machine companies.

This bill would additionally prohibit a candidate for elective state or local office from accepting any contribution from a manufacturer or vendor of voting equipment or systems.

While saying there is no current evidence of problems with contributions from such companies, she added that “it’s natural to wonder whether election results are being manipulated or whether these machines are so bug-ridden no one should be using them.”

ÒFor me, itÕs pretty simple. Elections are supposed to reflect the will of the voters and ensuring peopleÕs votes are accurately counted gets to the very core of our democracy. The people charged with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system shouldnÕt be taking money from companies that are trying to get their voting equipment installed throughout California.Ó (quoted from her website, which unfortunately is in frames so I had to finagle a link to the press release!)

[originally listed on National Journal's technology daily (subscription service)]

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best.

This working paper just came out today (11/18/04). There are some pretty strange findings and the authors say they are “99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to
chance.” Makes one wonder.

Electronic voting raised President BushÕs advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. The impact of
e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade.

How could the exit polls in this year’s presidential election have diverged so drastically from the results that election officials and the media announced?

Professor Steven Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a disturbing answer. Looking at the exit polls and announced results in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, he concludes that the odds against such an accidental discrepancy in all three states together was 250 million to one.

“As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.”

Read Dr. Freeman’s well-reasoned, well-written argument, and make up your own mind. Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy

Stamp of reproval for e-voting systems.
By Robert Lemos
CNET News.com,
October 28, 2004.

As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Tuesday, weak and outdated federal voting standards have emerged as a major cause of e-voting security concerns. Over the years, state election officials have approved purchases of thousands of e-voting machines, relying on their compliance with federal guidelines that fail to address critical problems.

Voting machines remain unsecured, expert warns.
By Chappell Brown
EE Times,
October 28, 2004.

With the election only a few days away, news of the insecurity of electronic voting continues to come out
with alarming consistency.
A government study of voting machine security issues was cancelled because the conclusions by the panel of computer scientists were so negative.

Computer experts are questioning the security of the all-electronic voting machines being used in this year’s presidential election, but the problems posed by this new approach to recording the vote run much deeper than vote tampering or lost data.

Bad Protocol.
Edward W. Felten. Freedom to Tinker,
October 13, 2004.

Felton reports from a talk by Dan Wallach from Rice University.
One of Wallach’s example concerns the
Diebold AccuVote-TS system, which uses “smartcards” that validate a electronic vote and only let a voter vote once. Unfortunately, it is
“an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design of their voting system” because it makes
it very easy to vote more than once!

E-Voting Research Delayed, Experts Say
Yahoo! News / AP
By KATHY BARKS HOFFMAN and RACHEL KONRAD.
Sun Oct 10, 2004

After nearly 50,000 Michigan Democrats cast ballots over the Internet in February, academics eagerly sought election data that would help them determine what types of people voted online. But scholars around the country complain that they haven’t been able to get statistics from the Feb. 7 caucus….

Researchers and civil rights experts say Michigan’s Democratic Party is merely one of a number of organizations that are stingy with voting data Ñ even though computerized balloting systems and registration databases make such information relatively easy to share.

Wired News: Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws

A programmer wrote a 5 line script that changes vote totals in the Diebold e-voting Global Election Management System (GEMS).

Diebold says not to worry. The system wasn’t designed to be used that way. And anyway, “no one would risk manipulating votes in an election because it’s against the law and carries a heavy penalty.”

A computer scientist says that the security hole may not be intentional, but, “…the vulnerabilities do show incompetence and indicate that Diebold programmers simply don’t know how to design a secure system.”

EFF: E-voting

The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides this page of links to information about electronic voting. Categories include: Electronic Voting Machine Quick Reference Guides, an audio of a Technical presentation at a conference, court cases (e.g., ACLU v. Connor (Texas), Stewart v. Blackwell (Ohio)),
Standards for Electronic Voting Machines, Independent Research into E-voting Security, Media Coverage, and Links to Related Off-Site Resources.

Consumer Report Part 1: Look at this — the Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole | Black Box Voting

The major news organizations are not covering this. Is it because it is not correct? Surely, someone else should examining this issue!

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.