Monday, January 12, 2009
Funding Frozen For Proposed Humboldt Voting Machine Switch
According to the agenda, this Tuesday the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors will consider a proposal from Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, who seeks approval for the purchase of Hart InterCivic eScan optical scanners to replace the similar Diebold/Premier equipment used to "count" votes here since 1995. Linked from the agenda is a 22 page .pdf called Voting Modernization Project Plan Phase II. From page two:Because of the current fiscal crisis in the State of California, the voting Modernization Bond funds designated to cover this project were frozen by the State Treasurer on December 19, 2008. We will return to your Board for change order and funding plan approval once the funding plan is developed and approved by the Secretary of State. The delay in obtaining these funds should not impact the approval of the concept of this plan.
As previously reported at WDNC, the Registrar has created a sense of urgency around this proposal (reinforced by quotes in a Eureka Times-Standard Sunday cover story that is oddly absent from the paper's website). But how can she expect the Supes to hurry up and approve a proposal for a purchase requiring funds that are not currently available and which would be based on a contract that has not been made public? Further calling this urgency into question, from page 6 of the same agenda attachment:Because there is currently no county-wide election scheduled until November 2009, full implementation of the system will be possible before the next election.
One other quick point about this implementation plan. On page 9 it calls for "sleepovers," a period of two days prior to the election when precinct inspectors will have the eScans in their private possession. This is despite myriad warnings, even in the California Secretary of State's own Top To Bottom Review of Hart voting systems. From that report:Conclusion (p.16):
No procedural mitigation defeats unfettered access to machines that can be undetectably manipulated. In addition, deletion of audit trails occurred in this past November's election, as revealed by the Election Transparency Project (ETP). Volunteer Parke Bostrom commented on this in a quote previously posted here at WDNC and also found in this December 8 article at Wired.com:
Although the Red Team did not have time to finish exploits for all of the vulnerabilities we discovered, nor to provide a complete evaluation of the Hart voting system (System 6.2.1 [now proposed for Humboldt]), we were able to discover attacks for the Hart system that could compromise the accuracy, secrecy, and availability of the voting systems and their auditing mechanisms. That is, the Red Team has developed exploits that – absent procedural mitigation strategies – can alter vote totals, violate the privacy of individual voters, make systems unavailable, and delete audit trails.This means the audit log is not truly a "log" in the classical computer program sense, but is rather a "re-imagining" of what GEMS would like the audit log to be, based on whatever information GEMS happens to remember at the end of the vote counting process.
Bostrom is referring to the Diebold central tabulation program responsible for the 197 secretly deleted ballots, though the point is the same with Hart's equipment. Beyond undetectable manipulation, the system can cover its tracks, destroying assurances of built-in memory redundancies and making a mockery of logic and accuracy testing.
The We Do Not Consent blog on Friday posted an announcement from the Humboldt County Republican Party that it has adopted a resolution in support of a public discussion process prior to a vote by the Supervisors on Crnich's proposal. In Sunday's (so far) print-only T-S article, Eureka City Councilman Larry Glass adds, "I think that's an issue that I'd like to see get some more public dialogue, and I'm going to try to make a point of contacting the supervisors and expressing that." Another member of the Council assured me he will attend Tuesday's Supes meeting to make this point in person.
The Voter Confidence Committee, which I co-founded nearly four years ago, distributed an e-mail newsletter on Sunday evening encouraging supporters to attend Tuesday's meeting, or at least to call Supervisors with some or all of the following messages:--We want and are entitled to have a choice and a say in how we count our votes;
There has been other recent media coverage of this developing story. In the third hour of Friday's Peter B. Collins show, I spoke with PBC and Brad Friedman about the day old announcement of a second discrepancy found by the ETP, showing 57 ballots were scanned twice into the official certified results.
--This plan calls for $600,000+ of public money to be spent, and any expense this size deserves careful public scrutiny;
--Prior to voting on the proposed plan, the responsible thing is for the Supervisors to invite the public to participate in the decision making process;
--In any case, there is no reason to rush this decision as the funds for this purchase have been frozen by the State Treasurer;
--The proposed replacement equipment are still secret corporate vote counting machines (a "false alternative");
--State-sponsored reviews of the proposed replacement machines have revealed many problems; we do not want to repeat the past mistake of investing in flawed technology despite knowing of the risks and warnings;
--The manufacturer of the replacement machines has withdrawn from the federal certification process, meaning no software or security updates of any kind will be possible, and no newer versions will be available.
After a commercial break (edited out of linked recording), we got into discussing Tuesday's upcoming Supes meeting and were then joined by a surprise phone call from Crnich. She has appeared on PBC's show many times before, and this is not the first time she has called in immediate response to my presence on the show. There was an unusually long and uninterrupted segment where Friedman challenges Crnich in ways that just have to be heard, including telling her flat out in the end that she should slow down and allow more public input. Overall, I come on the show at about 16:30 into the recording; Crnich joins around the 24 minute mark.
Finally, borrowed from the VCC newsletter, a summary of recent related links:
North Coast Journal, 12/4/08, Election Results: Wrong
http://ncjournal.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/election-results-wrong/#comments
Eureka Times-Standard, 12/5/08, Software glitch yields inaccurate election results
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_11145349 (archive)
Eureka Times-Standard, 12/7/08, Local elections office commended
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_11161383 (archive)
Eureka Times-Standard (editorial), 12/7/08, A glitch that should never have been
http://www.times-standard.com/editorials/ci_11161384 (archive)
Wired, 12/8/08, Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/unique-election.html
Wired, 12/8/08, Unique Transparency Program Uncovers Problems with Voting Software
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/unique-transpar.html
Eureka Times-Standard (Letter to the editor), 12/10/08, Who Dares Defend Diebold?
http://www.times-standard.com/letters/ci_11183863 (archive)
We Do Not Consent blog, 12/17/08, Humboldt's False Alternative to Diebold
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/12/humboldts-false-alternative-to-diebold.html
North Coast Journal (Letter to the editor), 12/18, Has Humboldt Hit a Tipping Point?
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/issues/2008/12/18/vote-smart/
Eureka Times-Standard, 12/22/08, Registrar of Voters considers dumping equipment
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_11287543 (archive)
Eureka Times-Standard, 12/29/08, Federal election commission eyes Humboldt
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_11328669 (archive)
We Do Not Consent blog, 12/6/09, Exclusive: Humboldt's Secret Hart Attack
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/exclusive-humboldts-secret-hart-attack.html
We Do Not Consent blog, 12/9/09, Humboldt Republicans Call For Public Discussion of Proposed Voting Machine Switch
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/humboldt-republicans-call-for-public.html
Eureka Times-Standard, 1/10/09, New error found in county election results
http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_11422921 (archive)
Eureka Times-Standard (Editorial), 1/11/09, Thank you, Humboldt County Transparency Project
http://www.times-standard.com/editorials/ci_11428478 (archive)
* * *
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/funding-frozen-for-proposed-humboldt.html
Labels: Board of Supervisors, Brad Friedman, Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Hart Intercivic, Humboldt Republicans, Parke Bostrom, Peter B. Collins, Top To Bottom Review, Transparency Project
Friday, January 09, 2009
Humboldt Republicans Call For Public Discussion of Proposed Voting Machine Switch
This is the second of two breaking stories from the Humboldt County, CA election integrity scene on the evening of January 8...
The county Republican Party has issued a press release, shown in full below, announcing their adoption of a resolution in support for a "public discussion process" before the Board of Supervisors votes on the proposal from Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich to switch from Diebold/Premier "election" machines to similar equipment made by Hart InterCivic.
The We Do Not Consent blog broke the news of the Registrar's proposal in a December 17 exclusive. A subsequent WDNC exclusive ran earlier this week revealing Crnich had previously divulged her plan at a public meeting of the Election Advisory Committee, requesting that attendees keep it secret.
In those articles, as well as my letters published in the Eureka Times-Standard and North Coast Journal, I have been advocating for a public process to evaluate multiple alternatives to the Diebold system currently used in Humboldt. Of course, I don't think we're going to see anyone cry or even resist giving up on Diebold. In fact, we ought to have a damn party! The way I see this unfolding situation is as a giant victory slathered in opportunity.
Parke Bostrom, who has been involved in most if not all developing Humboldt election integrity stories in recent months, authored a petition featured in my last post that outlines a specific public process for the county to consider.
The Republican resolution below stems from their Thursday night meeting, which Bostrom attended as part of a broader outreach effort to media, community groups, and local elected officials aimed at creating more support for encouraging the Board of Supervisors to take this path next Tuesday, January 13, when the Registrar's proposal is expected to appear on their agenda. If you can lend your voice, please be at the county courthouse at 5th and I Streets in Eureka at 9am. You can also scroll to the bottom of this page to find phone and e-mail info for the Supes. Let them know:We love the idea of getting rid of Diebold but we must slow down and have a public evaluation of alternatives rather than rushing into another secret corporate vote counting system as the Registrar of Voters, Carolyn Crnich, is recommending - secretly, at that.
Bostrom is also a pivotal player in the Election Transparency Project, a volunteer citizen-developed and Registrar supported audit project that uses an off the shelf office scanner and open source software to make images of all the ballots cast in an election. An initial review of the data from this past November's election revealed that Diebold's central tabulation program, GEMS, had secretly deleted 197 ballots, causing the Registrar to certify inaccurate results. The news became a national story. The ETP has now found another discrepancy, the second of the two breaking stories...
* * *
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: M. Parke Bostrom, 707.733.4201, parke.707@gmail.com
At the January 8th meeting of the Republican Party of Humboldt County,
central committee member M. Parke Bostrom moved that the following
resolution be passed:
----
Resolved
The Republican Party of Humboldt County calls upon the Humboldt County
Board of Supervisors to delay voting on the proposed plan to purchase
new elections equipment until there has been a reasonable period of
time for a public discussion process.
----
Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich was present at the
meeting to swear in all the committee members. Crnich stayed for and
participated in discussion with Bostrom regarding his resolution.
Prior to a vote on the resolution, party chairman Patricia Welch left
the chair and said, "As a Republican, I believe that anytime the
taxpayers' money is spent, it is important that there is an
opportunity for public discussion, and therefore I urge committee
members to vote in favor of the resolution."
The resolution passed in a nearly unanimous vote. The Republican
Party of Humboldt County is the first organization to pass a
resolution on this very important matter.
Additional contact info:
Patricia Welch
Chairman, Humboldt County Republican Party
Northwest Regional Vice Chairman, California Republican Party
707-227-6562 Cell
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/humboldt-republicans-call-for-public.html
Labels: Board of Supervisors, Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Hart Intercivic, Humboldt Republicans, Parke Bostrom, petition, press release, Transparency Project
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Humboldt Election Transparency Project Identifies Another Discrepancy In November's Reported Results
This is the first of two breaking stories from the Humboldt County, CA election integrity scene on the evening of January 8...
In a message posted just before 5pm Thursday at the Democracy Counts blog, Mitch Trachtenberg and Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich made a joint statement announcing the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project (ETP) has found a second discrepancy in the results of November's election, which Crnich certified as accurate in early December, just prior to discovering the Diebold central tabulation program, GEMS, had secretly deleted 197 ballots from the total count.Joint Statement on the November 2008 Humboldt County Election Results
That last line about no outcomes being affected, while I don't doubt it, seems almost obligatory to the point of cliche in these types of stories, like many a government-issued denial ("the US does not torture," or even, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). Even given the benefit of the doubt, things look very wrong and smell foul. But hey, what's a little secret vote counting among friends, right?
Carolyn Crnich,
Humboldt County Clerk and Registrar of Voters
Mitch Trachtenberg,
Humboldt County Election Transparency Project volunteer
January 8, 2009
As we've compared the results from Humboldt County's official count with the independent count Mitch has conducted with his Ballot Browser independent vote counting software, we've found two additional issues.
First, the Election Transparency Project had scanned the front side of 63 ballots twice (once upside down); these duplicate scans will be removed from Ballot Browser's counts.
Second, the Elections office appears to have scanned 57 ballots into the Diebold GEMS system twice -- these duplicates need to be removed from the GEMS results.
The numbers from the two systems are now extremely close, though not identical.
We believe many of the remaining variations may be a result of differing vote sensitivity between the Diebold system and Ballot Browser, with Ballot Browser's totals approximately 0.05% higher than those from the Diebold system (approximately one added vote per 2,000 counted vote opportunities).
The variations that remain do not affect the outcome of any races.
Since the news of the original GEMS failure, the We Do Not Consent blog has twice broken stories of the Registrar's rushed and hushed plan to replace GEMS and the county's Diebold optical scanners with similar eScans made by Hart InterCivic. Crnich told the Eureka Times-Standard "This plan that is proposed pre-dates any of the problems that were found to exist in this election."
I personally confirmed this quote with Crnich on Tuesday when she acknowledged having shared her plan in November with volunteers of the ETP, who were asked to keep it a secret.
Even prior to learning this, I had already written a series of articles and letters calling for a public process to evaluate multiple alternatives to the current Diebold system, which of course I'm thrilled we'll finally be done with. With cooperation from Parke Bostrom and others, an outreach campaign is underway aimed at getting the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to create such a process at their January 13 meeting, when Crnich's proposal comes up for their approval. We are beginning to receive support from some perhaps unexpected places. That's the other breaking story, coming soon...
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/humboldt-election-transparency-project.html
Labels: Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Hart Intercivic, Mitch Trachtenberg, Parke Bostrom, Transparency Project
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Exclusive: Humboldt's Secret Hart Attack
On December 17 the We Do Not Consent blog broke the story that Humboldt, CA Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich had announced to the Election Advisory Committee (EAC) the previous evening her intention to replace Diebold/Premier "election" junk with comparable secret vote counting computers from Hart InterCivic. I've posted a few times about the need for a public due diligence process around multiple Diebold alternatives, including a letter published in the Eureka Times-Standard and another that ran in the North Coast Journal. Both letters were based on the recent news of a Diebold programming failure that secretly deleted 197 ballots and led to inaccurate election results being certified here. Both letters were also written prior to learning about Crnich's proposed switch. Efforts to spark such a community dialog are happening today in multiple forms, and on the heels of a major new development.
In a phone call this morning, Crnich acknowledged that in November she discussed the planned changes with a small number of volunteers who were asked to keep it a secret. Parke Bostrom is an EAC and ETP (Election Transparency Project) volunteer who has also worked closely with Crnich as an election day poll worker and overall observer of the Elections Department. Yesterday Bostrom posted The "Spend Pork Wisely" Petition that begins:Petition calling for public discussion of Humboldt County's plan to purchase $600,000 of Hart InterCivic eScan election equipment.
The full petition text appears here and at the bottom of this post. Crnich has now tried twice without success to get the matter on the Supes agenda. As I noted on 12/17, her first attempt was for the December 16 Supes meeting, which would have done the deed even before fully revealing the secret at that night's EAC meeting - at which Crnich also said she had hoped to take delivery of nearly 80 new machines the next day in order to get a $28,000 discount offered by Hart if the deal could be completed by year's end.
WHEREAS, at the November 18th monthly public meeting of the Humboldt Election Advisory Committee, County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich announced the Elections Office's plan to stop using the county's Diebold/Premier AccuVote/GEMS elections equipment and replace it with similar Hart InterCivic eScan equipment.
And WHEREAS, County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Crnich then asked those attending the public meeting to keep this plan secret until at least mid-December, thereby minimizing the opportunity for public discussion of the plan prior to receiving approval for the plan from the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors.
The Humboldt Board of Supervisors met again today without taking this on, leaving us planning for a January 13 agenda item, but taking action now with outreach to media as well as the Supes and various local City Councils, whose members we hope will encourage the Supes to have a public process. Eureka Councilman Larry Glass encouraged such an approach when I spoke with him this past Saturday evening in his Old Town music store. (Also worth noting: Glass recently made news for heroically rescuing a would-be suicide jumper into Humboldt Bay).
My 12/17 exclusive landed as the top story on that day's Daily Voting News, compiled by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org. Two days later, BradBlog quoted me heavily and advanced Gideon's observation that Hart InterCivic had withdrawn from the federal certification process. Bostrom's petition puts a fine point on this:And WHEREAS, the version of the Hart InterCivic eScan equipment the Elections Office is planning to purchase is also an old version of the eScan system, as Hart InterCivic has been unable to receive certification from the California Secretary of State for the most recent and up-to-date version of the eScan system.
The Times-Standard has followed up twice since I broke the story of the proposed switch. In a quote of note in the December 22 article (archive), Crnich says, "This plan that is proposed pre-dates any of the problems that were found to exist in this election."
And WHEREAS, Hart InterCivic has withdrawn from the certification process and is not currently seeking certification for use in California of the most recent and up-to-date version of the eScan system; and consequently, so long as Hart InterCivic remains disengaged from the certification process, it will not be legally possible to apply any software upgrades that may be necessary to prevent future invisible failures of the old version of the eScan system
The same article also reports Congressman Mike Thompson sent a letter to "federal elections officials," about his concern over the invisible failure. I wonder if he knew then or even knows now that some votes for him were among those deleted (as Bostrom notes in the petition). I am awaiting a call back from Thompson's office in Eureka.
The T-S followed up again on December 29 (archive) reporting Thompson's letter got the attention of Election Assistance Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez, who claims her horribly ineffectual board "doesn't have the authority or capacity to launch independent investigations." She does pledge, and seem to want a gold star for, her intention to "disseminate the contents of the Humboldt County report to elections officials from coast to coast [to] prevent similar problems from occurring elsewhere." What a good idea. If only it weren't the repeatedly unfulfilled yet HAVA-mandated purpose for her existence.
Also check out the first half of hour three of the December 19 Peter B. Collins show when I called in to discuss all this with PBC, Brad Friedman, and Harvey Wasserman.
Happenings in the Humboldt Elections Department have been making national news for a while now. Generally speaking, Crnich has earned lots of fans for her willingness to work with the great team of citizen volunteers that have made the ETP happen. In addition to Bostrom, credit, praise and thanks also rightfully go to Kevin Collins, Mitch Trachtenberg, and Tom Pinto.
With such involved interactions and access to Crnich, these guys have gained her trust and confidence, resulting in candid sharing of information. However, Crnich's request for secrecy, and the volunteers' granting of this request, is not the kind of transparency we deserve from our local government, particularly in the context of a so-called Election Transparency Project.
Asked to comment on Bostrom's petition, Crnich told me she is "ready to move forward," and the idea of slowing down for a public due diligence process would be a "serious impediment to progress" because it puts needed training on hold. While Crnich calls the lateral move from Diebold to Hart "progress," I see it as a false alternative.
I have been unable to reach Collins and Trachtenberg for comment on the petition and secrecy issue, however, Pinto provided the following in an e-mail early this morning:In my opinion, citizens are being offered a disappointing menu of choices with regards to election systems. I really hope the CA Sec. of State will offer us the option of using an election system that incorporates open source technology. However, that option is not being offered at this time.
I concede that I missed several consecutive EAC meetings at which Hart equipment was apparently discussed and even demonstrated (Crnich even chided me for this when I arrived at the December meeting). However, I do not think that these small and largely undocumented meetings, of a committee with no formal mandate from the county, constitute a sufficient public process. Pinto notes that "interested persons" have been given an opportunity to weigh in, but not enough has been done to make the community at large aware of the proposed switch to Hart, let alone interested.
I think that CC [Carolyn Crnich] has made an acceptable decision to purchase Hart eScan based upon what is being offered by the State and based upon the age and problems of our existing software. I think CC has researched it sufficiently and she expects it to save [Elections Manager] Kelly [Sanders] a HUGE amount of time. I'm glad the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project is in place to the catch poll worker errors and software bugs (regardless of which proprietary system we're using). I hope that more citizen volunteers will participate in the next audit.
I think CC has done a first rate job of reaching out to citizens to participate. She has given interested persons, such as the ones who attend the EAC meetings, sufficient opportunity to voice any concerns about the eScan. She has also invited the public to inspect these machines. I respectfully question whether there is sufficient need for creating a formal time period for additional public participation. I also doubt that the conclusion of such a comment period would result in any difference the current plan. However, I do not object to the creation of formal public comment period.
Bostrom's petition at least seeks to bridge this gap, also noting that the contract for the proposed switch to Hart has not even been made public yet. That aspect alone deserves rigorous public scrutiny. I'll have more on this developing story in the days ahead.
* * *
Petition calling for public discussion of Humboldt County's plan to purchase $600,000 of Hart InterCivic eScan election equipment.
WHEREAS, at the November 18th monthly public meeting of the Humboldt Election Advisory Committee, County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich announced the Elections Office's plan to stop using the county's Diebold/Premier AccuVote/GEMS elections equipment and replace it with similar Hart InterCivic eScan equipment.
And WHEREAS, County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Crnich then asked those attending the public meeting to keep this plan secret until at least mid-December, thereby minimizing the opportunity for public discussion of the plan prior to receiving approval for the plan from the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors.
And WHEREAS, on the evening of December 16th, at the next monthly public meeting of the Humboldt Election Advisory Committee, after 197 ballots had been invisibly deleted by an invisible failure of the AccuVote/GEMS equipment, when asked what the planned response to the invisible AccuVote/GEMS failure would be, and having been bumped from the overfull agenda of the Board of Supervisors meeting that very morning, County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Crnich publicly announced the plan to purchase the eScan equipment.
And WHEREAS, the invisible failure of the AccuVote/GEMS system deleted 114 votes for Representative Mike Thompson; 102 votes for Assembly Member Wes Chesbro; 76 and 148 votes for, respectively, City of Eureka Councilpersons Linda Atkins and Frank Jager; 110 and 84 votes, respectively, for and against California's Proposition 8; 83 and 113 votes, respectively, for and against City of Eureka Measure J.
And WHEREAS, the invisible failure of the AccuVote/GEMS system is believed to be due to a bug in the old version of the GEMS equipment that is claimed to be fixed in the most recent version of GEMS available for use in California.
And WHEREAS, the version of the Hart InterCivic eScan equipment the Elections Office is planning to purchase is also an old version of the eScan system, as Hart InterCivic has been unable to receive certification from the California Secretary of State for the most recent and up-to-date version of the eScan system.
And WHEREAS, Hart InterCivic has withdrawn from the certification process and is not currently seeking certification for use in California of the most recent and up-to-date version of the eScan system; and consequently, so long as Hart InterCivic remains disengaged from the certification process, it will not be legally possible to apply any software upgrades that may be necessary to prevent future invisible failures of the old version of the eScan system.
And WHEREAS, the cost to purchase the old version of the eScan system will be in excess of $600,000 of taxpayer money.
And WHEREAS, as of January 5, 2009, the proposed contract with Hart InterCivic has not been publicly disclosed, and consequently there has not been any open public discussion of the specific plan to purchase the old version of the eScan system.
And WHEREAS, open public discussion of the plan to purchase the old version the eScan system is a reasonable step to take to reduce the likelihood of future invisible failures of election systems.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that we, the undersigned concerned citizens call upon County Clerk, Recorder and Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, and also upon the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors to take the following steps to promote public confidence in the outcome of future elections in Humboldt County:
1. The county SHALL issue a press release containing the proposed contract with Hart InterCivic and inviting the public to submit written questions, comments and concerns regarding the planned purchase and use of the old version of the Hart InterCivic eScan system.
2. Following the publication of the press release, the county SHALL give the public at least 2 weeks to submit such written questions, comments, and concerns.
3. At the end of the submission period, the county SHALL publish, in an electronic format, all the questions, comments and concerns submitted by the public.
4. Within a reasonable period of time thereafter, the county SHALL prepare written responses to all the public's questions, comments, and concerns. In preparing said responses, the county may, if it so wishes, consult with Hart InterCivic and/or any other parties.
5. When the county finishes preparing written responses, the county SHALL publish, in an electronic format, the public's questions, comments and concerns together with the county's responses.
6. Following the publication of the county's responses, there SHALL be a period of reflection. The period of reflection of SHALL be at least one week long.
7. Prior to the conclusion of the period of reflection, the Board of Supervisors SHALL NOT approve the purchase of the old version of the eScan system.
8. After the conclusion of the period of reflection, the Board of Supervisors may create an agenda item for an open public hearing of the request to purchase the old version of the eScan system.
9. Additionally, if the Board of Supervisors is interested in considering, in a thoughtful and deliberate manner, alternatives other than the purchase of the old version of the eScan system, we recommend to the board that now, prior to the purchase of the old version of the eScan system, is a very good time to consider any such alternatives.
Sign the Petition
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2009/01/exclusive-humboldts-secret-hart-attack.html
Labels: Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Election Advisory Committee, eScan, Hart Intercivic, Kevin Collins, Larry Glass, Mike Thompson, Mitch Trachtenberg, Parke Bostrom, petition, T-S, The Journal, Tom Pinto
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Humboldt Envy?
Last week I posted a letter to the editor I had published in the Eureka Times-Standard (archive). It was written quickly on the morning of December 5, in the midst of the breaking news that the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project had revealed a failure in Diebold's GEMS central tabulator causing the County's certified election results from November to be proven inaccurate.
I sent the same letter to the North Coast Journal since there was also a breaking story on their website about it, even though it hadn't yet appeared in their weekly print edition. When that came out last Wednesday, I wasn't too surprised the letter wasn't published or that editor Hank Sims had editorialized about the story. So I used his column as the basis for yet another letter, which the Journal has published in this week's paper:North Coast Journal
It is tough to be timely in a weekly paper when commenting on a fluid situation. See my exclusive report from Wednesday morning about Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich announcing her intention to dump Diebold scanners in favor of similar secret corporate vote "counting" machines from Hart InterCivic. It is a major advance of the narrative above and has been republished at OpEdNews and Scoop.
Mail Box
12/18/08
Dear Editor:
Hank Sims now says Humboldt's official method of counting votes is an outrage ("Town Dandy," Dec. 11) and the Diebold/Premier folks "should be shunned. Maybe indicted." He may be late to the party, but the top hat and tails are always welcome.
Yes, Humboldt has joined Florida, Ohio, and towns and counties across the land who have experienced the failures of electronic voting. Our certification of inaccurate results has made national news and broken down some of the local wall of denial.
A December 7 editorial in The Times-Standard said local opponents of Diebold "were right to make noise, and right to complain about a company that has been less than responsible." Humboldt Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich told Wired.com in a Dec. 8 article, "this has sort of put a cloud over any confidence that I had in the Premier equipment that's been in this department since 1995."
Has Humboldt finally reached a tipping point? Are we ready to consider alternatives to Diebold? If so, a careful evaluation of the possibilities and input from a well informed community would be both appropriate and desirable.
I'd like to see more consistency in Sims' election integrity advocacy. And bottom line, I hope he'll push for a thorough examination of our options. A lot of work has already been done to facilitate evaluating hand-counting paper ballots, though Election Transparency Project volunteers may have other preferences and ideas to contribute to what could become the most envied process and dialog in the country.
Dave Berman, Eureka
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/12/humboldt-envy.html
Labels: Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Eureka T-S, Hank Sims, Hart Intercivic, Humboldt County, Letter to the editor, North Coast Journal
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Humboldt's False Alternative to Diebold
After missing several consecutive monthly meetings of the ad hoc volunteer Election Advisory Committee (EAC), convened by Humboldt County, CA Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, on Tuesday night I rejoined the group to learn Crnich has at last given up on Diebold/Premier's optical scanners and GEMS central tabulator as our official vote counting method. After years of opposing Diebold, this might seem like a dream come true. But that's only the beginning of the story.
Crnich informed the group that we will continue to use paper ballots and precinct based scanning with Hart InterCivic's eScan system (complementing Hart's eSlate machines already in use for HAVA compliance). A distinction was made between Diebold's optical scanners and Hart's so-called digital scanners, though a similarity worth noting is that rather than counting the actual ballots both technically count the images of the ballots internally created within black box technology.
Whatever the supposed relative merits may be for Hart compared to Diebold, this is the epitome of a false alternative, the appearance of choice in a no-win situation. We will still be using an accuracy-challenged proprietary and secret system found vulnerable to undetectable manipulation by California's Top To Bottom Review, Ohio's EVEREST study, and Colorado's Secretary of State.
Humboldt County has made news lately for its Election Transparency Project, which revealed a failure in GEMS that caused Crnich to certify inaccurate results from last month's election. Crnich later told Wired.com:Crnich told Threat Level the issue has made her question her confidence in the voting system because, even though the company provided officials with a workaround, the problem indicated a fundamental flaw in the company's programming. She said she'd heard a lot of stories from other election officials about problems with voting machines, but never thought they applied to California.
Crnich has been widely praised for working with citizen volunteers to create the audit mechanism that identified the problem, which was entirely the fault of Diebold and not at all of Crnich's doing. Certainly some credit is due there, though as I explained last week, this has been exaggerated in an unhelpful way that now will likely make it more difficult to challenge her decision to switch to eScan. Indeed, at the EAC meeting I was accused of "casting aspersions" for raising questions of timing and public input. Yet check out how this almost went down...
"I've always sort of listened to those anecdotal incidents with a jaundiced ear because California has some very stringent requirements of election systems that are in use here as well as some very strict security procedures and I didn't think those things affected us here," she said. "But this has sort of put a cloud over any confidence that I had in the Premier equipment that's been in this department since 1995."
At Tuesday's EAC meeting, Crnich said she has the sole authority to choose our vote counting method and had already done so. In fact, she had hoped to take delivery of nearly 80 new machines on Wednesday in order to get a $28,000 discount offered by Hart if the deal could be completed by year's end. The total cost is estimated to exceed $600,000 and would be paid entirely out of the County's unused HAVA and Proposition 41 funds. Procedurally, Crnich said she needs the County Board of Supervisors to approve her plan, and then approval of the CA Secretary of State for the use of funds.
Crnich said she attempted to get a spot on the agenda at Tuesday's Supes' meeting. An unusually long list of business items prevented that and has likely created a reprieve until January 6. However, that isn't guaranteed as Supervisor Jimmy Smith, in attendance at Tuesday's EAC meeting, suggested the possibility of a short-noticed special Supes meeting that could possibly occur this year if it would still allow the $28k savings.
Crnich told the EAC the next scheduled election is not until November 2009, though there is talk of a possible statewide special election as early as March. In that regard, she did not express urgency for the Hart transition to begin. If anything, she said she looked forward to having the time to evaluate candidates for an open position within the elections department. She lamented the delay between the announced opening in July and her recent receipt of the qualified applicant list.
The intent here is not to attack Crnich. These are the things she has done and said, which fairly raise the following questions.
There is an element of deja vu here. In 2005 I wrote about efforts to prevent Crnich's flirtation with going touchscreen, though it certainly wasn't presented as an argument for the status quo. Crnich periodically receives heaps of praise for nixing the switch, typically without reference to the public resistance.
I can only think to call this a bittersweet irony. After years of urging the immediate abandonment of Diebold equipment, now Humboldt County can't drop the hot potato fast enough. The glow of the Transparency Project is currently blinding and seems to shield the sense of embarrassment for not only certifying inaccurate results but also defending the continued use of equipment known to be flawed all along. Who else will make clear that one laudable achievement does not mean complete deference on important questions of public policy?
* * *p.11
Here are some key observations from Harri Hursti and others about Ohio's EVEREST study:
The Red Team, working in close conjunction with the 2007 TTBR Hart Source Code Team, discovered that the Hart EMS software implicitly trusts all communication coming from devices appearing to be Hart-branded and neither authenticates the devices nor performs adequate input validation on data transmitted to it by the devices. This allows for the possibility that a compromised device, such as an eScan that had been tampered with at a polling station, could infect the EMS systems. In particular, the Source Code Team discovered a weakness in the code that would allow an eScan to perform a buffer overflow attack and execute arbitrary code on the computer running SERVO.
...
The team was also able to access device-level menus that should be locked with passwords but were not. This access could allow an attacker a vector for altering configuration settings and/or executing a denial of service on the eScan.
Some of the findings from previous studies on precinct count optical scanners were replicated on the eScan, and they allowed the Red Team to maliciously alter vote totals with the potential to affect the outcome of an election. These attacks were low-tech and required tools that could be found in a typical office.
The Red Team implemented an attack devised by the 2007 TTBR Hart Source Code Team that was able to extract election-sensitive information from the eScan and issue administrative commands to the eScan. The leaked information would allow an attacker the ability to execute further attacks, while administrative commands issued to the eScan could erase electronic vote totals and audit records from an eScan while putting it out of service for the remainder of the Election Day. For more details on these attacks, please see the 2007 TTBR Hart Source Code Team report.3.2 Insider Defenses
For more see this 2006 report from VotersUnite.org, the same site's Election Problem Log 2004 - Present, as well as BradBlog.com.
Attack Class 6: eScan Manipulation – We were able to exploit a number of vulnerabilities in the eScan that could give election insiders the ability to compromise election results and voter privacy. Some of these were a result of a lack of physical security. We were able to replace the eScan's internal flash memory card containing the eScan executable and configuration file with only a screwdriver in about 2 minutes. After replacing the card, we were able to boot the eScan into the Linux operating system. This simple attack gives a single poll worker with a few minutes of unobserved access to the eScan the ability to undermine all votes cast at a precinct (EVEREST 20.3.1).
While opening the eScan to replace the memory card, we broke three tamper evident seals. While such seals may prove that a machine was opened, a preventative measure is preferable. A poll worker may intentionally break these seals in order to cast doubt on election results. It has also been shown that tamper evident seals do not always correctly show that tampering occurred [14].
Insiders may also wish to use their access to ballots to determine voter choice. This can be done with the eScan due to the design of its ballot box (EVEREST 20.3.4). The eScan's scanner sits on top of its ballot box, which is essentially a plastic tub. When a ballot is scanned, it is subsequently dropped into the box. No measures are taken to disturb the order in which ballots fall, allowing a malicious poll worker to note the position in which certain votes are cast and then relay these positions to an election official with access to the ballots. We observed ten numbered ballots as they were cast with the eScan, and verified that the vote order was preserved.
...
Attack Class 14: Open Audit Interfaces – Both the Hart JBC and eScan have open interfaces that allow for the erasure of votes and audit log records. As detailed in Issue 3 of the CA TTBR, the eScan is managed through an accessible Ethernet port that listens for connections on TCP port 4600. This port is normally used for sending and receiving commands from SERVO, such as file transmission and reading images of the eScan's memory. No cryptographic tokens are required for these operations to occur.
We discovered that with a handheld device such as a Palm computer, an attacker with an Ethernet cable can mimic the actions of SERVO to the eScan during a live election, and cause the vote records and audit logs to be erased from both the eScan's internal memory and the MBB inserted into it (EVEREST 20.3.7). Any voting that had occurred on the eScan to that point would be erased, necessitating a manual recount.
...
Attack Class 19: Autovoting – A final example of unsafe features intentionally added to the Hart systems is the Ballot Now’s "Autovote" feature (EVEREST 20.7.2). Autovote allows for the creation of pre-filled-in paper ballots. Once again, this feature is enabled through Windows registry entries. Once these entries are enabled, Ballot Now displays the Autovote menu option when started.
The Autovote menu allows the Ballot Now user to choose the number of pre-filled-in ballots to print. The user has no control over the selected filled in entry for each contest, however, the selected entries are uniformly distributed. This allows an arbitrary number of ballots with the desired results to be printed with the overhead of some ballots with undesired results that may simply be discarded.
Paper ballots generated by Autovote initially say "Autovote" on the front and back, making them conspicuous and easy to detect in an audit or recount. We were able to overcome this by installing a PNG printer driver on the Ballot Now machine. This driver allows ballots to be printed to PNG image files as opposed to paper. We could then open the files in an image editor, remove the Autovote label and print them. Aside from the label, Autovote ballots are identical to regular ballots. We conducted a normal election and an election with Autovote ballots, and could not identify any differences in the eScan unofficial printout, the audit logs, or the cast vote records on the eScan's MBB.
Autovote could be used in tandem with the eScan's duplicate ballot feature to perform a ballot stuffing attack. Using Autovote ballots is advantageous over using photocopies, as each Autovote ballot has a unique serial number, and thus cannot be differentiated from legitimate votes in an audit.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/12/humboldts-false-alternative-to-diebold.html
Labels: Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Election Advisory Committee, eScan, EVEREST, false alternative, Hart Intercivic, Jimmy Smith, Top To Bottom Review, Transparency Project
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Humboldt At The Tipping Point: Who Dares Defend Diebold?
Here in Humboldt County, CA a local story of national interest broke last Thursday on the websites of the Eureka Times-Standard (archive) and North Coast Journal. The next morning I wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in today's T-S (archive). I'll let this serve as a summary then provide links to much of what's been published already and add some further reasons for optimism at the bottom.Any defenders?
So here's a summary of links from the past several days, then I've got a few more observations.
Letters to the editor
Posted: 12/10/2008 01:15:38 AM PST
First I'd like to congratulate Kevin Collins, Tom Pinto, Mitch Trachtenberg, Parke Bostrom and all the volunteers of the Election Transparency Project.
Their work revealed a discrepancy caused by Humboldt's electronic voting equipment last month.
Over the last few years I've made many different arguments for getting rid of the Diebold (now Premier) equipment used to count votes in Humboldt County. Somehow it wasn't enough that they “count” in secret, can be easily manipulated without detection, and report results impossible in a legitimate election.
Somehow local decision makers weren't deterred from doing business with a company that admitted to illegally installing uncertified software here and elsewhere; that was sued in class action suits filed by company shareholders; and whose then -- CEO said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes” to Bush in 2004.
Now we learn that Humboldt has finally experienced what is euphemistically called a “glitch.” In reality it was a bug in Diebold's central tabulation program, GEMS. This caused the results of November's election, already certified as accurate by Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich, to be proven inaccurate.
Worse still, Diebold knew about the bug at least four years ago and never fixed it. Other counties were made aware of the problem and told how to work around it. Crnich says she never knew, and I believe her.
This raises many questions, most important among them: Who dares defend the continued use of these machines and the county's relationship with Diebold/Premier?
Dave Berman
Eureka
T-S, 12/5/08: Software glitch yields inaccurate election results (archive)
T-S, 12/7/08 Local elections office commended (archive)
T-S Editorial, 12/7/08 - A glitch that should never have been (archive)
Wired - two Kim Zetter articles from 12/8/08:
Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County
Unique Transparency Program Uncovers Problems with Voting Software
Election Transparency Project volunteers:
Parke Bostrom - http://hum.dreamhosters.com/etp/news/20081204.html (main site)
Mitch Trachtenberg - http://www.mitchtrachtenberg.com/ourvotes.html (main site)
Tom Pinto - http://humtp.com/
John Gideon & Brad Friedman at BradBlog.com, 12/8/08 - 'Humboldt Transparency Project' Reveals Diebold, U.S. Federal E-Voting Scam
The BradBlog piece includes this link to an .mp3 of Crnich with Brad on the Peter B. Collins show on the afternoon of 12/5/08.
* * *The fact that Diebold/Premier did not take the action to recall the systems, actually puts them into a situation where they may very well have violated federal law. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 Title III Section 301(a)(5) mandates an acceptable error rate for voting systems in use in federal elections. That error rate, not counting any error caused by an action of the voter, cannot exceed 0.00001%.
Parke Bostrom's post above describes how "deck zero" became the batch of ballots that were handled properly by the elections department, and yet vanished from the final certified total. He comments further that the audit log for the Diebold GEMS central tabulation software matched the wrongly decreased total:
However, in the case of the Humboldt County vote count, the error rate was 0.31%.
We have asked both the Secretary of State of California and the EAC if they plan to take action by asking the US Attorney Office to investigate this seemingly clear violation of federal law. Neither the CA SoS, nor the EAC has yet replied to our queries on that matter.This means the audit log is not truly a "log" in the classical computer program sense, but is rather a "re-imagining" of what GEMS would like the audit log to be, based on whatever information GEMS happens to remember at the end of the vote counting process.
This demonstrates the system will cover its tracks when reporting an inaccurate result, destroying assurances of built-in memory redundancies and making a mockery of logic and accuracy testing. Not just here, everywhere. Frankly this is just another example of something we've known a long time.
Crnich herself has been very interesting through all of this. In the "Serious Error..." article above, Zetter reports:Crnich told Threat Level the issue has made her question her confidence in the voting system because, even though the company provided officials with a workaround, the problem indicated a fundamental flaw in the company's programming. She said she'd heard a lot of stories from other election officials about problems with voting machines, but never thought they applied to California.
Crnich losing confidence of course should be music to our ears. She also said a great thing in the interview with Peter B., explaining why she's been willing to work with citizen volunteers. As Humboldt County Clerk/Recorder and Registrar of Voters, Crnich is an elected official and I'm glad she acknowledged a responsibility to listen to constituents.
"I've always sort of listened to those anecdotal incidents with a jaundiced ear because California has some very stringent requirements of election systems that are in use here as well as some very strict security procedures and I didn't think those things affected us here," she said. "But this has sort of put a cloud over any confidence that I had in the Premier equipment that's been in this department since 1995."
In all, the media coverage above practically lionizes Crnich, which I think goes too far. Consider this analogy. Someone builds a fire in the middle of their bedroom and burns down the house. Would this person be praised for the wisdom of having an insurance policy? Using secret corporate vote counting computers, whether by Diebold or any other vendor, is playing with fire.
I've been unable to reach Crnich by phone in the past two days, repeatedly getting voice mail that could not accept more messages.
Also today, The North Coast Journal came out with Hank Sims' "Town Dandy" column called Deck Zero. Sims writes in reference to the known failure of the GEMS central tabulation software:The fact that Diebold/Premier let it stand for over four years, potentially undermining the first principle of American democracy, is an absolute outrage. These people should be shunned. Maybe indicted.
Throw in a little validation from the T-S editorial board...:They were loud, and they were strident in proclaiming that they didn't trust election technologies as much as they trust the ability of actual human beings to count votes.
...and it is starting to sound like we may be at a tipping point here. You might expect me to be frothing about hand-counting paper ballots right about now. You'd be wrong. Thinking as an organizer, I would hope now to establish three things that would be widely agreeable throughout the community:
The recent discovery, thanks to the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, of a discrepancy in election results due to flawed software reveals that these activists were right to make noise, and right to complain about a company that has been less than responsible in dealing with the problem.
That said, if this is the nature of the opportunity now, I will re-offer to the community the materials I've developed to evaluate hand counting, most notably the forecast tool (spreadsheet) for estimating time, cost and labor needs for hand-counting in the precinct on election night. Back in the summer of 2007, when I first made this public, Sims noted: "Initial twiddling with the numbers suggests that it wouldn't be all that time-consuming or costly -- and wouldn't you rather wait a few days and spend a little more for a trustworthy count?"
I'd like to see more consistency in Sims' election integrity advocacy. And bottom line, I hope he'll push for a thorough examination of Diebold alternatives, as I'm sure Transparency Project volunteers will have other preferences and ideas to contribute to what could become the most envied process and dialog in the country.
This is all another way of saying "what would be better" is an inclusive and engaging community dialog aimed at literally defining "better" than Diebold.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/12/humboldt-at-tipping-point-who-dares.html
Labels: Brad Friedman, Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Eureka T-S, Hank Sims, Humboldt Transparency Project, Kevin Collins, Mitch Trachtenberg, North Coast Journal, Parke Bostrom, spreadsheet tool, Tom Pinto
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Activists chanted for voter confidence
I've got a lot of stray threads to pull together here so let's start with this great quote from the Eureka Reporter's coverage of Saturday's Peace March in Eureka, CA:
Hundreds gather to march in peace rally
By ASHLEY BAILEY, The Eureka Reporter
Published: Mar 15 2008, 11:57 PM · Updated: Mar 16 2008, 12:00 AM
Category: Local News
Topic: Community
Hundreds of Humboldt County residents united in a peace march from the Eureka Municipal Auditorium to the Old Town Gazebo on Saturday.
It wasn't just about being against the Iraq War or being against the military's recruitment of minors — nothing seemed to be off limits.
Activists chanted for voter confidence, increased public monitoring of police, and promoting peace and ending violence. (emphasis added)
MORE:http://eurekareporter.com/article/080315-hundreds-gather-to-march-in-peace-rally
You take the good with the bad sometimes. The Reporter's e-paper from Monday March 10 (published only online, see page A2) contained a barely edited version of the Vets For Peace Chapter 56 press release announcing their support for hand-counting paper ballots. The edits attributed factual statements to me, rather than sourcing the basis for considering the claims factual, thus making the facts appear to be matters of opinion. This is a known pet peeve of mine.
So, I submitted a letter to the editor about this, which spawned quite an e-mail exchange with Reporter Managing Editor Glenn Franco Simmons. Typically he requests such exchanges be kept off the record (out of the blogosphere), though this time he did not. I won't post all that now, but perhaps later. I'm told to expect the letter in the paper, and will post that here at WDNC once it has been published.
At the Peace March on Saturday, I shared a moment on stage with John Mulloy from VFP-56. I believe this was what inspired the "chanting" for voter confidence. Mulloy has a cameo in the WDNC Photo Gallery from the March, tucked into the top right corner of the photo of the VCC table at the Gazebo. Here's one where he's the star:
At the Peace March we got a little over 100 people signed up for the willing hand-counter list that now hovers around 350. A VCC e-mail newsletter went out to the newly expanded subscriber list, encouraging letters to the editor, and also the introduction of hand-counting as a campaign issue in the three County Supervisor races on the June ballot.
One last note about the March. I posted a photo of Peter Aronson, captioned with a reference to his tremendous dedication to the topic of depleted uranium. I have since added to the GuvWurld News Archive a January 10 interview (.mp3) Aronson did on the Peter B. Collins show. The dude knows his stuff!
There is a lot of new content over at GuvWurld. In particular, I have been posting a lot of grim economic news, primarily because there isn't any other kind right now. I also want to direct your attention to a recording (.mp3) from last Thursday night. It begins with my presentation to the Humboldt Republican Party, followed by Humboldt Registrar Carolyn Crnich making a presentation of comparable length, and then about 20 minutes of discussion (43:33 total).
To summarize, citing from the VCC Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County, I ran through historical problems with Diebold locally and around the country. I also brought in two new reports: the NH Primary recount study I've previously mentioned by the We The People Foundation; and last week's release from the University of CT, in which the Department of Computer Science announces more and new ways to tamper with memory cards (the same ones used here in Humboldt), including what they described as a "time-bomb" attack.
I spoke about efforts to build support for hand-counting paper ballots, but I didn't have time to get into a lot of detail about our work around forecasting cost, time and labor needs. Despite my preparation, I didn't at all get to preemptively address concerns about the Humboldt Transparency Project, which I knew the Registrar was there to promote. Fortunately, I did speak to this briefly during the discussion.
Perhaps most worthy of note, the Registrar misstated an important aspect of the VCC's position on how hand-counting would be done here in Humboldt. As stated in the VCC's Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County, and in direct communication with the Registrar on multiple occasions, the VCC advocates fresh voters be brought in to count, relieving the poll workers who have been working since before dawn. The Registrar went out of her way to suggest that hand-counting is not favorable because tired people have already worked a long day that would be even longer.
There's a bit more to say about this but I'll hold it back for the day down the line when I'll publish the follow-up letter I sent thanking Patricia Welch, Humboldt Republican Party Chairman, for enabling me to share information with the group.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/03/activists-chanted-for-voter-confidence.html
Labels: "time bomb", Carolyn Crnich, Diebold, Eureka Reporter, hand-counting paper ballots, Humboldt Republicans, John Mulloy, NH Primary, OpEdNews.com, Peace March, Report on Election Conditions, VCC
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Press Releasee: VCC Documents Problems In Humboldt's February Primary
PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Bob Olofson, 707-444-8764 rwolofson@sbcglobal.net
Election Watchdog Repeats Call For Hand-Counting Paper Ballots
March 10, 2008 -- During the recent 'Super Tuesday' primary election, the Humboldt Voter Confidence Committee sent observers to selected precinct polling places. While the election process was mostly free off technical and human glitches, the following problems were noted:
Several Accu-vote ballot scanners at different polling places jammed. Two were repaired within a few minutes with no further problems noted on those machines. A different scanner was reported by a poll worker at 12:30pm as having jammed about 10 times at that point in the day, while another poll worker referred to the same machine as jamming once every 2 - 3 ballots.
One poll observer reported that two different 'e-slate' voting machines showed a ballot count of two on the readout, while the printer tape said zero ballots, and the poll workers said that no one had voted on the machine. There were also two voting machines returned to election headquarters without having been first closed out per operating instructions.
Several instances were observed of paperwork being put in the wrong bag, one instance of an official seal being left unsecured (which could theoretically be used to re-seal the container after tampering with ballots inside,) and several instances of minor problems and delays in setting up or closing down equipment.
In the main vote counting room at County election headquarters (where the paper ballots are scanned and tabulated) between approximately 8:15pm and 10:50pm, the doors were left open and the room and access hallway unattended for periods of several minutes at a time.
A machine from a McKinleyville precinct was left overnight at the precinct rather than being returned to election headquarters.
All data from the e-slate voting machines was tabulated by an employee of the contractor that supplied the equipment, on a laptop brought by the employee.
There was apparently no specific time frame for the 'hash test' on the memory cards of the Accu-vote scanners. (This test is to assure that the secret proprietary code supplied by the vendors of the scanners has not been tampered with since it left the custody of the County elections office. The longer the hash test is delayed, the greater the possibility that a hacker could successfully re-program the card and then erase any signs of tampering with it.)
The VCC again acknowledge the dedication and competence of the County election office staff and the poll workers.
The VCC again called for an end to the use of all optical scanners (for counting paper ballots) and paperless voting machines, and a return to the more verifiable, transparent and secure practice of hand counting all paper ballots. The public are invited to obtain more information on election integrity issues at www.voterconfidencecommittee.org.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/03/press-releasee-vcc-documents-problems.html
Labels: accu-vote, Bob Olofson, Diebold, eSlate, hand-counting paper ballots, press release, Voter Confidence Committee
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Humboldt Dems' Subcommittee Advances HCPB Resolution
The six-member Communication and Education Committee, actually a subcommittee of the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee (HCDCC), tonight unanimously passed the hand-counted paper ballot resolution below. As with the Voter Confidence Resolution, this makes a fine template for groups anywhere so feel free to repurpose it. As it stands, this will now come before the full Central Committee on Feb. 13.Whereas elections in Humboldt County rely on Diebold's (now Premier) precinct-based optical scanners, and Diebold's GEMS central tabulator program to combine all precinct results; and
Permalink:
Whereas computer security experts have repeatedly demonstrated and documented the ability to tamper with this equipment, changing election results without leaving behind a trace of evidence; and
Whereas academic studies have repeatedly demonstrated and documented that security flaws in this equipment exist by design, and cannot be remedied with "procedural mitigations," or new security methods; and
Whereas claims of "trade secrecy" prevent citizens, the media, and even elections officials from observing the inner workings of this equipment, denying everyone the right to see their vote counted as cast;
Whereas elections conducted under these conditions require blind trust, or faith, to accept unverifiable and inherently uncertain outcomes that provide no rational basis for confidence in the reported results; and
Whereas the County of Humboldt is free to choose not to use Diebold's equipment, and is likewise not prevented from choosing to hand-count paper ballots at poll sites on election night; and
Whereas hand-counting paper ballots provides transparency, security, and verifiable accuracy that creates a rational basis for confidence in reported results;
Therefore be it resolved, the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee hereby calls for Humboldt County to discontinue use of Diebold equipment and to introduce hand-counting of all ballots no later than the June 2008 primary election; and
Therefore be it further resolved that the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee will commit some of its resources to educating the community about the benefits of this change, and to recruit registered voters to serve as pollworkers and/or vote counters.
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/humboldt-dems-subcommittee-advances.html
Labels: Communication and Education Committee, Diebold, hand-counting paper ballots, Humboldt Dems, Voter Confidence Resolution
Saturday, January 05, 2008
NYTimes: Can You Count On These Machines?
Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a 7800+ word feature story on electronic voting, "Can You Count On These Machines?" The column is already online, spanning ten pages on the NYT website. As I read it I excerpted many passages I thought I might want to comment on, collectively about 1/3 of the article. As I work through a second pass to lay it out for you here, I will try to limit that further. For starters I would say the article really doesn't provide much substantial new information and performs worse still as a matter of framing.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html
So opens the expose, providing a little background and clearly setting the stage for the no basis for confidence meme, which is never explicitly stated. In fact, for the appearance of balance, the article goes on to quote renowned electronic voting machine apologist Michael Shamos, who often gives the appearance of acknowledging real problems while simultaneously minimizing and discounting them with subtle reframing:
January 6, 2008
Can You Count On These Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.
...
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County...Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes...No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working - until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.
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Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices "flip" from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 - even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person "undervote" for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.It's difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he told me. "But they're very disturbing to the public."
The majority of this article shows Shamos' quote to be ridiculous on its face. With such limited auditing of the machines we can't really know what percentage of them fail nor can we know the true extent of known failures. What we know is that our elections are unverifiable so the outcomes are necessarily inconclusive. Such inherent uncertainty is fueled by paperless electronic voting machines that prohibit the possibility of a recount:During this year's presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?
What if they don't? What if, huh? Have we learned anything in the past seven years? Certainly a lot of information not immediately available to us in the aftermath of the 2000 election has since emerged to enable our understanding of a completely and intentionally broken process. Last August, Dan Rather presented an investigative report on HDNet (thanks BradBlog for the archive) that revealed Palm Beach County's ballots were knowingly foisted upon them with flaws. I noted the Times' failure to mention this at what seemed an opportune spot in the article (though it is mentioned toward the end of the piece):The 2000 election illustrated the cardinal rule of voting systems: if they produce ambiguous results, they are doomed to suspicion. The election is never settled in the mind of the public. To this date, many Gore supporters refuse to accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency; and by ultimately deciding the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court was pilloried for appearing overly partisan.
What a completely bogus and false premise: electronic voting results are conclusive. How so? Corporate trade secrecy says otherwise. This is a gigantic example of how the media continues to shape perceptions of fundamentally flawed aspects of democracy. Even before the no basis for confidence meme had crystallized in my mind and pervaded my writing, I had the basic notion down as early as November 28, 2000, right in the middle of the prolonged recount battle between Bush, Gore, and the intellectually dishonest Supreme Court.
Many worried that another similar trauma would do irreparable harm to the electoral system. So in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which gave incentives to replace punch-card machines and lever machines and authorized $3.9 billion for states to buy new technology, among other things. At the time, the four main vendors of voting machines - Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart - were aggressively marketing their new touch-screen machines. Computers seemed like the perfect answer to the hanging chad. Touch-screen machines would be clear and legible, unlike the nightmarishly unreadable "butterfly ballot." The results could be tabulated very quickly after the polls closed. And best of all, the vote totals would be conclusive, since the votes would be stored in crisp digital memory. (Touch-screen machines were also promoted as a way to allow the blind or paralyzed to vote, via audio prompts and puff tubes. This became a powerful incentive, because, at the behest of groups representing the disabled, HAVA required each poll station to have at least one "accessible" machine.)
The Times' article next turns attention to Ohio, describing the use of Diebold TSx touch-screen machines, confusing paper trails with paper ballots and also wrongly concluding (with no evidence) it would take weeks to count:Under Ohio law, the paper copy is the voter's vote. The digital version is not. That's because the voter can see the paper vote and verify that it's correct, which she cannot do with the digital one. The digital records are, in essence, merely handy additional copies that allow the county to rapidly tally potentially a million votes in a single evening, whereas counting the paper ballots would take weeks.
The article mentions that Diebold voting systems are built on notoriously buggy Windows platforms on which unanticipated voter behaviors have caused system crashes. And the REAL QUESTION, (OF COURSE), is not whether any specific machine is worthy of trust but rather whether it is appropriate for election results to require our trust, as opposed to providing verifiable outcomes reflecting an actual rational basis for voter confidence in the reported results.
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[Referring to the May 2006 primary in Cuyahoga County]...poll workers complained that 143 machines were broken; dozens of other machines had printer jams or mysteriously powered down. More than 200 voter-card encoders - which create the cards that let voters vote - went missing. When the machines weren't malfunctioning, they produced errors at a stunning rate: one audit of the election discovered that in 72.5 percent of the audited machines, the paper trail did not match the digital tally on the memory cards.
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Still, the events of Election Day 2007 showed just how ingrained the problems with the touch-screens were. The printed paper trails caused serious headaches all day long: at one polling place, printers on most of the machines weren't functioning the night before the polls opened. Fortunately, one of the Election Day technicians was James Diener, a gray-haired former computer-and-mechanical engineer who opened up the printers, discovered that metal parts were bent out of shape and managed to repair them. The problem, he declared cheerfully, was that the printers were simply "cheap quality" (a complaint I heard from many election critics). "I'm an old computer nerd," Diener said. "I can do anything with computers. Nothing's wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election."
He also pointed out several other problems with the machines, including the fact that the majority of voters he observed did not check the paper trail to see whether their votes were recorded correctly - even though that paper record is their legal ballot. (I noticed this myself, and many other poll workers told me the same thing.) Possibly they're simply lazy, or the poll workers forget to tell them to; or perhaps they're older and couldn't see the printer's tiny type anyway. And even if voters do check the paper trail, Diener pointed out, how do they know the machine is recording it for sure? "The whole printing thing is a farce," he said.
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The Nov. 6 [2007] vote in Cuyahoga County offered a sobering lesson. Having watched Platten's staff and the elections board in action, I could see they were a model of professionalism. Yet they still couldn't get their high-tech system to work as intended. For all their diligence and hard work, they were forced, in the end, to discard much of their paper and simply trust that the machines had recorded the votes accurately in digital memory.
THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to record votes accurately...One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they're running elections.In the infrequent situations where computer scientists have gained access to the guts of a voting machine, they've found alarming design flaws. In 2003, Diebold employees accidentally posted the AccuVote's source code on the Internet; scientists who analyzed it found that, among other things, a hacker could program a voter card to let him cast as many votes as he liked. Ed Felten's [Princeton University] lab, while analyzing an anonymously donated AccuVote-TS (a different model from the one used in Cuyahoga County) in 2006, discovered that the machine did not "authenticate" software: it will run any code a hacker might surreptitiously install on an easily insertable flash-memory card.
That graf sent up a red flag for me because I remember the report of Felton's hack, and recall that BradBlog was the supposedly anonymous machine donor. Sure enough, in his own coverage of the Times story, Brad Friedman calls out Felton for continuously depriving him of due credit.
Like I said, this is a long article. Toward the end, the Times gets around to talking about the secrecy of electronic voting systems:But the truth is that it's hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their "source code" - the computer programs that run on their machines - as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can't get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this "black box" culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted.
Secrecy is indeed at the heart of the issue, but not because the lack of transparency makes the machines untrustworthy. Again, it is because trust is not an appropriate part of the equation. This is the most basic element of the election integrity message.If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine's underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.
Testing, like trust, is a red herring. A test on one machine is not indicative of the performance of any other machine, even if they are the same make and model. Further, testing of any given machine is not proof of how that same machine will perform in an actual election. Yet more context:
Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn't find out how they were conducted. The nation's largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.
The Times article makes further Florida reference, finally connecting the dots between Dan Rather's HDNet report, known problems with ES&S voting machines reported by the vendor but ignored by election administrators, and the 18,000 undervotes in the November 2006 Jennings/Buchanan election for Florida's 13th district Congressional seat. Smoothly segueing to Pennsylvania...
This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors - accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.
In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor. Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end.
"This is a crazy world," complained Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor of Leon County in Florida. "The process is so under control by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the truth. The vendor isn't going to tell me that his buggy software is why I can't get the right time on my audit logs."But what's notable about Centre County is that it uses the iVotronic - the very same star-crossed machine from Sarasota [County, FL]. Given the concerns about the lack of a paper trail on the iVotronics, why didn't Centre County instead buy a machine that produces a paper record? Because Pennsylvania state law will not permit any machine that would theoretically make it possible to figure out how someone voted. And if a Diebold AccuVote-TSX, for instance, were used in a precinct where only, say, a dozen people voted - a not-uncommon occurrence in small towns - then an election worker could conceivably watch who votes, in what order, and unspool the tape to figure out how they voted. (And there are no alternatives; all touch-screen machines with paper trails use spools.) As a result, nearly 40 percent of Pennsylvania's counties bought iVotronics.
Unverifiable conditions in any location leave no basis for confidence in federal election results, which therefore justify protest and rejection of results in every location. Finally bringing the article to a close, optical scanners are mentioned with barely a perfunctory caution for their known flaws.GIVEN THAT THERE IS NO perfect voting system, is there at least an optimal one? Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice is "optical scan" technology. With this system, the voter pencils in her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed into a computerized scanner. And if there's a recount, the elections officials can simply take out the paper ballots and do it by hand.
That may be the letter of the law, but there may be no such vendor compliance. In 2004, a CA Secretary of State investigation of Diebold revealed the company had illegally installed uncertified software in all 17 CA counties using its machines.
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Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone doesn't mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the morass of arguing over "voter intent." The machines also need to be carefully calibrated so they don't miscount ballots. Blind people may need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer scientists to hack his machines. It's also possible that any complex software isn't well suited for running elections. Most software firms deal with the inevitable bugs in their product by patching them; Microsoft still patches its seven-year-old Windows XP several times a month. But vendors of electronic voting machines do not have this luxury, because any update must be federally tested for months.There are also serious logistical problems for the states that are switching to optical scan machines this election cycle. Experts estimate that it takes at least two years to retrain poll workers and employees on a new system; Cuyahoga County is planning to do it only three months. Even the local activists who fought to bring in optical scanning say this shift is recklessly fast - and likely to cause problems worse than the touch-screen machines would. Indeed, this whipsawing from one voting system to the next is another danger in our modern electoral wars. Public crises of confidence in voting machines used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as optical scanning comes in, but they're unlikely to ever go away.
This just plainly leaves a false impression. Optical scanners have been proven every bit as vulnerable to tampering as touch-screen machines and operate in just as much secrecy. Further, no mention is made of touch-screen opponents who also reject optical scanners and prefer instead to count paper ballots by hand.
As I mentioned last night, this lengthy article, while offering some reasonable context for newbies to election integrity issues, serves only to reinforce the inherent uncertainty of election results produced under current election conditions. We have no reason to expect anything different from a newspaper that lead the cheerleading for war in Iraq, suppressed its own reports of criminal activity in the White House, and continues daily to treat the horse race of political theater as a legitimate campaign for votes that can never be tallied with certainty. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of credibility for the Times was the recent announcement that neocon spokesliar Bill Kristol has been hired as an opinion columnist. Backlash commentary is widespread.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/nytimes-can-you-count-on-these-machines.html
Labels: Bill Kristol, BradBlog.com, Dan Rather, Diebold, Ed Felton, Electronic Voting Machines, ESandS, inherent uncertainty, Ion Sancho, Michael Shamos, NYTimes
