Arkansas Vote Watch

Miami Dade to Oust Voting Machines That Failed to Count Past Six Elections

2005-05-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

Posted on Sat, May. 28, 2005

ELECTIONS
Voting system change in Dade likely

The Miami-Dade elections supervisor recommended switching from electronic voting machines to optical scanners, citing poor voter confidence and high costs.

BY NOAKI SCHWARTZ AND TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE
nschwartz@herald.com

Miami-Dade is poised to be the first place in the nation to ditch the iVotronics paperless voting machines for paper-based balloting after the county's top election supervisor on Friday issued a memo ''strongly recommending'' the change.

''I don't know of any other jurisdiction that has been using iVotronics that has moved to a paper-based system,'' said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software, the company that makes the machines. ``In fact, to the contrary, jurisdictions around the country have increasingly seen the value of the iVotronic technology.''

County Manager George Burgess forwarded election chief Lester Sola's report to county commissioners -- but cautioned that he has to give the question of ditching the iVotronics a complete review. Still, if commissioners vote in favor of the change, it could be a public relations black eye for ES&S, which sold the machines to Miami-Dade in 2002 for $24.5 million.

Broward County also uses ES&S machines.

Dade is one of ES&S' biggest clients. The company has more than 40,000 units in 20 states.

But with declining voter confidence and election day labor costs that have more than quadrupled, Sola said optical scanners could save big money.

If the county scraps the iVotronics, getting the new machines would take more than a year. County officials have been careful not to imply that the machines are faulty. The touch-screens are state certified and will continue to be used in upcoming elections while the issue is debated.

County leaders would have to choose one of seven optical scanners offered by three different vendors, including ES&S -- a process that could take seven months. The county would need 1,600 optical scanners, which cost as much as $6,000 each and take up to nine months to arrive.

Sola said they would have to spend $9.4 million to $12.3 million to equip the county's 749 precincts with the new machines. But he expects they could recoup the purchase price in a few election cycles through savings in operating costs and that the transition would be relatively smooth because the county already uses a handful of optical scanners to count absentee ballots.

''In fact, based on the initial analysis, the county could save more than $13.21 million over five years,'' Sola wrote.

The ATM style touch-screens were heralded as the best way to deliver Miami-Dade from under the clouds of the notorious 2000 presidential recount.

''That decision was based on the best information we had at the time. We were coming off the chads,'' said County Commissioner Katy Sorenson.

News of Sola's memo prompted U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, a longtime touch-screen critic, to urge Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to study the accuracy of the voting machines in all touch-screen counties.

The move to ditch the iVotronics accelerated in April when elections chief Constance Kaplan resigned after her department found that human error led to hundreds of votes being tossed out in recent elections.

Days later, Burgess asked Sola to assess whether optical scanners, which count votes marked on ''bubble sheets,'' would deliver more accurate results. Burgess also wanted information on how much a switch would cost and how much it might save in the long run.

After the 2000 election debacle, county officials went with what they considered the most sophisticated technology around -- touch-screen voting machines. Miami-Dade bought 7,200 iVotronics, a paperless machine that stores votes on hard drives and discs.

In all, 16 of Florida's 67 counties chose touch-screen machines, including Broward. Other counties with large urban centers, except Orlando's Orange County, followed Miami-Dade's lead, choosing ES&S.

But in the machines' first major test, the September 2002 primary, Election Day was a disaster in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Complications with the machines prevented polls from opening on time, leading to the intervention of the governor.

The machines had relatively few glitches in later votes. But most recently, a coding error led to hundreds of ballots being thrown out in the March special referendum on slot machines. The same mistake was found in five other municipal elections, but Kaplan said the number of missing votes would not have affected outcomes.

In addition, the cost of the actual elections has escalated. There is about one election countywide each year and 30 or so municipal races. Sola's memo said that previous punch-card countywide elections cost about $1.5 million -- a price tag that has mushroomed to as much as $8 million with the iVotronics.

The county must replace the back-up batteries on the machines for about $1 million and the batteries on the cartridges used to program the machines for another $61,504. And, with an increase in registered voters, Sola said he expected the county would need to buy 1,000 more machines before 2008 for another $4 million.

In Broward, there is no effort to replace the iVotronics the county purchased for $17.2 million in late 2001.

Sola's memo already has the support of some commissioners.

''It doesn't really make any sense to put more money into these machines that nobody trusts,'' Sorenson said.

Either way, the county will continue to pay for its decision to buy iVotronics -- at least for the next seven years. It owes ES&S $20.5 million.

Staff writer Erika Bolstad contributed to this report.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/11759284.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

Miami Dade FL to Throw Out $24 M in Ivotronic Touchscreens

2005-05-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

These voting machines about to be thrown out by Miami Dade Co. are ES&S iVotronics. Contrary to the sentence citing 'due to human error' the machines are being ditched by this county after the discovery of software and machine 'bugs' that failed to count the votes in the past six FL elections - and even took votes from machines not in use adding them into the election totals. We vote on these machines in Pulaski, & Faulkner - Boone Co. used them in Nov, same software.

If there's no action, AR is likely to see iVotronics in all 75 counties. SOS Charlie Daniels 501-682-1010. Push for Accupoll DRE's with optical scanners in the precincts. That's the best we can do for now. We don't know if Accupoll works any better or any worse, but we do know they don't have a history of corruption and bribing election officials. Optical scanners are full of problems, but there is a paper ballot to use when the machines crash that you won't have on DRE's in the seven counties.

Accupoll has the paper ballot, printer and disabled device already equipped on it.

*************

From VotersUnite.org: The big news for today is the announcement from Miami-Dade County that they now realize that they made a mistake when they chose to go with DREs. This realization was made possible by the poorly designed machines and because the election director who bought and fought to keep the machines is no longer in a position where she has to defend her terrible decision. The truth has now come out. This story should be repeated to every state and local election official who has bought DREs or who may be buying DREs in the future.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/miami/sfl-delections28may28,0,6680437.story?coll=sfla-news-miami

Miami-Dade's elections chief urges new system
By Chrystian Tejedor and Ihosvani Rodriguez
Sun-Sentinel

May 28, 2005

After repeated embarrassing glitches at the polls, elections officials in Miami-Dade County have recommended scrapping the county's $24.5 million electronic voting system in favor of paper ballots with optical scanners.

Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola made the recommendation Friday in an initial analysis of the county's voting system and the feasibility of adopting a new one. In his report, Sola said that adopting the simpler system could save county taxpayers millions and restore voter confidence by providing a paper record of ballots cast.

In April, an outraged Mayor Carlos Alvarez requested a study on the merits of the optical scan system after revelations that the Elections Department lost hundreds of votes during the March 8 slot machine referendum because of a coding error.

The revelations led former Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan to resign on March 31 and were the latest embarrassing chapter in the county's elections. Sola took over the same day.

Alvarez also fumed that the current system has increased the cost of running an election to about $7 million per election.

Sola's report comes days after a voter advocacy group released a disparaging report that cited a litany of problems during last fall's general elections, among them malfunctioning voting machines.

After County Manager George Burgess reviews Sola's report, the issue could head to county commissioners, who could decide to switch systems Sola estimated that replacing the voting machines with paper ballots and optical scanners would take at least 15 months.

Alvarez was attending a funeral late Friday and could not be reached for comment, staff said. In a one-paragraph written statement, Burgess said he would meet with Sola in the coming weeks before making any specific recommendation.

In his report, Sola recommended that county leaders move carefully in exploring purchasing a new system.

But Sola said an initial analysis showed that the county would save more than $13 million over five years with an optical scan system through lower operating costs and the elimination of costly maintenance expenses.

Staff Writer Madeline Baro-Diaz contributed to this report.

Ihosvani Rodriguez can be reached at ijrodriguez@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5005.

Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

*******

Optical Scanners Hacked Into - 'Phoned Home'

2005-05-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

http://arkansasvotewatch.blogspot.com/2005/04/top-10-reasons-for-paper-ballots-on_22.html

NCVV: We currently have optical scanners in use in 48 of 75 AR counties, with more on the way. # 2 of the Top 10 Reasons for Paper Ballots on Evoting Machines states the machines are not hacker proof, something all election officials vehemently deny. I first wrote that in 2003. LB

=======

"None of the attacks left any telltale marks, rendering all audits
and logs useless, except for hand-counting all the paper ballots".

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?
file=/1954/5921.html

Posted on Friday, May 27, 2005 - 05:03 pm:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
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Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical
scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer
Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious
memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such
that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election
manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions
in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia
County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary
election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted
localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical
scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington,
Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to
be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New
Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in
recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper
ballot hand-counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-
scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.

A little man living in every ballot box

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming
methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic
ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man
living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an
executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot
box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan
program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call
to a program living in the removable memory card during the
election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program
on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that
checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized
changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was
certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple
attacks.

Ion Sancho: Truth and Excellence in Elections

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho and Information Systems
Officer Thomas James had already implemented security procedures in
Leon County far exceeding the norm in elections management. This
testing, done by a team of researchers including Black Box Voting,
independent filmmakers, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and
special consultant Harri Hursti, was authorized by Mr. Sancho, in an
unusual act of openness and courage, to identify any remaining holes
in Leon County's election security.

The results of the memory card hack demonstration will assist
elections supervisors throughout the U.S., by emphasizing the
critical importance of accounting for each and every memory card and
protecting access.

Findings:

Computer expert Harri Hursti gained control over Leon County memory
cards, which handle the vote-reporting from the precincts. Dr.
Herbert Thompson, a security expert, took control of the Leon County
central tabulator by implanting a trojan horse-like script.

Two programmers can become a lone programmer, says Hursti, who has
figured out a way to control the entire central tabulator by way of
a single memory card swap, and also how to make tampered polling
place tapes match tampered central tabulator results. This more
complex approach is untested, but based on testing performed May 26,
Hursti says he has absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Three memory card tests demonstrated successful manipulation of
election results, and showed that 1990 and 2002 FEC-required
safeguards are being violated in the Diebold version 1.94 opti-scan
system.

Three memory card hacks

1. An altered memory card (electronic ballot box) was substituted
for a real one. The optical scan machine performed seamlessly,
issuing a report that looked like the real thing. No checksum
captured the change in the executable program Diebold designed into
the memory card.

2. A second altered memory card was demonstrated, using a program
that was shorter than the original. It still worked, showing that
there is also no check for the number of bytes in the program.

3. A third altered memory card was demonstrated with the votes
themselves changed, showing that the data block (votes) can be
altered without triggering any error message.

How to "Roll over the odometer" in Diebold optical scan machines

Integer overflow checks do not seem to exist in this system, making
it possible to stuff the ballot box without triggering any error
message. This would be like pre-loading minus 100 votes for Tom and
plus 100 votes for Rick (-100+100=ZERO) -- changing the candidate
totals without changing the overall number of votes.

A more precise comparison would be this: The odometer on a car rolls
over to zero after 999,999. In the Diebold system tested, the
rollover to zero happens at 65,536 votes. By pre-loading 65,511
votes for a candidate, after 25 real votes appear (65,511 plus 25 =
65,536) the report "rolls over" so that the candidate's total is
ZERO.

This manipulation can be balanced out by preloading votes for
candidate "A" at 65,511 and candidate "B" at 25 votes -- producing
an articifial 50-vote spread between the candidates, which will not
be obvious after the first 25 votes for candidate "A" roll over to
zero. The "negative 25" votes from the odometer rollover
counterbalance the "plus 25" votes for the other candidates, making
the total number of votes cast at the end of the day exactly equal
to the number of voters.

While testing the hack on the Leon County optical scan machine,
Hursti was stunned to find that pre-stuffing the ballot box to "roll
over the odometer" produced no error message whatsoever.*

*We did not have the opportunity to scan ballots after stuffing the
ballot box. Therefore, the rollover to zero was not tested in Leon
County. This integer overflow capability is discernable in the
program itself. We did have the opportunity to test a pre-stuffed
ballot box, which showed that pre-loaded ballot boxes do not trigger
any error message.

Simple tweaks to pass L&A test and survive zero tape

Though the additional tweaks were not demonstrated at the Leon
County elections office, Hursti believes that the integer overflow
hack can be covered up on the "zero tape" produced at the beginning
of the election. The programming to cover up manipulations during
the "logic & accuracy test" is even simpler, since the program
allows you to specify on which reports (and, if you like, date and
time of day) the manipulation will affect.

The testing demonstrated, using the actual voting system used in a
real elections office, that Diebold programmers developed a system
that sacrifices security in favor of dangerously flexible
programming, violating FEC standards and calling the actions of ITA
testing labs and certifiers into question.

In the case of Leon County, inside access was used to achieve the
hacks, but there are numerous ways to introduce the hacks without
inside access. Outside access methods will be described in the
technical report to be released in mid-June.

Security concerns

Putting an executable program into removable memory card "ballot
boxes" -- and then programming the opti-scan chip to call and invoke
whatever program is in the live ballot box during the middle of an
election -- is a mind-boggling design from a security standpoint.
Combining this idiotic design with a program that doesn't even check
to see whether someone has tampered with it constitutes negligence
and should result in a product recall.

Counties that purchased the Diebold 1.94 optical scan machines
should not pay for any upgraded program; instead, Diebold should be
required to recall the faulty program and correct the problem at its
own expense.

None of the attacks left any telltale marks, rendering all audits
and logs useless, except for hand-counting all the paper ballots.

Is it real? Or is it Memorex?

For example, Election Supervisor Ion Sancho was unable to tell, at
first, whether the poll tape printed with manipulated results was
the real thing. Only the message at the end of the tape, which
read "Is this real? Or is it Memorex?" identified the tape as a
tampered version of results.

In another test, Congresswoman Corrine Brown (FL-Dem) was shocked to
see the impact of a trojan implanted by Dr. Herbert Thompson. She
asked if the program could be manipulated in such a way as to flip
every fifth vote.

"No problem," Dr. Thompson replied.

"It IS a problem. It's a PROBLEM!" exclaimed Brown, whose district
includes the troubled Volusia County, along with Duval County --
both currently using the Diebold opti-scan system.

This system is also used in Congressman John Conyers' home district,
in contentious King County, Washington, and in Lucas County, Ohio
(where six election officials resigned or were suspended after many
irregularities were found.)

Diebold optical scans were used in San Diego for its ill-fated
mayoral election in Nov. 2004.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Optical scan systems have paper ballots, but election officials are
crippled in their ability to hand count these ballots due to
restrictive state regulations and budget limitations.

The canvassing (audit) procedure used to certify results from
optical scan systems involves comparing the "poll tapes" (cash
register-like results receipts) with the printout from the central
tabulator. These tests demonstrate that both results can be
manipulated easily and quickly.

Minimum requirements to perform this hack:

1. A single specimen memory card from any county using the Diebold
1.94 optical scan series. (These cards were seen scattered on tables
in King County, piled in baskets accessible to the public in
Georgia, and jumbled on desktops in Volusia county.)

2. A copy of the compiler for the AccuBasic program. (These
compilers have been fairly widely distributed by Diebold and its
predecessor company, and there are workarounds if no compiler is
available.)

3. Modest working language of any one of the higher level computer
languages (Pascal, C, Cobol, Basic, Fortran...) along with
introductory-level knowledge of assembler or machine language.
(Machine language knowledge needed is less than an advanced
refrigerator or TV repairmen needs. The optical scan system is much
simpler than modern appliances).

The existence of the executable program in the memory card was
discernable from a review of the Diebold memos. The test hacks took
just a few hours for Black Box Voting consultants to develop.

Nearly 800 jurisdictions conducted a presidential election on this
system. This system is so profoundly hackable that an advanced-level
TV repairman can manipulate votes on it.

Black Box Voting asked Dr. Thompson and Hursti to examine the
central tabulator and the optical scan system after becoming
concerned that not enough attention had been paid to optical scans,
tabulators and remote access.

Thompson and Hursti each found the vulnerabilities for their
respective hacks in less than 24 hours.

"Open for Business"

When it comes to this optical-scan system, as Hursti says, "It's not
that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open
for business.'"

The question now is: How brisk has business been? Based on this new
evidence, it is time to sequester and examine the memory cards used
with Diebold optical scans in Nov. 2004.

The popularity of tamper-friendly machines that are "open for
business" in heavily Democratic areas may explain the lethargy with
which Democratic leaders have been approaching voting machine
security concerns.

The enthusiasm with which Republicans have endorsed machines with no
paper ballots at all indicates that neither party really wants to
have intact auditing of elections.

The ease with which a system -- which clearly violates dozens of FEC
standards going back to 1990 -- was certified calls into question
the honesty, competence, and personal financial transactions of both
testing labs and NASED certifiers.

Revamp and update hand-counted paper ballot technology?

Perhaps it is time to revisit the idea of hand-counted paper
ballots, printed by machines for legibility, with color-coded
choices for quick, easy, accurate sorting and counting. We should
also take another look at bringing counting teams in when the polls
close, to relieve tired poll workers.

This report is the "non-techie" version of a longer report, to be
made available around mid-June, with more technical information.

PERMISSION TO REPRINT GRANTED AS LONG AS YOU PROVIDE A LINK TO
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

WA County Sticks With Optical Scanners, Plus Touchscreen for Disabled Voters

2005-05-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Oh well, we did what we could to inform these people for three years. At the very least when the scanners fail there will be a paper ballot to hand count, if it's detected.

County decides to stick with pencil-and-paper voting method

BY MARSHA L. MELNICHAK Northwest Arkansas Times
Posted on Friday, May 20, 2005

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story/nwat/28341

Washington County voters will continue to cast their ballots on paper and will still be able to watch their election commissioners count those ballots on a scanner at the county courthouse on election nights, following a unanimous vote by Election Commissioners on Thursday.

Commissioners voted to add one electronic voting machine at each of the 59 polling places in the county to be available to persons with disabilities. That machine, along with a required voter education program, will help the county meet minimum requirements of the Help America Vote Act, according to information from the office of the Secretary of State.

Most

of the county’s 80,000 registered voters will vote as they have in the past, on paper ballots. However, any voter may use the electronic voting machine, according to material from the Secretary of State’s office.

Cost of the new machines will be picked up by the State of Arkansas. The Secretary of State’s office is in the process of drafting a Request For Proposal for machines in all 75 counties, based on information submitted by each county,.

Commissioners could have voted to install an optical scanner at each polling site along with an accessible electronic voting machine. The cost of that solution for Washington County was estimated to be $610,000.

Another solution, adopting a full system of electronic voting throughout the county, was estimated to cost $1,056,000.

Washington County commissioners chose the least expensive of the three options with an estimated cost to the state of $280,000. Their option meets the minimum HAVA requirements, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

Commissioners Tom Lundstrom and Pete Loras explained their support of the current voting system.

Lundstrom said he likes to see the public at the courthouse on election night. "I would hate to give up the involvement of the public by coming to the courthouse, watching us count the ballots. We’re all accountable in front of God and everybody. Right here. If there’s a problem, you see it. If it goes great, you see it," he said.

Lundstrom concluded, "It’s always been this commission’s position that we’re not really all that worried about the media or some candidate insisting that they have results by 10 o’clock at night. We count the ballots, we count them right and the results will come when they come."

Burrow asked Rob Hammons of the Secretary of State’s office about the education program required with the option they chose. Hammons explained that the state is waiting for federal guidelines before decisions are made.

Lundstrom asked, "Frankly, how difficult is it to hand somebody a ballot and say, ‘Take your pencil and circle in one person per race’?"

The county’s scanners, he said, are sensitive; but any problems, in his opinion, are not due to the machines. "The problem is people who, like last year’s presidential race, we had four or six people qualify for our ballot. They vote for three of them or six of them. I mean, why do they even bother to show up? I don’t know how you educate somebody just not to be stupid."

After the commissioners’ vote, County Clerk Karen Combs Pritchard inquired about the possibility of money from the state for more or other machines in five or six years as the number of voters increase.

Hammons said there was no such guarantee. Money left over from the counties may go into a pool to be divided among the counties based on a formula not yet determined.

After hearing the discussion of money, commissioners said they would not change their votes, and Burrow indicated after the meeting that the vote is final. "Washington County is going to do nothing but grow, grow, grow," Combs Pritchard said after the meeting. She explained her concern is that the county may need more voting machines in the not-too-distant future and there will not be money available from the state for purchase.
Copyright © 2001-2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved. Contact: webmaster@nwanews.com

Bug in Software Causes Machines to Start Subtracting Votes

2005-05-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

NCVV: These were ES&S machines, using the flawed Unity software. AR officials think this flawed software doesn't cross state lines and that the ES&S machines in 3/4 of AR counties are 'working well'. We've got news for them. The vendor software runs and instructs all their machines worldwide. The central vote tabulator mentioned below is nothing more than a plain old laptop computer.

Posted on Fri, Nov. 05, 2004

AMENDMENT 4
Gambling vote glitch mars tally

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD AND CURTIS MORGAN
ebolstad@herald.com

Broward County corrected a computer glitch Thursday that had miscounted thousands of absentee votes, instantly turning a slot-machine measure from loser to winner and reinforcing concerns about the accuracy of electronic election returns.

The bug, discovered two years ago but never fixed, began subtracting votes after the absentee tally hit 32,500 -- a ceiling put in place by the software makers.

''Clearly it's a concern about the integrity of the voting system,'' said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman, a canvassing board member who was overseeing the count. ``This glitch needs to be fixed immediately.''

The problem, which resulted in the shocking discovery of about 70,000 votes for Amendment 4, a measure allowing a referendum on Las Vegas-style slots at parimutuels in Miami-Dade and Broward, came to light just after midnight Wednesday when Broward's canvassing board shut down.

Lieberman, Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and several lawyers on both sides of the gambling amendment noticed votes suddenly disappearing on Amendment 4.

The problem was quickly traced to software in what is known as the central tabulation machine, a computer that collects data from optical scanners that read the individual mail-in ballots.

Besides reversing the Election Night outcome on a controversial gambling question, the error spurred finger-pointing and provided more ammo for critics of high-tech voting.

Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on ''inadvertent human error'' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error.

Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. ``It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.''

FINGERS POINTED

County officials blamed Election Systems & Software, the company that sold the machines and counting software to Broward.

County officials say they think ES&S failed to follow through on a problem that was brought to their attention two years ago, during the 2002 general election.

ES&S spokeswoman Becky Vollmer said the glitch -- which limits the number of votes that can be counted in each precinct to safeguard against ballot stuffing -- will be fixed in software updates they are submitting to the Division of Elections next year.

''This was not an error with the tabulating system,'' Vollmer said in an e-mail. ``This was a programming oversight that caused the results reporting software to contain incorrect information for preliminary, unofficial results. No votes were lost and no other ballot questions were affected.''

But Broward County Administrator Roger Desjarlais said ES&S was accountable. ``I believe they had an obligation to fix it. They just have an obligation to provide a product that works.''

ISOLATED PROBLEM?

While Broward insisted that the problem had exposed another hidden bug in the electronic voting system, the view was different in Tallahassee.

Alia Faraj, Hood's spokeswoman, said ES&S had not previously submitted any information about the counting cap in its tabulation software, which is supposed to be certified by the Secretary of State's Office.

But she said programmers had admitted a ''human error'' in setting up the absentee count and said there were no reports of similar problems from any of the 15 counties in the state that use electronic systems, 11 with the same ES&S gear. Another 21 use ES&S systems to tabulate paper ballots counted by optical scanners.

Other counties that use the same vote-counting software say they've never encountered the problem and it was never brought up at the users group meetings held annually.

Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County's elections chief, said her technology experts were aware of the potential issue, but that nothing like that had happened in the county, which uses different software. ''As long as you know about it, you can turn it off,'' LePore said.

The tabulation software was set to reverse the vote count at 32,500. It was triggered when Broward counted all 97,535 absentee ballots in one mega-precinct Tuesday night and early Wednesday.

The glitch only affected Page 2 of the ballot -- the one with five of the amendment questions -- because it contained only statewide measures that drew enough voting to trigger the cap, county officials said.

OTHER RESULTS STAND

Results on the other amendment questions were changed, as well, but, unlike the gambling question, their outcomes had not been in doubt.

When they saw the count going haywire, election officials were able to go to individual scanners feeding the main computer and obtain the correct vote count. Suddenly, they found thousands of uncounted votes that gave the gambling initiative a big boost.

Opponents of the amendment said they were suspicious of the newfound votes, especially because 94 percent of the 78,000 votes cast on Amendment 4 were in favor of the amendment. Other votes from Broward were 65 percent in favor.

''It certainly seems statistically remarkable,'' said state Rep. Randy Johnson, a Republican from Winter Haven who is chairman of No Casinos from Celebration.

CRITICS SPEAK UP

Lale Mamaux, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, said the miscount had proved the necessity of a paper trail that Florida elections officials have resisted for voting machines.

Broward was able to correct the count because they could simply run the absentee ballots through scanners again. That can't happen with touch-screen voting.

Wexler, an outspoken critic of Florida's election system, sued to create a paper record for manual recounts in close elections like the contentious 2000 presidential race. A federal judge rejected the suit late last month.

ANOTHER BLACK EYE

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said such errors can undermine public confidence.

''The bigger picture is that it cast doubt on the accuracy of the elections,'' she said. To resolve any concerns, Rodriguez-Taseff said Broward should recount everything -- not just absentees.

The miscounted votes were the second major flaw in Broward's election, which was also marred when thousands said they didn't get their absentee ballots in the mail.

''I wish it hadn't happened, in that we're trying to regain credibility for this office,'' Snipes said. ``But people will have to look at the whole issue and put it in perspective.''

Herald staff writers Mary Ellen Klas, Luisa Yanez, David Kidwell, Jason Grotto and Joe Mozingo contributed to this report.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/10103931.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

Green Says Voting Company Tampered With Recount Effort

2005-05-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=490

Green says voting company tampered with recount effort

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

David Cobb, the unsuccessful Green Party presidential candidate, aired startling allegations at the Democratic House Judiciary Committee’s Columbus hearings Monday, alleging that a voting company representative tampered with voting equipment in an unspecified county last Friday and attempted to plant false information into the Ohio recount.

Cobb says that a witness who had requested anonymity watched a representative of Triad Systems enter a local Board of Elections unannounced and tamper with a vote tabulator which then lost all data.

The representative then, Cobb said, tried to convince employees to post false information so that it would appear as if the data was valid and had never been lost.

This following is RAW STORY ’s transcript Cobb’s speech as recorded by Inside Track News’ broadcast (mp3 file), an independent media outlet that covered the event. The story has been followed in detail at The Brad Blog.

“A representative from Triad Systems came into this county’s Board of Election’s office unannounced, that is on this Friday. He said he was just stopping by to see if they had any questions about the upcoming recount.

“He then headed into the back room where Triad supplies tabulators, that is the machine that counts the ballots, is kept. This Triad representative told them that there was problem with the system, that the system had a bad battery and it had ‘lost all its data.’

“He then took the computer apart and started swapping parts in and out of it. And in another [incomprehensible] in the room. And he had spare parts in his coat, as one of the people moved in [sic] remarked how very heavy it was.

“He finally reassembled everything and said it was working but not to turn it off. He then asked which precinct would be counted in the 3 percent recount test and that one which had been selected as if it had the right number of votes was relayed to him he then went back and did something else to the tabulator.

“The Triad Systems representative suggested that since the hand recount had to match the machine count exactly and since it would hard to memorize the several numbers which would be needed to get the count exactly right, that they should post this series of numbers on the wall where they would not be noticed by observers such as to make them look like employee information or something similar.

“The people doing the hand count could then he said just report those numbers no matter what the actually counted in the ballot. This would then ‘match’ the tabulator report for this precinct exactly.

Minority leader of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) replied, “David Cobb, I need to you to arrange

a meeting with our staff immediately.”

Cobb asserted that such practices were “going on across the state.”

The Columbus Free Press’ Editor Robert Fitrakis also submitted a list of documented Ohio voting irregularities Dec. 8, which Conyers’ office has posted online in pdf format.

###

Correction: An earlier version of this article and headline incorrectly stated David Cobb was the Libertarian candidate. Cobb was the Green Party candidate.

Correction: Due to a transcription misunderstanding, an earlier version of this article stated that the Triad Systems representative entered the Columbus Board of Elections. Cobb did not in fact specify the Election Board in question.

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=494

AFFIDAVIT
December 13, 2004
Sherole Eaton
Re: General Election 2004 - Hocking County, TriAd
Dell Computer about 14 years old - No tower

On Friday, December 10 2004, Michael from TriAd called in the AM to inform us that he would be in our office in the PM on the same day. I asked him why he was visiting us. He said, “to check out your tabulator, computer, and that the attorneys will be asking some tricky questions and he wanted to go over some of the questions they maybe ask.” He also added that there would be no charge for this service.

He arrived at about 12:30PM. I hung his coat up and it was very heavy. I made a comment about it being so heavy. He, Lisa Schwartze and I chatted for a few minutes. He proceeded to go to the room where our computer and tabulation machine is kept. I followed him into the room. I had my back to him when he turned the computer on. He stated that the computer was not coming up. I did see some commands at the lower left hand of the screen but no menu. He said that the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone. He said that he could put a patch on it and fix it. My main concern was - what if this happened when we were ready to do the recount. He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his offices to get information to input into our computer. Our computer is fourteen years old and as far as I know had always worked in the past. I asked him if the older computer, that is in the same room. could be used for the recount. I don’t remember exactly what he said but I did relay to him that the computer was old and a spare. At some point he asked if he could take the spare computer apart and I said “yes". He took both computers apart. I don’t remember seeing any tools and he asked Sue Wallace, Clerk, for a screwdriver. She got it for him. At this point I was frustrated about the computer not performing and feared that it wouldn’t work for the recount. I called Gerald Robinette, board chairman, to inform him regarding the computer problem and asked him if we could have Tri Ad come to our offices to run the program and tabulator for the recount. Gerald talked on the phone with Michael and Michael assured Gerald that he could fix our computer. He worked on the computer until about 3:00 PM and then asked me which precinct and the number of the precinct we were going to count. I told him, Good Hope 1 # 17. He went back into the tabulation room. Shortly after that he (illegible) stated that the computer was ready for the recount and told us not to turn the computer off so it would charge up.

Before Lisa ran the tests, Michael said to turn the computer off. Lisa said, ” I thought you said we weren’t supposed to turn it off.” He said turn it off and right back on and it should come up. It did come up and Lisa ran the tests. Michael gave us instructions on how to explain the rotarien, what the tests mean, etc. No advice on how to handle the attorneys but to have our Prosecuting Attorney at the recount to answer any of their legal questions. He said not to turn the computer off until after the recount.

He advised Lisa and I on how to post a “cheat sheet” on the wall so that only the board members and

staff would know about it and and what the codes meant so the count would come out perfect and we wouldn’t have to do a full hand recount of the county. He left about 5:00 PM.

My faith in Tri Ad and the Xenia staff has been nothing but good. The realization that this company and staff would do anything to dishonor or disrupt the voting process is distressing to me and hard to believe. I’m being completely objective about the above statements and the reason I’m bringing this forward is to, hopefully, rule out any wrongdoing.

200 Ballots Stuck in Broken iVotronic Touchscreen in S. Carolina

2005-05-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

NCVV: The gizmo had to be sent to Canada to retieve the ballots stuck in it. We vote on iVotronics in Pulaski & Faulker Co. During the Nov. election iVotronics were used in Boone Co., on loan to them. They used them and shipped them back.

Posted on Thu, Nov. 04, 2004

Lexington town leaders criticize slow vote count

By TIM FLACH
Staff Writer

Lexington town leaders promise to end delays that kept the local election’s outcome under wraps until early Wednesday morning.

Some Town Council members are demanding that results tabulated from voting machines be disclosed as soon as they are available.

“I want a clear message that this is what we expect,” said Councilwoman Hazel Leggett-Tyndall, who was re-elected.

After Tuesday’s balloting, town election officials counted 540 paper absentee ballots by hand before releasing results.

Election officials spent 3½ hours on that count, ignoring repeated requests from other town officials to post the tally from the 3,300 ballots automatically counted by the machines.

All ballots were totaled and announced en masse shortly after midnight, well after a crowd of 100, including some candidates, had dwindled.

“I’m a little disappointed in the lateness of the results,” Mayor-elect Randy Halfacre said. “There probably could have been some things done differently.”

Results from three of six precincts were in before the absentee count began. Totals from the other three came in within an hour after.

“We didn’t want to quit on the absentee ballots,” town election commission chairman Fred Sons said. “It was an executive decision I made.”

It was the wrong decision, Leggett-Tyndall said.

She plans to propose guidelines requiring rapid public reporting of town ballots. The next local elections are in two years.

Meanwhile, town officials are searching for a way to tally more than 200 ballots stuck in a broken voting machine.

Those uncounted ballots aren’t crucial to determining the outcome of the race for mayor and three council posts.

Candidates supported by foes of the local 2 percent meal tax swept to victory Tuesday, ousting three incumbents who favor it.

Those elected, in addition to Halfacre and Leggett-Tyndall, are newcomers Kathy Maness and Ted Stambolitis.

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/10094010.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

© 2004 The State and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.thestate.com

Evoting Code Filed With One Company-Not a Good Thing.

2005-05-14T23:51:00.000-07:00

NCVV: The Discovery Channel had a show entitled "Breaking Vegas" on last week. The show was about a Nevada Gaming Inspector who was in charge of the source code for all the gaming vendors and all the slot machines in the state of Nevada. This programmer/gaming inspector stole the source code from the vendors submitted to him for inspection/clearance and wrote his own source code to rig the slot machines. He ripped the infected slots off to the tune of about $200,000 per month. He programmed the machines to hit the jack pot when coins were inserted in a series. e.g. 2, then 1, then 3 etc. The same thing could happen with evoting, if it hasn't already. Read on, the voting machine code is given to ONE company.

E-voting companies file code

Voting machine code available from the National Software Reference Library

"Touch screen voting" [Federal Computer Week, Sept. 6, 2004]
BY Michael Hardy
Published on Nov. 8, 2004

More Related Links

In the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 election, officials at five electronic voting machine companies filed digital signature information for many of their software products with the National Software Reference Library, a repository maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Although the officials filed the signature information rather than source code that people can read, computer experts say that it could be useful, within limits, if disputes arise about voting software used in elections.

The data stored in the library can be used to verify that the software used on voting machines has not been modified, said Barbara Guttman, manager of the interoperability group in NIST's Information Technology Lab. However, the library does not have copies of the actual software code, she said.

What the library has is a "hash of the binary," said Aviel Rubin, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a critic of e-voting technology. Hashing is a cryptographic process that creates a signature code based on the binary machine language derived from the software's source code.

Verifying that the software itself is unaltered is not enough to ensure voting security, said Rebecca Mercuri, computer scientist and fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and a critic of electronic voting.

"Just because it's archived doesn't mean that the software is safe," she said. "It doesn't mean it was used correctly. It doesn't mean the ballot was laid out correctly."

The filing offers only a back-end reference for checking and is not a visible assurance for voters, she added. "The voter going in to vote doesn't know that the machine has the same version of software" that the company filed, she said. "It's not a transparent process. It's one step in a multistep process."

Officials also have wide latitude in how they approve software for use, said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. The process doesn't always require analyzing source code.

"The federal voting system standards are voluntary, and about 40 states claim to follow these standards, but doing so is not always a matter of state law," she said. "States that don't follow the federal standards do have their own standards sometimes, but those standards may not require source code examination."

Alexander said determining the best method to approve software might become more of an issue than it has been in elections so far.

"While it would be difficult and perhaps impractical to mandate a uniform voting system across the country, it seems obvious that, at a minimum, we should have mandatory security standards and procedures for federal contests imposed by the federal government," she said.

Officials at a sixth company, VoteHere Inc., submitted hashes of their auditing software. VoteHere's system is not a voting machine. Instead, it offers auditing capabilities for machines made by other companies. Avante International Technology Inc. officials will submit code for the Vote-Trakker system shortly, Guttman said.

E-voting has aroused considerable suspicion, and many fear that such machines can be programmed to skew election results in a way that would be difficult to detect.

The heightened attention makes it particularly critical that the software not be changed after voting authorities accept it, even with a seemingly innocuous software patch or bug fix, said Will Doherty, executive director of the Verified Voting Foundation, a group that favors paper backups and other safeguards for votes cast electronically.

The software reference copies will help ease those fears, Doherty said. "It's not all we would ask, but it is a step in the right direction."

Officials of the federal Election Assistance Commission had been urging companies since the summer to file the code.

NIST's library maintains similar code for more than 5,900 applications, Guttman said.

The reference copies improve the overall security of the electoral process, she said. With them on file, altering code without detection is harder than it would be otherwise. "Security is about making things harder, not impossible," she added.

A measure of uncertainty in the voting process always exists because of differing practices at individual polling locations and varying state laws, said John King and Ellen Theisen, who run an e-voting watchdog group called Voters Unite.

Theisen said the companies' gesture might be a publicity stunt. "It seems a lot like that to me," she said. "I can't see it being all that useful. I'm just wondering what real value it has." What if voting officials find out that their software has been changed, she said. "What recourse do they have but to say, 'Huh?' "

Alfie Charles, a spokesman for Sequoia Voting Systems, said the company will keep its software in the library up-to-date as new versions come out. "The objective is to make sure that there is a copy of whatever programs are in use in our elections," he said. "As upgrades are made, changes are made, the upgraded versions will be released" to the library.

http://www.fcw.com/print.asp

***

Code for safekeeping in library

Before Election Day, officials at five manufacturers of electronic voting machines placed digital signature information for their voting software in escrow, where it could be examined in the event of disputed election results. The companies are:
• Diebold Inc.'s Diebold Election Systems.
• Election Systems and Software Inc.
• Sequoia Voting Systems.
• Hart InterCivic.
• Avante International Technology Inc.

Local Printer Leaves Bar Codes off Ballots- Machines Won't Scan Ballots

2005-05-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

NCVV: This occurred in Sevier County, AR in the May 04 primary. The local printer's employee printed the bar codes on the 'test' ballots, but not the actual ballots used during the election. The optical scanners would not scan the ballots in the election, resulting in a hand count. The employee was fired, the printer said he didn't want to comment.

Printer played role in Boulder voting woes

By Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News
November 10, 2004

BOULDER - The head of a Denver company that printed ballots for Boulder County's troubled election acknowledged Tuesday he used a subcontractor who might have been responsible for the problems.

Howard Harris, president of Eagle Direct, declined to name the subcontractor, saying his company is ultimately responsible for the work.

Advertisement

Harris did not rule out the possibility that his own printers might be at fault.

Boulder County Clerk Linda Salas said she wasn't aware Eagle Direct had subcontracted out some of the $143,000 job.

Boulder officials say bar codes on several thousand ballots were the wrong size. Scanners would not count the ballots, requiring election workers to do the tally, race by race.

The vote count took three days, making Boulder one of the last counties in the nation to report results and running up what Salas called a "huge fortune" in overtime and other costs.

A spokeswoman for Xerox, which manufactured and maintains Eagle's printers, said the mistake wasn't caused by their machines.

Kara Choquette said Xerox believes the error was made by the subcontractor, which uses different equipment.

Harris said the subcontractor uses machines manufactured by a unit of Kodak.

Whether the bad ballots were printed by Eagle or the subcontractor won't be known until they can be examined when the vote totals are certified next week.

Harris also said his company isn't solely to blame for the massive vote-counting delays.

"We are a part of the problem, and I am not saying we are not, but I cannot say we are the only problem and all of the problem," he said.

Harris said delays were also caused by write-in votes, which must be tallied by hand. Jason Savela received more than 8,000 write-in votes in his failed race against District Attorney Mary Keenan.

"That slowed the process down as much as if the ballots were bad," Harris said.

The programming of the scanners might also be to blame for not letting machines read bar codes that were off by an amount so tiny that it was not visible to the naked eye, Harris said.

Some of the scanners were not functioning during part of the count, Harris said.

"We haven't laid everything at (Eagle Direct's) feet. We said we're looking into it," Salas said.

But, Salas said, the scanners were not the problem. They were down only while technicians were trying to figure out why some ballots were being rejected - a search that ended when the printing problem was identified.

Salas said Hart InterCivic, which manufactured the voting system, was involved in the trouble-shooting and ruled out a programming error.

URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/election/article/0,1299,DRMN_36_3317633,00.html

Copyright 2004, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.

Voting Vendor Programs Voter Turnout Too Low on Machines

2005-05-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Is this how voter turnout is predicted PRIOR to the elections being held? This article is not worded well, however it states mid way through that ES&S programmed the voter turnout on the machines too low. More people voted than the machines reflected, due to the programming. Notice the catch phrase used by 'that side' - "Doesn't affect the outcome of the election."

Voter turnout near 60 percent

Monday, November 08, 2004
By MICHAEL W. HOSKINS
Daily Journal staff writer, mhoskins@thejournalnet.com

Nov. 9, 2004

Voters in many parts of Johnson County rallied in record numbers to vote in last week’s elections.

White River Township gets a gold star for the most voters casting ballots in Johnson County last week, but Clark Township had the highest percentage of voters.

Two-thirds of the 28,007 registered White River Township residents cast ballots, meaning more than 18,500 residents voted in the election.

But that wasn’t the highest percentage turnout in Johnson County.

For example, the county’s growing east side in Clark Township had the highest turnout with 68.2 percent, or 950 of the 1,393 registered voters, casting ballots.

Most townships had turnouts higher than 60 percent, although Franklin and Pleasant townships were both about 55 percent.

Less than half the registered voters in Blue River Township cast ballots.

Johnson County turnout hit 59.85 percent, just shy of the 60 percent county clerk Jill Jackson had predicted before the election.

A total 51,558 of the 86,144 registered voters cast ballots in the election, according to county figures tallied late last week. The official figures were delayed and recalculated after election company Election Systems & Software made an error in figuring the number.

Company officials programmed the machines with a number from mid-September, when about 5,000 fewer voters were registered for the Nov. 2 election.

The error didn’t affect results or any races but did drop the turnout rate to lower than what was first thought. The nearly 60 percent still beats the turnout in 2000, when only about 56 percent of county residents voted.

This year, the turnout topped recent years despite constant rainfall and dark clouds that hovered over the county and much of central Indiana.

Greenwood Christian Church on Averitt Road had one of the best and one of the worst voter turnouts at the same time.

Three-fourths of the registered voters in Pleasant Township’s Precinct 22 cast ballots, while little more than a third of those registered voted in Precinct 37.

Both precincts vote at the church, separated by a sliding divider wall.

Between the two, 1,528 people are registered to vote at the church, which is at the southern end of Greenwood near the New Whiteland border.

Precinct 28 at Center Grove Elementary School posted the best turnout in the Nov. 2 election, with nearly 75 percent of voters casting ballots.

Election administrators will be studying the turnouts and voting registration as they review the election and possibly consider revamping precincts to better accommodate voters.

Jackson is not yet sure what, if any, changes will be made.

The county redrew precinct maps following the 2000 Census because of new population estimates, and the number of polling sites increased from 98 to 104.

http://www.thejournalnet.com/Main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=113&ArticleID=47172

Content © 2005 The Daily Journal, Johnson County, Indiana
Software © 1998-2005 1up! Software, All Rights Reserved

You Touch It, You Voted For It-Even If Hand Just Resting On The Screen

2005-05-14T23:15:00.000-07:00

NCVV: These machines were the notorious ES&S iVotronic touchsreens. AR votes on these machines in Pulaski, Faulkner Co.'s. The machines were 'on loan' to Boone Co. for the Nov. 04 election. They used them, crated them up and sent them back. Boone Co. officials are deciding now whether or not to actually purchase the iVotronics.

October 21, 2004

You touch it, you voted for it

A potential user-interface problem has surfaced with the touch-screen voting machines being used during early voting in San Antonio. The problem also could affect voters nationwide.

Bexar County Elections Administrator Clifford Borofsky confirms that the problem is real, but he insists it is a minor issue.

A San Antonio Business Journal reader brought the problem to the attention of the newspaper after he claims his vote was registered for the wrong candidate. He said the bad vote was cast because he inadvertently rested his hand on the screen of the voting kiosk while using his other hand to vote.

"The machine registered the vote from my thumb when I rested my hand on the screen to vote," the reader claims.

The reader says he caught his error on the review screen before finalizing his vote, but he questions whether everyone -- especially new voters -- would do the same.

Borofsky says his office has received only two reports in 60,000 votes cast of votes being registered by individuals inadvertently resting their hand on the voting screen. However, there is no way to know how many people made the mistake without knowing it.

"That's what the review screen is for," Borofsky says, adding that it is the fail-safe built into the system to guard against inadvertent votes.

However, Borofsky does concede that it would be good to make voters aware of the problem, "especially people foreign to the voting process."

Currently, there are no warning signs on the machines or in the polling places to make voters aware of the hyper-sensitivity of the touch-screen voting machines, he says.

For early voting, Borofsky says Bexar County is employing some 200 electronic machines made by Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software. He adds that Canton, Ohio-based Diebolt Inc. also makes a similar touch-screen voting system. Both companies are major suppliers of electronic voting systems for the 2004 election.

http://sanantonio.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/stories/2004/10/18/daily37.html?t=printable

© 2004 American City Business Journals Inc.

Programmer Says He Was Asked to Write Vote Rigging Code. He Did.

2005-05-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

More Questions for Florida
By Kim Zetter

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,66002,00.html

02:00 AM Dec. 13, 2004 PT

A government watchdog group is investigating allegations made by a Florida programmer that are whipping up a frenzy among bloggers and people who believe Republicans stole the recent election.

Programmer Clint Curtis claims that four years ago Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Florida) asked his then-employer to write software to alter votes on electronic voting machines in Florida.

He said his employer told him the code would be used "to control the vote" in West Palm Beach, Florida. But a fellow employee disputed the programmer's claims and said the meetings he described never took place.

Many questions have been raised about Curtis, the 46-year-old programmer, who said he doesn't know if anyone ever placed the prototype code on voting machines. But this hasn't stopped frustrated voters and bloggers from seizing his story. Daily Kos mentioned the allegations, and Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog has written extensively about them.

Staff members for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) met with Curtis last week to discuss the election allegations. Representatives for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) inquired about other allegations from Curtis that his former company spied on NASA.

The FBI in Tallahassee, Florida, has set up a meeting with Curtis, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said it was trying to corroborate his claims about possible election fraud and NASA spying.

The group hopes that even if the election allegations aren't proven, they will inspire legislators to pass a law requiring voting software to be open to public inspection to help deter fraud and restore public confidence in the election process. The software code used in voting machines is considered proprietary and it is protected from public examination -- an issue voting activists have been trying to address.

"I think Mr. Curtis helps make that issue a little more difficult to shunt aside," said CREW Executive Director Melani Sloan. "You don't even have to believe what he says (in order to be concerned about voting machines), just that he created a program. If he can do it, anyone can."

In September 2000, Curtis was working for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo, Florida, a software design firm that contracts with NASA, ExxonMobil and the Florida Department of Transportation, among other clients. According to Curtis, Feeney met with him and Lee Yang, the company's president, to request the voting software.

At the time, Feeney was Yang's corporate attorney and a registered lobbyist for the company as well as a member of Florida's legislature. A month later, he would become speaker of Florida's House of Representatives. In 2002 he was elected to Congress.

Curtis said Feeney asked for code that could go undetected on a voting machine and be easily triggered without any devices by anyone using the machine. Curtis had never seen source code for a voting machine, but in five hours, he said he designed code in Visual Basic that would launch if someone touched specific spots on the voting screen after selecting a candidate.

Once the code was activated, it would search the machine to see if the selected candidate's total was behind. If it was, the machine would award that candidate 51 percent of the total votes recorded on the machine and redistribute the remaining votes among the other candidates in the race.

Curtis said he initially believed Feeney wanted the code to see if such fraud were possible and to know how to detect it. The programmer told Feeney that such code could never be undetectable in source code, and he wrote a paper describing how to look for it. But when he gave the paper and code to his employer, Yang told him he was looking at it all wrong. They weren't looking at how to find code, Curtis said she told him. They needed code that couldn't be found.

"Her words were that it was needed to control the vote in West Palm Beach, Florida," Curtis said. "Once she said, 'We need to steal an election,' that put me back. I made it clear that I could not produce code that could do that and no one else should."

Curtis says he left the company in February 2001 because he found its ethics questionable. He doesn't know if his code was ever used.

Neither Feeney's spokeswoman nor election officials in Palm Beach County returned calls for comment. But a man who identified himself as Mike Cohen, Yang's executive assistant at the time whom Curtis said was in the meeting, told Wired News the meeting never occurred. Cohen said Curtis was "100 percent" wrong and that Cohen didn't attend such a meeting. He added he knew nothing of any meeting on the topic that occurred without him.

Yang attorney Michael O'Quinn called Curtis' assertions "absurd and categorically untrue." He said Curtis is an opportunist and a disgruntled former employee furthering an agenda by telling lies. According to O'Quinn, Curtis tried the same tactic in 2002 when he leveled other charges against Yang and Feeney.

Some details of Curtis' statements don't check out. West Palm Beach city didn't use touch-screen machines in 2000, something Curtis didn't know when Wired News spoke to him. It was the pregnant chad controversy in that year's presidential election that led Palm Beach county, where West Palm Beach resides, to replace its much-maligned punch-card system with touch-screen machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems in December 2001.

But Curtis said the program could have been adapted for use in the counting software used with punch-card machines and optical scan machines, or it could have been used on the new touch-screen machines in 2002, the year Feeney was elected to Congress.

Adam Stubblefield, a graduate student in computer science at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored a now-famous report (.pdf) about Diebold's voting machine code last year, thinks the chances that Curtis' code was used in a voting machine are nil.

"(Curtis) clearly didn't have the source code to any voting machine, and his program is so trivial that it would be much easier to rewrite it than to rework it," said Stubblefield.

Stubblefield also found fault in Curtis' statement that any malicious code would be detected in a source code review. This would be true only for unsophisticated malicious code, like Curtis' prototype.

Despite Curtis' concerns about statements Yang and Feeney supposedly made regarding election fraud, Curtis didn't tell the FBI or election officials in West Palm Beach about them, even after the 2000 election thrust Florida into the international spotlight.

He said he didn't worry about the code or Yang's statements because he believed if anyone installed malicious code on a voting machine authorities would find it when they examined the code. It wasn't until he read a news story last spring indicating that voting software is proprietary and is not open for inspection once it's certified that the earlier conversations began to concern him.

He claims he did later tell the CIA, the FBI, an investigator for Florida's Department of Transportation and a reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal about the voting issues when he gave them other information about Yang and Feeney. But so far this has not been corroborated. The FBI did not return calls for comment. The Department of Transportation investigator is dead.

And writer Laura Zuckerman who worked closely with Curtis on several stories for the Daytona paper, told Wired News he never mentioned the voting software code.

In 2002, Zuckerman wrote about allegations Curtis made that Yang Enterprises overcharged the Department of Transportation for work it never performed. In addition, Curtis told Zuckerman that Yang employed an illegal Chinese national while working on government contracts for NASA, and that the company was possibly spying on NASA by downloading documents from the NASA computer system.

"I didn't get a hint of anything like that at the time that I was writing any of these stories," Zuckerman (who no longer works for the newspaper) said.

However, other information provided by Curtis has been somewhat corroborated. The overbilling charge was confirmed by a Department of Transportation employee, although an official state investigation found no wrongdoing. Curtis thinks pressure from Feeney and others helped squelch the investigation, charges that Zuckerman did not find implausible from her own research.

And Last March, the Chinese national that Curtis discussed, Hai Lin Nee, was arrested in a 4-year-old Immigration and Customs Enforcement sting operation for trying to mail sensitive computer chips to Beijing in 1999 in violation of export rules.

But no one at Yang has been arrested for spying on NASA or stealing documents, despite a letter Curtis sent to a NASA investigator in February 2002 suggesting the company might be doing so. Curtis believes Feeney squelched that investigation as well to protect Yang. Both CREW and staff for Sen. Nelson's office are looking into those charges.

Curtis recently signed an affidavit (.pdf) and says he's willing to take a polygraph test. In the affidavit, Curtis stated that Feeney once "bragged that he had already implemented 'exclusion lists' to reduce the 'black vote'" and discussed ways of further impeding the black vote through strategic use of police patrols on Election Day.

His willingness to go on record with his vote fraud allegations is what makes some believe him.

Jon Kaney, a prominent Florida attorney who represents the Daytona Beach News-Journal and sparred with Feeney over articles the paper wrote about the lawmaker in 2002, said the affidavit does take things up a notch.

"You don't casually go around swearing under penalties of perjury unless you think you're right," Kaney said. "The affidavit struck me as something somebody ought to be looking at." But he said his first reaction to the affidavit was: "Gag. This can't be believed."

It remains to be seen if any new investigations can uncover the truth.

Machine Tapes, Pollbooks Don't Match Up in 35% of FL Precincts

2005-05-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

NCVV: I've been going around the state discussing this very thing occurring on AR machines. The machine tapes, due to
bad software code, or due to faulty machines themselves are not matching the number of voters signing to vote on the pollbooks at the precincts. This is absolutely huge news coming out of Florid this week. We vote on these iVotronic touchscreens in Pulaski, Faulkner and now Boone Counties in AR. . The AR SOS office, per Tim Humphries legal counsel has this to say regarind this breaking news: "Although we are aware of the problems in FL, we have no significant probem with AR machines". If the machines are not counting votes in Florida and Indiana, you can be guaranteed they are doing this in Arkansas. Same software, same machines. There is one blatant difference: FL and IN election officials are admitting they have a problem. FL officials are ousting $24 million worth of ES&S iVotronics because they failed to count the vote in the past six FL elections. AR election officials consistently deny we have a problem.

Elections
Discrepancies found in 35 percent of Miami-Dade precincts

May 06, 2005 By: Jessica M. Walker

In the latest South Florida election mishap, workers in 35 percent of Miami-Dade Countyâ€™s 749 polling places last November filed counts of voter signatures that differed from the number of ballots cast on the touch-screen voting machines, a new analysis has found.

On Nov. 2, election workers in 260 polling places submitted data to the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections office that did not match up with the total number of touch-screen ballots reported by the canvassing board, according to a study conducted by the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Out of those 260 polling places, 23 submitted totals that were off by more than 50 voters, while 68 submitted totals that were off by more than 10 voters. In one polling place, the difference was 1,284. That polling place was one of five that showed very large discrepancies. The coalition is studying those five for possible clerical errors.

Not including those five polling places, the percentage difference between the reported signature totals and the machine ballot counts varied from less than 1 percent to 34 percent. The differences included polling places where there were more reported signatures than ballots cast, and others where ballots cast exceeded reported signatures.

A Daily Business Review inspection of voter logs showed that in some polling places where there were discrepancies, the totals reported by election workers equaled the total number of voters in the precinct, including absentee and early voters. But the county reporting form for signature totals, Certificate No. 2, asks workers to fill in the total of polling place signatures only, not the total of absentee voters.

The reform coalition said the discrepancies cast doubt on the countyâ€™s ability to check the accuracy of the controversial iVotronic touch-screen machines. Since there are no paper records votes cast, critics argue that itâ€™s essential for election officials to carefully reconcile the total of voter sign-in signatures with the electronic tallies on the machines. To ameliorate this problem, critics have urged that the machines be outfitted with printers to produce backup paper records of individual votes.

â€œThe counting of signatures and reporting of discrepancies to the canvassing board are fundamental to counting votes correctly,â€� said Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor and member of the reform coalition who led the analysis. â€œItâ€™s really important to do this on election night. How do we know otherwise whether the machines are correctly reporting every vote?â€�

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections office, said the discrepancies do not necessarily indicate voting machine malfunctions. Human error in counting and the lack of a policy for the inclusion of absentee and early voters could account for many of the mistakes, he said.

Kaplan said his department recognized that the signature counts were off and said it was something the supervisor of electionsâ€™ office would seek to improve in the future. â€œAre we batting 1.000 on them all being correct? No,â€� Kaplan said. â€œItâ€™s a training issue. Whenever we become aware of issues, we re-emphasize those certain issues in training.â€�

Kaplan said that under the departmentâ€™s new leadership, the discrepancies would likely be looked into. Former Supervisor Constance A. Kaplan, who is not related to Seth Kaplan, resigned after irregularities were found in the March 8 slot machine referendum.

â€œAll of these procedures are under review, and these are the kind of things we want to tighten up,â€� Kaplan said. â€œThis is something that we will be looking at.â€�

Miami-Dade County Commissioner Katy Sorenson, who served on the canvassing board in the 2004 elections, declined to comment on the discrepancies, saying she was not familiar with the coalitionâ€™s study. â€œThings can happen where people decide not to vote, they can sign in and leave, so I donâ€™t really know if thatâ€™s a problem,â€� she said.

Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, said the issue of reconciling signature totals and machine counts was a local one and is not the concern of her office. â€œEach supervisor has their own process for how they reconcile the numbers,â€� Nash said.

The discrepancies between the signatures and the ballots are not necessarily indicative of iVotronic machine problems or missing votes. In some instances the differences were due to sloppy counting of signatures by poll workers.

For example, Precinct 11 recorded 693 votes and 849 signatures. But a Daily Business Review inspection of the voting log found 694 signatures. Another precinct with a major difference was Precinct 362, which recorded 583 votes and 859 signatures. A review of that precinctâ€™s signature log found 580 signatures.

Nevertheless, inaccurate signature counts could interfere with the ability of the supervisor of elections office and the county canvassing board to promptly identify problems in a close election, such as machine malfunctions and election fraud, before the election results are certified.

Latest glitch

Miami-Dade and Broward counties have experienced a series of embarrassing election glitches since they adopted touch-screen voting systems in 2002. In March, Constance Kaplan resigned as elections supervisor after reporting to the county manager that in the vote on slot machines, nearly 1,300 fewer votes were recorded than there were voters who showed up to vote in the single-issue election. County leaders are considering switching to a paper-based optical scan system.

In an audit of the 2002 general election, the Miami-Dade Audit and Management Services Department found discrepancies between signatures and ballots cast in 48 randomly selected precincts. The audit found that the discrepancies did not affect any election outcomes. But it recommended greater attention to reconciling signature and ballot counts. It called this an â€œan important audit control, as well as a positive tool for promoting precinct worker corrective action.â€�

Last October, the election reform coalition wrote to Secretary of State Hood, expressing its concern about the absence of a statewide system for reconciling voter signatures and electronic ballots.

â€œDespite the statutory requirement to account for voted ballots, the Polling Place Procedures Manual does not include a procedure for accounting for electronic ballots â€¦ counting signatures of voters, or explaining any gaps between these figures,â€� the letter to Hood said.

Despite the letter, Hood did not put any such system in place in the touch-screen counties.

Machine malfunction?

The voting process works like this: After entering the polling place but before casting a ballot on an iVotronic machine, Miami-Dade voters must sign next to their printed name in an election log of registered voters. At the end of Election Day, poll workers are responsible for counting the signatures and recording the total on Certificate No. 2, a paper document.

Poll workers are told prior to the election to compare the number of signatures to the number of votes tallied on the iVotronic machines to find discrepancies. Any differences could indicate vote fraud, election machine malfunction, poll worker error or other problems and should be reported to the department.

Seth Kaplan said that poll workers in the November election were told to visually check the signature count against the machine totals and to report any large differences to the department. However, that instruction was not written in the procedures guide for poll workers.

The reform coalitionâ€™s analysis and a Daily Business Review spot check found numerous polling places where there were large discrepancies â€” including polling places where there were more signatures reported than electronic ballots cast, and ones where there were more ballots cast than signatures reported.

At Precinct 124, the certificate documented 17 signatures, while the machines counted 1,301 votes. That precinct has been earmarked as a probable clerical error in the coalitions study. A check of the voter log by the Daily Business Review confirmed that there were far more than 17 signatures at the precinct.

Itâ€™s the smaller differences that will be scrutinized by the coalition. For example, in Precinct 41 there were 910 votes and 844 signatures, a difference of 62. At combined Precinct 117/166, the ballots totaled 995 and the signatures numbered 1,276.

In some of these polling places, Mahoney speculated, the differences may have been due to clerical errors by poll workers.

For Precinct 816, in the Church of the Ascension at 11201 SW 160th St., a Review inspection of the voter log showed 945 signatures, while the iVotronic computer tape showed a count of 1,032. But the individual machine counts are listed on the tape as well, and they add up to 945. But the number certified by the canvassing board came in at 1,116 votes.

In this case, the discrepancy may have been due to an iVotronic machine malfunction. Lynn Kaplan, a volunteer observer for the reform coalition who was at that polling place on Nov. 2, said in an interview that as a poll worker was closing down one of the iVotronic machines at the end of the day, an error message popped up on the machineâ€™s digital screen saying: â€œInternal malfunction/unit closed to save data/vote data corrupted.â€�

Kaplan said that while a control number called a public count said that 84 voters had voted on that machine that day, the computer had tallied no results The public count shows up on the exterior of a machine and keeps tabs on how many ballots have been cast each day. The public count number should match the number of votes recorded on the machineâ€™s memory.

Kaplan also said she witnessed a poll worker take the Personal Electronic Ballot cartridge from a nearby machine that was in the process of downloading election data, and insert the PEB into the malfunctioning machine.

The PEB is used by poll workers to control the machines. It starts up the machines at the beginning of the day. At poll closing time, PEBs are inserted into machines to download the election results. After the PEB is used to gather all the data, it should contain the results from the precinct.

After the PEB switch, Kaplan said, the poll worker did another computer printout of the results. Both machines showed zero votes.

A county computer specialist was summoned. After several printouts of election results including all machines in the precinct, the final printout showed 84 votes on both machines.

That left significant discrepancies between the signature total for the polling place, the control number showing votes on the machines and the computer printouts of voters.

The machineâ€™s manufacturer, Omaha-based Electronic Systems & Software, did not respond to request for comment.

Lynn Kaplan said election workers at Precinct 816 had lots of trouble at the end of the Election Day reconciling the conflicting iVotronic numbers with the total number of signatures. â€œI shudder to think what goes on in all the other precincts if people arenâ€™t keeping up with these things,â€� she said.

The reform coalitionâ€™s Mahoney said she wants the supervisor of electionsâ€™ office to investigate what happened that night at Precinct 816.

â€œIt shows a lack of transparency in the system,â€� she said.

The Supervisor of Elections office said it is looking into what happened with Precinct 816 in response to a Daily Business Review request for an explanation.

Mahoney said the situation in Precinct 816 highlights the need for better procedures and training for reconciling signature and ballot totals. She also stressed that the county must investigate discrepancies to see if they resulted from fraud or equipment malfunction.

She noted that unless the numbers are inspected immediately after the election, mistakes would not be caught in time for certification, which must be complete in the 48 hours after the elections.

â€œItâ€™s a very important comparison,â€� Mahoney said. â€œWith electronic voting, how can you be sure youâ€™ve got the right number of ballots? The benchmark has to be the number of voters that came into the polling place.â€�

Jessica M. Walker can be reached at jwalker@floridabiz.com or at (305) 347-6649.

http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/news.html?news_id=34733

Microvote Machines Malfunctioned in TN

2005-05-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

NCVV: We vote on Microvote machines in Conway and Perry Counties. They can print a paper receipt, yet they were excluded from the paper trail bill in AR.

Sumner County, Tennessee. May, 2005. Microvote.
Paperless Infinity voting machine locked up and failed to release votes.
VotersUnite.Org heard from a citizen in Cookeville, Tennessee:

A Microvote machine malfuntioned in a city of Portland election in Sumner Co., TN. The reports claims that 110 votes were not able to be retrieved on election night. The next morning changes were made and the 110 votes were supposed recaptured. This type of problem is very typical with the Microvote Infinity unit in the state of Tennessee.
VotersUnite! contacted Wayne Pruett, election director in Sumner County, TN. Mr. Pruett said the Microvote Infinity voting machine had locked up around 2:00 on election day and was taken out of service. He called a technician from Indianapolis to come into the office and retrieve the votes.
Mr. Pruett said the machine was always in public view in the county office and that the press and other observers were invited to view the retrieval process. He expressed complete confidence in the results.

See: Microvote in the News

http://www.votersunite.org/info/content/newmessup-14.asp

AR Senate OK's Bill for Paper Trail, Just Not For All AR Counties

2005-05-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=5631

NCVV: I sent out an action alert in late February asking for action to have the amendment written by the SOS office stricken by the AR Senate. The SOS office opposed this bill prior to tacking on an amendment that excluded seven touchscreen counties from paper receipt requirement, due to the supposed cost to the counties. They even stated these inflated costs to the House State Agency and Gov't Affairs Cmte. I was present at that committee hearing. When I called this to the attention of AR constituents, and email was sent out by the SOS office stating that my information was 'erroneous'. Everything I stated in my alert is stated in this article, in fact, it's stated by the SOS himself below. The interesting thing to note is that the Deputy SOS implied to the legislative committee that the cost to the counties would be $10 million to equip all counties with a paper requirement. The facts were not presented there, in fact the Deputy SOS never told the committee the number of machines needed for purchase. My question then and now: how could they quote a cost to the committee if they didn't know how many machines they needed for purchase? They've many times told constituents they were 'conducting a cost analysis' to see how many machines they would need. They said the same exact thing in 2003-and still number number is available?
*Warning* the counties that they can't afford machines with paper receipts is opposing the bill, and certainly not supporting it. The SOS office has not ever stated they were in favor of paper receipts until after the amendment was tacked onto HB 1360. In fact they've come up with some very ridiculous reasons why we should not have paper receipts to verify our votes.

As a result of this amendment 403,066 Arkansans are disenfranchised - as their votes cannot be verified. Arkansas is the only state in the nation with a law exempting some counties from paper requirements on voting machines.

Arkansas Senate OKs Bill for Paper Trail on Touch-Screen Voting

by Michael R. Wickline and Jake Bleed, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
March 4th, 2005

The Arkansas Senate sent to the governor Thursday a bill that would require touch-screen voting machines in Arkansas to produce a paper receipt for voters to verify their votes and for use in recounts.

By a 34-0 vote, the Senate approved House Bill 1360 by Rep. Ray Kidd, D-Jonesboro, that would bar the state Board of Election Commissioners and county boards of election commissioners from buying or procuring touch-screen machines that don’t include "a voter verified paper audit trail."

Such a trail is called a receipt, a printed representation of how the voter voted. The voter would get it before casting the ballot he had just voted on. The receipt wouldn’t contain information about the individual voter, and the voter wouldn’t take it with him, but he could see that it is the same as he voted. It would be retained by election officials to serve as the official ballot in the event a recount was ordered.

The bill would exempt from the requirement the touchscreen machines that Columbia, Faulkner, Ouachita, Pulaski and Union counties already use.

Supporters of the bill contend the state would be better off requiring touch-screen machines to produce the receipts, which would be produced by printers attached to the voting machine. The state should take this step, they say, because it is about to spend millions of mostly federal dollars on voting machines to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.

Arkansas’ 75 counties’ voting machines must comply with the federal act by the May 23, 2006, primary election.

Alaska, California, Illinois, Maine, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin have enacted similar laws, said Jennifer Bowers of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. The secretaries of state in Missouri and Nevada also are requiring their touch-screen machines to produce a paper receipt for voters to verify, according to Electionline. org.

Twenty-one other states besides Arkansas are considering similar legislation, Bowers said.

Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels, the state’s top election official, said he supports the bill, too. "People need to believe that their vote will be counted, and [a paper trail] ends up being one of those ingredients that they will get to know and see and takes some of their fear away for voting on" touch-screen machines, he said in an interview.

Daniels has said he plans to let each county have either only touch-screen voting machines or optical-scan voting machines with at least one touch-screen machine per polling site. With an optical-scan machine, voters mark a paper ballot that’s later placed in an optical-scan unit that reads the marks and tabulates the votes.

He has set aside $18.5 million in federal and state funds to buy machines for the counties.

Last month Daniels warned a House committee that HB1360 could increase the $3,000-to-$3,500 cost of each touch-screen voting machine by about $500 to $1,000. That could mean that counties get fewer such machines or must shoulder more of the cost of the machines, he said. Daniels said Thursday that he won’t know the actual cost of the machines until he starts negotiating with voting machine companies after his office issues a request for proposals from the companies.

LTE: Scrap Voting Machines

2005-05-01T05:56:00.000-07:00

Scrap voting machines

The election supervisor for Miami Dade County, Fla., resigned in frustration and in disgrace over yet another discovery that the ES &S iVotronic touchscreen voting machines failed to count the vote on a gambling initiative. Bad programming code told the machines to ignore the votes. And they did. The problem of the machines ignoring the votes was determined to have affected the last six Florida elections.

How did this happen? The machine software code is flawed. The software programming code instructs the machines to take votes from non-existing memory areas and scramble the vote data. The vendor reportedly has known about these flaws in the Unity software for well over two years and has not fixed the problem. How many times do these machines have to fail before election officials get a clue?

How does this affect Arkansas? We vote on these machines using the same flawed Unity software in Pulaski and Faulkner counties. Voters, call Secretary of State Charlie Daniels and demand he throw these faulty machines and their software out of Arkansas elections. An accurate vote count depends on this.

LISA BURKS
CONWAY

In case you didn't see this in the letter: : Bad programming code told the machines NOT TO COUNT THE VOTE. MACHINES DID NOT COUNT THE VOTES IN THE PAST SIX ELECTIONS IN FL. We vote on these machines in THREE AR counties.

SOS office phone: 501-682-1010 NCVV note: Since the writing of this LTE, I discovered that Boone Co. had recently LEASED iVotronic touchscreen voting machines. These ivotronics were used in Boone Co. 's Nov. general election. The SOS approved their request to lease the machines.

Article published in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette Saturday, 4-30-05.

Top 10 Reasons for Paper Ballots on Evoting Machines

2005-04-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

NATIONAL COALITION FOR VERIFIED VOTING (NCVV)
ARKANSAS HEADQUARTERS

TOP 10 REASONS FOR PAPER BALLOTS ON EVOTING MACHINES

1. EVOTING MACHINES ARE NOT RELIABLE. Electronic voting machines have broken down, frozen up, mistabulated votes, loaded electronic ballots sideways, issued 'ghost votes', and even subtracted votes across the nation. There are thousands of examples of machine failure. These reports are far too numerous to ignore and show a serious problem regarding the functionality of electronic voting machines. See votersunite.org for more information.

2. EVOTING MACHINES NOT VIRUS/HACKER PROOF. Many of our nation's vote tabulations are transmitted on central vote tabulators (which are just laptop computers) via the internet on Windows operating systems. Many other evoting machines are connected to the Internet separately. There are currently over 68,000 viruses, worms and trojan horse viruses of which many open ports allowing hackers in via remote access on Windows Operating Systems. The internet is simply too unsecured to place vulnerable votes on this system. Two vendors were found to have stored vote totals unsecured on the internet. Transmitting the vote totals via wireless means is just as insecure. Wireless phones can get viruses, e.g. Nokia and wireless systems have been hacked. e.g. T-Mobile.

3. PROGRAMMING 'SOURCE CODE' IS SECRET. The programming code or source code gives the machines their instructions. The 'source codes' or programming by the vendor is 'proprietary' and owned solely by the vendor. These programming codes cannot be examined by local election officials. There are currently machines used in actual elections with flawed source code that has not been repaired by the vendor even though they are aware of the flaw. e.g. FL and AR. A former NASA computer scientist testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Dec. 2004 that a 'flag' could be programmed in the source code, causing the vote count to be flipped to the other candidate. There is no way to insure the integrity of the programming, or to insure that honest programming mistakes are not made.

4. VOTES CAST RUN RISK OF NOT BEING COUNTED. There is no way to assure that the vote cast is actually the vote that is recorded in the data cartridge inside the machine.
For example, the touchscreen could show Candidate X, the paper receipt could show Candidate X and the data cartridge shows the vote was actually cast for Candidate Y. Just as bad are the instances of machines 'flipping' the vote and giving the incorrect totals to another candidate. This occurs frequently on both optical scanners and touchscreens. Machines in Mahoning Co, OH recorded -25 million votes cast. That's not possible. There is no way to verify the vote was cast correctly.

5. THE VOTE IN DATA CARTRIDGE IS 'CERTIFIED' BY ITA'S. ITA's or Independent Testing Authorities are certifying the vote count in secret. Wyle Labs, one of the ITA's is the very same lab that certified one well known vendor's machines that were later found by the Johns Hopkins Computer Security report to be ' seriously and significantly flawed'. How do we know these ITA's are trustworthy? We don't.

6. THE MACHINES ARE PROGRAMMED BY THE VENDORS. They are only 'configured' locally by the election officials, with local election data entered by officials. Votes could possibly be pre-programmed before the election or a simple mistake in programming could occur. e.g. Texas 2002, in three races the vote totals for three different candidates were exactly the same, 18,181. In 2004, North Carolina experienced similar coincidences - with a Senatorial candidate (D) and Presidential candidate (R) receiving the same number of votes: 177,324. Is this programming error, or is this coincidence? Coincidence is unlikely.

7. 'SMART CARDS' ALLOW MULTIPLE VOTES. This is another startling discovery stated the in Johns Hopkins Computer Security Report. In Arkansas, during a local county demonstration involving touchscreen voting machines
the commissioner involved in the voting machine demonstration was allowed to vote twice with the 'smart card'. During the 30 minute demonstration, the touchscreens also failed to operate twice. In 2004 a 'smart card' containing votes had to be sent to Canada in order to extract the vote totals, as local election officials could not extract them , nor did they receive needed technical assistance to do so. How do we know the votes extracted from Canada were correct? We don't. American vote totals have no business being sent to Canada or any other country for that matter.

8. MEMORY ON VOTING MACHINES TOO SMALL. In both N. Carolina and Florida 2004, the the main vote tabulator began to SUBTRACT votes upon reaching the magic number 32,767. Voting machines are supposed to add votes, never subtract them. This was due to a software bug. (See #10) and will affect either optical scanners or touchscreens. In North Carolina, one vendor indicated the memory capacity was 10,500 votes on the touchscreen machine. In reality, the machine memory could only hold 3,005 votes resulting in 4,438 votes that were simply lost.

9. MACHINE CALIBRATION 'IFFY' AT BEST. Untrained election officials, or unscrupulous individuals can easily mis-calibrate the touchscreen settings causing the vote for the candidate touched on the screen to be cast for the opposite candidate. This is machine failure and involves human error factor as well. Voters are not educated about the machine calibration, and are not aware they can request to see the screen 'test' to insure the electronic ballot loads properly and the screen highlights the correct candidate prior to casting their vote. Another troubling aspect of touchscreen voting includes inserting a 'triggering mechanism' into the code/calibration in which the voter placing their fingers in a certain combination on the screen could cause the machine to flip the vote to the other candidate.

10. MACHINES LOSE ELECTION DATA. The Republican gubernatorial race in Florida during the 2002 election completely disappeared, removing any record of the vote count. There was no paper record of the election to use as a backup when this occurred. It was discovered a year later that this was a result of a software flaw or 'bug'. The bug also caused the machines to count votes from machines than were not used in the precincts, and were in fact locked away in a warehouse. The vendor had been aware of this software bug for at least one year, has made no effort to repair it and continues to sell these machines and software to the states. In 2005, it was further discovered that the software bug was responsible for the machines not counting votes in the past six FL elections.

SUMMATION: Electronic voting machines have been touted to be easy to use, giving quick election results with no mechanical breakdowns. This is simply not the case. These electronic voting machines have proven to incorrectly tally votes, cost counties more money, take longer to complete elections and cost states millions in recounts (when they can perform one). These are just some of the many reasons why having a paper ballot is a necessity. It is imperative that these machines be equipped with paper ballot (vvpb) audit capacity to insure that every vote cast on them is in fact cast, counted and can be recounted if necessary. Paper ballots/receipts on these unreliable machines will not fix this broken system, however at the very least an audit of the election can be performed to see if the receipts match the machine totals.

*We haven't covered maintenance or repair. Replacement batteries can cost in upwards of $100,000 for 6 -8 batteries. e.g Colorado. What county can afford that expense?

NCVV Contact Information:

Lisa Burks
National Coordinator
National Coalition for Verified Voting (NCVV)
Arkansas Headquarters
lburks@conwaycorp.net

Electronic Voting Machines Inferior to Technologies They Replace

2005-04-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review

NCVV: We love the first sentence in this article. On 4-20-05 AR SOS Charlie Daniels addressed a committee in Hot Springs. He touted ES&S having a 'superior product', that their machines worked 'well' and no problems on their voting machines in AR. This article states the facts instead. Footnote: Sometimes Michael Shamos is our worst enemy on the voting issue, and sometimes he's our friend. We never know which way he will go. It's always a crap shoot when he gives statements on evoting.

Glitches add up for electronic vote machines

By Brandon Keat
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, April 21, 2005

Electronic voting machines frequently are inferior to the technologies they replace, evidenced by a string of snafus stretching from Western Pennsylvania to Miami-Dade County, elections experts say.

Officials in Beaver, Mercer and Greene counties are scrambling to put new voting systems in place after a test found their touch-screen systems froze, failed to detect touches or sometimes didn't count votes accurately. The Department of State decertified the machines, but will retest them Friday in Harrisburg.

In Florida's Miami-Dade County, glitches have prompted calls to scrap a $24.5 million touch-screen system installed after the 2000 election fiasco. Problems with UniLect Patriot voting machines, the same kind used here, have led to contested elections and millions of dollars in legal costs in North Carolina. Other e-voting woes abound.

"Every single type of (electronic voting machine) has had serious problems, from malfunctioning to design flaws to being too hard to use," said Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite!, a nonpartisan group that monitors voting machines and elections. "I hear a lot of the excuse 'human error,' but if these things are so complicated to use, that's a problem too."

The group's Web site, www.votersunite.org, documents problems with electronic voting machines across the nation: touch screens malfunctioning, machines freezing up or breaking down, and votes counted incorrectly, erased or simply uncounted.

E-voting nonetheless is the way of the future, said state consultant Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who has been testing voting machines for the state since 1980.

More than half of the 108 electronic machines Shamos has tested have failed. But the electronic machines offer better security against fraud than other systems and, when designed correctly, can offer benefits, such as alerting voters if they fail to vote in a particular race, he said.

Both Beaver and Greene counties went to UniLect electronic systems in 1998. Beaver County paid $1.2 million to switch from optical scan systems, while Greene County spent $400,000 to switch from hand-counted paper ballots. Mercer County spent $1 million for UniLect systems, which replaced lever machines in 2001.

"We went into the 21st century ahead of time with the electronic voting machines, but now, here we are," Greene County Commissioner Pam Snyder said.

The UniLect system failed an initial test by Shamos in 1993.

The glitches apparently were fixed, and the machines were certified the next year. Shamos, however, found some of the same problems -- including troubles with touch screens and straight-ticket voting -- in a test of the machines in February.

But Jack Gerbel, president of UniLect Corp. of Dublin, Calif., said the system works.

"We have never had an election where the equipment that has been programmed correctly has not counted exactly right," he said.

Still, specialists say, hand-counted and optically scanned ballots offer something e-voting does not: a paper trail. That's the best way to make sure all the votes get counted, said Justin Moore, a voting machine specialist at Duke University.

"In the perfect crime, the question is always, 'What do you do with the body?' In electronic voting, there's no body," Moore said.

That's one of the reasons Miami-Dade County officials are considering going back to optical scan ballots.

"We know that it does provide the paper records that some people in the community have made a priority," said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections.

Brandon Keat can be reached at bkeat@tribweb.com or (724) 779-7113.

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/regional/s_326434.html

Images and text copyright © 2004 by The Tribune-Review Publishing Co.
Reproduction or reuse prohibited without written consent from PittsburghLIVE.

Alameda Co: "Diebold is Holding The County Hostage to Try to Extort Money"

2005-04-21T19:31:00.000-07:00

ALAMEDA COUNTY

NCVV: Had anyone in the AR legislature bothered to ask us, we'd have quickly told them that IRV, or ranked choice voting is a bad idea that was rushed through as a result of dissatisfaction with electronic voting machines. Problem is, IRV is performed on electronic voting machines. And it doesn't work either. But it's now state law for military voters in AR. Here's yet another example of why IRV is a terrible plan:

Voting officials slam Diebold on instant-runoff system
Company accused of moving too slowly to update machines

- Patrick Hoge, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Advocates of instant-runoff voting say Alameda County officials and Diebold Election Systems are dragging their feet, preventing a majority winner in a current Oakland City Council mail election and slowing efforts for instant-runoff voting in Berkeley.

In addition, several dozen election-reform advocates, including some local government officials, protested outside Alameda County offices in Oakland on Tuesday against what they said was an attempt by Diebold to overcharge the county for implementing instant-runoff voting.

"Diebold is holding the county hostage to try to extort money,'' said Dave Heller, a co-coordinator of the successful campaign for instant-runoff voting in Berkeley, where it was approved by voters last year.

A Diebold official denied that the company was moving slowly or inflating prices.

"We're certainly not holding any part of this process up,'' said Steve Knecht, the company's California sales manager. He said a $2 million figure to reconfigure the county's election system to allow for instant runoffs was a rough estimate, and that company officials are doing a more thorough analysis that should be made public within a few weeks.

Alameda County Registrar Bradley Clark, who wrote a letter March 15 asking Diebold to develop a plan for implementing ranked-choice voting, said San Francisco spent about the same amount getting its instant-runoff voting system running in November's election.

Rodney Brooks, chief of staff to Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, called the $2 million figure "ridiculous.'' Brooks contended that the company given the contract for the county's election equipment, Global Election Systems, had said it could be easily converted to ranked-choice voting. That firm was purchased by Diebold, which assumed the contract.

But Knecht countered that Global only told the county that touch screens could be easily adapted, not the entire system. A conversion would be complicated because it would require state and federal certification, but neither state nor federal agencies provide guidelines for instant-runoff voting.

About a year ago, complaints from Clark about the performance of Alameda County's Diebold electronic machines led to a state and county false claims lawsuit that resulted in the Texas-based company paying a $2.6 million settlement in November.

Advocates say ranked-choice voting avoids costly runoff elections and makes elections more fair. Under the system, voters rank choices for the office being decided and if no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated and the votes are redistributed by rank until someone receives a simple majority of votes.

In 2000, San Leandro voters approved a measure allowing the use of instant-runoff voting but recently spent $80,000 on a special runoff election for a City Council district, San Leandro City Councilman Tony Santos said.

"That money was wasted,'' said Santos. "It could have been used to pay for a police officer or something.''

Oakland voters in 2002 approved the use of instant-runoff voting to fill City Council vacancies, and Berkeley voters approved it for all races in 2004.

Kenneth Mostern, who ran the campaign for the instant-runoff measure in Berkeley and now runs a private election management firm, said he recently paid a company $55,000 to create the system that was used in an election for officers of the KPFA-FM radio station, which has 96,000 voting members.

Berkeley City Councilman Kriss Worthington said the county's failure to implement instant-runoff voting means that the will of a majority of voters in the ongoing special election for City Council in Oakland's District 2 will likely be denied.

"That is a tragedy and an injustice,'' Worthington said. "We need to put increased pressure on Diebold.''

E-mail Patrick Hoge at phoge@sfchronicle.com.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/20/BAGP2CBS6J1.DTL

©2005 San Francisco Chronicle

Florida Mayor: 'The Equipment is Problematic'

2005-04-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

Fate of $25M e-voting system in Miami-Dade dangling

NCVV Quote of the Year: "We need to do something where we can restore the confidence of the people in the electoral process -- and that boils down to the equipment. The equipment is problematic." Miami Dade Co. Mayor Carlos Alvarez
That's what we like. The truth.

The county may opt instead for optical scanning equipment

News Story by Marc L. Songini

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,101105,00.html

APRIL 14, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Ongoing technical glitches have prompted election officials in Florida's Miami-Dade County, famous for the hanging-chad controversy in the disputed 2000 presidential election, to consider scrapping a $25 million investment in the county's electronic voting system in favor of optical scanning gear.

Miami-Dade now uses touch-screen iVotronic machines from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) that was installed in 2002 to remedy flaws in the paper-based system. After a special election last month -- during which a glitch left hundreds of votes uncounted -- and the subsequent resignation of the county elections supervisor, officials in Miami-Dade County are considering their electoral options.

"Quite frankly, if you talk to a number of people, they have lost confidence and are cynical about whether their votes count," said Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez. "That has to be changed. We need to do something where we can restore the confidence of the people in the electoral process -- and that boils down to the equipment. The equipment is problematic."

He declined to place the blame in any specific area, but he did emphasize that "people want some sort of backup, a hard copy on paper."

Coding errors by county personnel caused the iVotronic system to undercount votes in five local elections, with a boiling point reached in a countywide March 8 special election. Officials said the miscount didn't influence the end result, but the elections supervisor, Constance Kaplan, resigned amid the controversy.

In a memorandum issued April 4, and with backing from Alvarez, County Manager George Burgess instructed newly appointed Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola to undertake a comprehensive review of the voting processes, including the coding and staff training processes. He also urged Sola to "assess the desirability and feasibility of replacing the County's touch-screen electronic voting system with an optical scan system."

In adjacent Broward County, which also relies on iVotronic machines, optical scanning would have been preferable from the start, said Mayor Kristin Jacobs. But optical scanners are no longer an option, because the state has mandated a tight deadline for a switch to automated voting systems -- leaving county officials scrambling to meet the timetable. The state also limited the pool of vendors and technologies allowed.

Currently, Jacobs is pushing the state to allow printers to be used with the machines, a move that she said still requires state approval.

According to Sola, the problems in Miami-Dade resulted from human errors. The "equipment is working as required," he said.

Nevertheless, using the optical technology could cut costs and would automatically create a hard copy of votes. Before the installation of the 7,200 iVotronic machines, the punch-card-based system cost $1 million to $2 million per election. After installing the iVotronic equipment, that figure rose to $6.6 million in the November 2004 election. Part of that cost was the result of having to transport the machines back and forth securely to the voting precincts, requiring extra seasonal help and trucks.

While earlier estimates put the cost of going to optical scanning at somewhere between $3 million and $10 million, Sola said that would probably be cheaper than buying 7,200 printers at about $1,300 apiece for the iVotronic systems.

As for why the Miami-Dade didn't turn to optical scanning initially, Sola said officials viewed it as just a newer variation of the faulty punch-card technology. "We've learned a lot," he said. "We're not saying we're doing this right now. It's healthy to look at options."

For its part, ES&S emphasized that responsibility for the coding error lies with the county itself. "ES&S values our relationship with Miami-Dade County and [is] very proud of the work we have done together over the years to greatly enhance the county's voting process," the company said in an e-mail statement. "As a vendor with a broad array of integrated voting solutions, we are well-positioned to meet any needs Miami-Dade County may have in the near or long term."

A report will be delivered to the county manager on May 27.

PA SOS Says "Voting Machines Not Capable of Absolute Accuracy" - Kicks Them Out

2005-04-14T11:19:00.000-07:00

..... or the difference between the number of votes counted in a race and total ballots cast, was 5.25 percent in Beaver County, 4.5 percent in Greene County and 7.29 percent in Mercer County.

NCVV: That's nothing. Come to Pike and Crittenden County, AR in which we sported a 17.5 and 11.5% difference respectively between the number of votes counted and ballots cast on ES$S machines. We had among the worst vote discrepancies in the entire nation. Source: Scripps Howard News Survey Pennsylvania Sec. of State Pedro Cortes has acted with integrity on this issue, acted responsibly and has done the right thing by the people by kicking out those unreliable machines-so now you know it's doable. Absolute accuracy. Those words are a voters dream. Do you think Cortes would consider moving South?

04/08/2005

County voting system invalid

By: J.D. Prose - Times Staff

BEAVER - The Pennsylvania Department of State said Thursday that Beaver County's $1.2 million electronic touch-screen voting system is unreliable and can no longer be used, even in the primary election that is only five weeks away.

Advertisement

"Needless to say, we're all shocked by this finding, and we need to work our way through," Commissioners Chairman Dan Donatella said. County elections chief Dorene Mandity declined to comment, saying she had not yet read the state's report.

In decertifying the UniLect Patriot system, Secretary of State Pedro Cortes cited concerns he had after a re-examination of it on Feb. 15 by Carnegie Mellon University computer professor Michael Shamos that was prompted in part by a petition filed by Beaver County residents.

Cortes said in a five-page report that the Patriot system does not meet the state's criteria of being "safely and efficiently useable" in elections, or "capable of absolute accuracy." Cortes said the system is also confusing and difficult to learn, "displaying messages whose import is misleading or unclear."

Cortes' decision means that Beaver County, as well as Mercer and Greene counties, cannot use the Patriot system in the May 17 primary. These are the only three counties in the state that use the Patriot system.

Beaver County has used the touch-screen system since November 1998.

Department of State spokesman Brian McDonald said the affected counties can choose another voting system that meets the state's criteria, such as paper ballots or punch cards.

"Certainly, we'll work as best we can with them to iron out any problems or details," he said.

Those comments did little to mollify a furious Donatella, who said it would be impossible for the county to implement a new voting system so close to the primary.

"There is no way we could put in a paper ballot by the 17th (of May)," he said. "You don't do this weeks before an election."

After speaking with Mercer and Greene county officials, Donatella said the three could sue the state or seek a court order allowing them to use the Patriot system next month.

As for the cost, Donatella said the state certified the Patriot system before the county bought it, so the state should pay for its replacement now that it has decided the system is inadequate.

"We're not going to pay for the commonwealth's mistakes," Donatella said. "We expect the state to pay in full."

This morning, Cortes was expected to conduct a telephone conference call with Beaver, Mercer and Greene officials, Donatella said.

McDonald said the state had yet to decide whether it would give the counties any money to replace the banned system. McDonald also said that Cortes' decision would not affect the results of the November general election because the Patriot system was certified at that time.

During the re-examination done in Harrisburg, Cortes said the Patriot system "failed to sense touches on multiple occasions." It also froze one time and stopped accepting any touches, he said.

"Because the screen does not reliably detect the voters' finger touches, the system will fail to register their votes," Cortes wrote.

Cortes said the problem could have led to the high undervote that Beaver, Mercer and Greene counties experienced in the 2004 general election.

According to a Grove City College study of 24 counties included in Cortes' report, the undervote for president, or the difference between the number of votes counted in a race and total ballots cast, was 5.25 percent in Beaver County, 4.5 percent in Greene County and 7.29 percent in Mercer County.

Electronic-voting critics contend that the large number of undervotes proves that votes were not being correctly tabulated. In Beaver County, according to a Times review in January, there were 4,551 fewer votes counted for president than total ballots cast.

Only two of the other counties studied had presidential undervotes exceeding 2 percent, according to the Grove City College report. The average undervote was 1.49 percent.

Mandity said in January that the undervote was probably caused by people being confused with the system or simply not voting in the presidential race.

Mercer County had widespread problems, and its election chief resigned after the November election.

Cortes said Shamos' re-examination found that the Patriot system's security was lacking. "An intruder could conduct malicious activities on the personal computer at the central location (usually kept at the county election office) and then erase any evidence that such activity had taken place," Cortes wrote.

The Patriot system also has an optional code that would allow the machines to skip the required step of printing a tape when polls open verifying that the tabulating elements for each race have been set at zero.

CMU's Shamos, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, also found that "if a voter would attempt to deselect or change a straight party choice, such action could cause the entire ballot to be changed," Cortes wrote.

The state was required to conduct a re-examination because 19 Beaver County residents filed a petition and paid the required $450 fee. State officials were also concerned about the problems in Mercer County.

New Sewickley Township resident Sheila Green led the petition drive. Starting last year, Green began telling county officials that the system was untrustworthy and susceptible to fraud.

Green's legal challenge to the Patriot system was rejected by Beaver County Judge John McBride in October, but she pressed her concerns with the state and forced the re-examination. Green could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Jack Gerbel, president of UniLect Corp., based in California, said company officials were reviewing Cortes' decision but condemned it as "totally wrong ... absolutely wrong from start to finish."

Gerbel attended the re-examination in February and insisted everything went fine. "We'll have to do something," he said, "because (Cortes decision) is nuts."

J.D. Prose can be reached online at jprose@timesonline.com.

©Beaver County Times Allegheny Times 2005

ES&S: Trouble in Voting Machine Paradise

2005-04-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

NCVV: This is the Unity software discovered to contain bad code that scrambles vote data, picks up votes from machines not in use and instructs machines to ignore votes. No reputable election official would knowingly conduct business with this vendor in lieu of the information that has surfaced regarding ES&S business practices around the nation. AR votes on these machines with bad software in Faulkner, Pulaski and Boone Counties.

ES&S sells firmware to Indiana designed NOT to tabulate votes. Indiana uses them anyway.

http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1706282

March 11, 2004
Election Commission Bails Out Voting Machine Maker In Time for May Primary

By Karen Hensel and Loni Smith McKown
I-Team 8

What began as an I-Team 8 investigation into voting technology got hot late Wednesday night. On the grill: Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the maker of touch-screen voting machines used in Indiana and across the nation.

Heated debate about voting machines ignited fireworks Wednesday.

”Am I so damn stupid…that for me to use the word "work," do you understand that to run an election for something to work, it's gotta count the votes?” asked an exasperated election commissioner S. Anthony Long to ES&S executive Ken Carbullido.

Indiana election commissioners were disgusted late Wednesday night with answers to questions about new touch-screen voting systems. “If we could fine you, I'd make the motion now,” said Long. Carbullido replied, “Sir, I stand behind the answer I gave you.” Long said, “It would work. But then you tell your clerks it won't work because it won't tabulate the votes. I don't believe this.”

The I-Team first told you about a conference call last week that panicked four county clerks. They were told the certified software in their new electronic voting machines might not tabulate the votes. We have since found a way to make it work and that's why I was able to answer to you correctly today and say it will work,” said Carbullido.

“When you say we gotta use it, you say we gotta dust it off and find out ways to make it work. Come on!” said Long.

“I just think I was absolutely lied to by your CEO and I'm more than on the slow burn about it. I sat in this room and you all lied to me. You're so derelict in your duties that you can't look at a piece of paper and answer the question? Give me a break,” said Brian Burdick, who also serves on the election commission.

They had come all the way from Omaha with apologies. “We at ES&S made the mistake of loading the wrong version of firmware on their units,” said Rob McGinnis, ES&S.

A version of embedded computer code used by Johnson, Henry and Wayne Counties in November was actually illegal because it had not been approved by the state.

“We've changed our corporate policies and procedures to require thorough reporting of the status of certifications as well as any movement of product from warehouse to customer sites to the field,” said Carbullido.

Three of the panicked clerks wanted to re-use the illegal software they used in November. A fourth clerk with brand-new machines, Vandergurgh County's Marsha Abell, was ready to throw in the towel and return her federal reimbursement money to the state. “I have my check in my folder and I'm willing to give it back to the state and use my punchcards,” she said.

“Bailing you guys out is just beyond distasteful for me,” said Burdick.

The state did bail them out. With reservations, the commission approved use of the illegal software for the May primary. “I don't want any county or the state to be out any more time or effort because of the condition ES&S has put everybody in and I think this is time to put up or shut up,” said Long.

The solution is temporary. The deadline for ES&S to certify software is October first. If the deadline isn't met, the four counties will have one short month to figure out how residents will vote this fall for governor and for president. “I just want to say, I feel sorry for you guys,” said Burdick.

A losing candidate could challenge an election conducted on uncertified equipment. ES&S will put up a $10 million performance bond against any legal expenses or problems that arise. ES&S is still racing the clock to certify new software before the fall election.

____________________________

http://arkansaspoliticalpress.blogspot.com/

ES&S knew for over 2 years about the defects in the memory. Sold machines anyway to FL.

2001: Optical Scanners Wreak Havoc in FL

2005-04-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

NCVV Note: AR optical scanners wreaked some havoc of their own in the 2004 May primary. We vote on optical scanners in 48 of our 75 counties. Optical scanners in at least one county failed to tabulate any votes for four candidates in the US Senate race and the Presidential race, when in fact a hand count resulted in 27 votes discovered for these candidates. The candidates receiving zero votes on the scanners were Republicans.

New system fumbles votes
By Roger Roy and David Damron
Sentinel Staff Writers

May 6, 2001

PENSACOLA -- Escambia County spent more than a half-million dollars on its state-of-the-art voting machines, which are exactly the kind that lawmakers last week mandated be used statewide to avoid a repeat of last year's election debacle.

But what happened in this Panhandle county on Election Day should serve as a warning for the state's expensive effort to reform its election system. As far as Escambia voters were concerned, the sophisticated $5,000 machines stationed in every precinct might as well have been cardboard boxes.

To save time and the expense of extra ballots -- which cost 23 cents each -- Escambia election officials, with a single computer keystroke, deliberately disabled the machines' ability to instantly identify all mismarked ballots and return them to voters to try again.

More than 4,000 Escambia ballots were thrown out because voters never got a chance to correct their mistakes. As many as 3,400 of those votes might have been saved if the machines had been programmed to give voters another chance, as they were elsewhere.

In some precincts, Escambia had three times as many uncounted ballots as in counties using punch cards, which were so widely condemned that the Legislature last week banned them from Florida.

And Escambia County wasn't alone.

The Orlando Sentinel analyzed voting results from 2,008 precincts in the 26 counties that on Nov. 7 already were using election equipment similar to Escambia's. The study found many instances in which error rates actually were higher than in counties with punch-card ballots.

And the machines fell far short of their vote-saving potential. Had all 26 counties with the advanced system done as well as the very best -- Leon County -- more than 12,000 votes might have been saved.

INSTANT ERROR CORRECTION

In theory, the election system on which every Floridian will soon vote is nearly foolproof.

Called optical-scan technology, it uses paper ballots on which voters fill in an arrow or an oval by their candidate's name. Voters feed the ballots into a machine known as an optical scanner, which tabulates votes and can instantly spot any mistakes.

The machine can detect whether more than one vote was cast in a race -- an overvote. It also spots ballots on which it can read no votes, usually because the voter used an improper ink pen or marked the wrong areas of the ballot. When the tabulator detects those errors, it rejects the ballot like a vending machine spitting out a wrinkled dollar bill, and the voter gets a second, or even third, chance.

In counties without precinct-based optical scanners, flawed ballots are discovered only after they've been trucked away to election headquarters to be counted. By that time, the voter is long gone and it's too late for corrections.

But even after the state spends $24 million or more equipping every precinct in the state with the new voting machines, things can still go wrong. In the counties already using those systems, the Sentinel found:

More than 16,000 ballots could not be counted in the presidential election, either because the machine detected no votes or voters marked spaces for more than one candidate. That rejection rate -- less than 1 percent of all ballots cast -- was about five times better than the rate in counties using punch cards. But if it holds up when all 67 Florida counties are using the optical-scan system, there would still be nearly 50,000 uncounted ballots cast in the next presidential election.

Some counties where the machines appeared to work properly still had some precincts with the highest error rates in the state. In some cases, there is evidence that mistakes by poll workers were responsible. But in many cases, election officials simply were unable to explain the large number of flawed ballots.

The errors hit especially hard in precincts with large numbers of black and Democratic voters, another phenomenon election officials could not explain. `OUR BIGGEST DOWNFALL'The Sentinel also found that Escambia wasn't the only county that failed to program its machines in a way that would have reduced the number of uncounted ballots: Manatee County's voting machines also were programmed to simply accept mismarked ballots, even though they couldn't be counted.

The two counties use different brands of precinct tabulators, the only ones in use in Florida. Escambia's OpTech brand is used in Orange County. Manatee's Accu-Vote is identical to the system used in Seminole County.

But despite using different brands of the optical-scan system, Escambia and Manatee election officials programmed them in the same way that wasted thousands of potential votes. They simply turned off a feature that would have made the machines return ballots to voters when the machine detected more than one vote in any race.

Such programming is easy: On the system used in Escambia, it requires a single computer keystroke when setting the machines for each election.

Manatee County Election Supervisor Bob Sweat said he turned off his machine's error-detecting feature because "it slows down the process."

Nearly 1,400 of Manatee's 112,000 presidential ballots couldn't be counted, most because voters had made marks for more than one candidate.

Escambia County Election Supervisor Bonnie Jones, a longtime Democrat now registered with no party affiliation, said her machines had been programmed the same way since they were purchased in 1994. Accepting ballots with mistakes, rather than giving voters a second chance, saved money on extra ballots and moved voters through the polls more quickly, she said.

"It just never came up before," said Jones, who called the programming decision "our biggest downfall."

How election machines were programmed was an obscure issue before November's election, the closest in Florida history.

But Escambia County Commissioner Michael T. Bass said he thought the machines had been programmed to take advantage of their ability to give voters a second chance. He said he was "floored" when he learned otherwise last week.

"When we bought that equipment, we had to really suck up and grit our teeth, because it was quite an expense," said Bass, a Republican. "And we thought it would eliminate those mistakes."

Bass dismissed election officials' explanation of saving money as "just bull----. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for that, and they're worried about 23-cent ballots. They should be embarrassed."

In Leon County, where Election Supervisor Ion Sancho was the first in Florida to switch to precinct tabulators, the machines were programmed to spit out flawed ballots. Less than one-fifth of 1 percent of Leon ballots went uncounted. Escambia's uncounted-ballot rate was 20 times higher.

Sancho said counties that didn't use their equipment to stop mismarked ballots "were shortchanging the voters. To not use these features is to rob the voters of the very technology they spent the extra tax dollars to purchase."

UNEXPLAINED ERRORS

In other counties examined by the Sentinel, the precinct tabulators were properly programmed to stop bad ballots. Still, some precincts in those counties had inexplicably high error rates.

In Columbia County, new precinct tabulators that cost the small county $300,000 last year appeared to work flawlessly -- at first.

"We thought things went very smoothly," said Jean Lear, Columbia's deputy supervisor.

Yet in Columbia, which includes Lake City, 3.6 percent of all presidential ballots in the November election couldn't be counted, nearly as high as the 3.9 percent that were thrown out in Florida's punch-card counties.

And in Precinct 26 in Columbia, 17 percent of all the ballots were thrown out, the highest rate for any precinct with its own tabulator statewide.

About three of every four registered voters in Precinct 26 are black, and nearly nine in 10 are registered Democrats. Columbia election officials could not explain the precinct's high error rate, but said many voters must have chosen not to correct their ballot mistakes.

In those cases, poll workers can press a button that overrides the machine and accepts the ballot, even though it won't be counted.

That happened in one heavily Democratic Orange County precinct, where a poll worker 79 times pressed the override button to accept uncountable ballots. Time stamps on the machine's audit tape indicate the worker probably did so without taking time to explain the problem to voters or give them another chance.

The ballot machines used in Columbia County do not print a detailed audit tape. But Diane Killebrew, a bank teller who was the poll clerk, or chief poll worker, in Precinct 26, said she never used the override button. With the Accu-Vote system used in Columbia, the button is beneath a locked cover, and Killebrew had the key.

Killebrew said there were times when the machine would reject ballots, but when the voter tried again, it would accept them.

THE POWER FAILURE THAT WASN'T

In Bay County's Precinct 23, more than 15 percent of all ballots were thrown out, the third-highest rate anywhere in the 26 counties. Sixty-seven percent of the precinct's voters are registered as Democrats.

Bay election officials first said they suspected an Election Day power failure in that precinct had caused poll workers to use an emergency ballot box, which cannot identify mismarked ballots or return them to voters.

However, an examination of that precinct's audit tape, which lists power failures and machine malfunctions, showed the power had not failed. Bay County Election Supervisor Mark Andersen speculated that "bad pens" may have been used in the precinct, causing a high rate of ballots to be unreadable by the machine.

"There is no real on-the-surface explanation for it," Bay County Democratic Party Chairman John Carter said of the mistakes in Precinct 23. "I don't have even a suspicion that it was an equipment failure."

In most cases, election officials not only did not know why some precincts had much higher error rates than others, they were not concerned with finding out. Officials in most counties where those precincts were located said they had not examined their error rates or tried to identify the causes.

"We haven't looked into that," said Gene Crist, assistant election supervisor in Bay County.

A `WORKING CLASS' PROBLEM

Whatever the reason for them, the errors tended to hurt black voters and Democrats the worst.

In precincts with optical scanners, only 9 percent of the registered voters are black. But in the 64 precincts where the uncounted vote rate was the worst, 50 percent of the registered voters are black.

Nearly 3,300 of the 37,000 votes cast in those precincts were uncounted. Because the precincts are also 72 percent Democratic, many of those lost votes would likely have gone to Democrat Al Gore had they been salvaged.

The results in just two Escambia polling places demonstrate how the errors tilted toward black and Democratic precincts:

In heavily Republican Precinct 110, which includes the conservative Pensacola Christian College, Bush won 98 percent of the vote, and the error rate was less than 1 percent.

In Precinct 76, where blacks comprise 79 percent of all registered voters, Gore won 93 percent of the vote, but nearly 16 percent of all ballots were thrown out, the second-highest rate in the state.

With rare unanimity, state Democratic and Republican leaders agree that blacks and Democrats were the most likely to have their votes thrown out.

Florida Democratic Chairman Bob Poe said it might be because blacks in the November election were more likely to be first-time or infrequent voters. A high proportion of "working class" voters might tend to jam the polls before and after work, and black precincts on average have more voters in them, Poe said.

REFORMS CAN GO ONLY SO FAR

But many of the optical-scan precincts with the highest error rates are relatively small. And poll workers in some of the worst precincts reported no unusual jams or rushes of voters.

Al Cardenas, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said "We haven't really looked at it in a way that a person could have an educated guess."

Whatever the cause, there's no evidence that Florida's switch to uniform use of optical-scan voting equipment will end the disproportionate number of errors in black precincts.

The election reforms passed and funded by the Legislature will no doubt reduce the number of uncounted ballots in Florida. Even if error rates don't decline with more attention to voter and poll-worker education, the switch to the new equipment will cut uncounted ballots by two-thirds.

But Jim Smith, a former secretary of state who co-chaired a state election-reform task force, said Florida voters shouldn't get their hopes too high.

The final report of Smith's task force began with a lofty aim: "The goal is perfection."

The reality will be a little more down-to-earth, Smith conceded.

"Believe me," Smith said, "given human ingenuity, people will screw it up."

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/orl-newsystem,1,7554271.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

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ES&S Employee: Touchscreens Easily Manipulated

2005-04-09T17:22:00.000-07:00

Published on Friday, June 25, 2004 7:51 PM CDT

Election commission hears last pitch on vote machines
By Richard Duke

Courier Staff

The Saline County Election Commission, faced with having to revamp the county voting system by 2005, listened to the final presentation by independent companies about new and technologically advanced voting machines.

Representatives from Election Systems & Software spoke to officials Thursday morning, highlighting a feature that will assist the visually impaired with marking their ballots. Each county will have to provide assistance of this kind in the future.

The demonstration featured a terminal with a touch screen pad and an audible ballot that can be heard through headphones. The process marks the ballot, but it does not count it. The ballot can then be taken to a ballot box.

Mike Devereaux, who gave the presentation, said that touch screens, which many once thought would be the wave of the future, will never replace a paper ballot. The technology of touch screens, however, can greatly help those needing assistance in marking their ballot.

"The problem with touch screens as vote counters is that they can be easily manipulated," Devereaux said. "If someone were to go to a polling place that had a large turnout for John Kerry, that person could vote for John Kerry falsely, and when they got their receipt for John Kerry, they could report to an official that their vote was counted wrong. The entire machine would then have to be shut down with all of those votes still inside."

Devereaux believes that a paper audit is still what is desired by the public, especially after the presidential election in November 2000. Punch cards, however, must be discontinued, according to federal law.

In addition to the Voter Assist Terminal, ES&S displayed ballot counters, which combined the ease of electronic counting with the need of a paper audit. The counters can take any paper ballot and count each one, storing them within the machine. The information is then kept on a disk, which can be transferred to a central location. The process can be much quicker than hand counting, and if a problem occurs concerning fraud or human error, the paper ballots are still inside, ready to be counted.

The election commission has now seen a number of presentations from different companies, and it will make its decision soon. Saline County Clerk Freddy Burton said that, although changes in voting procedures must be made by December 2005, he would like to see Saline County have everything in place before then.

"We don't have to be ready for the general election in November, but we will make a decision about which is the best option for us and get everything in place as soon as possible," he said.

Saline County Clerk Freddy Burton and Election Systems & Software representative Mike Devereaux discuss the options available for polling places in the upcoming elections. (Courier photo by Richard Duke)

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Pulaski Co: No Provisional Ballots in Satellite Precincts Nov. 2004

2005-04-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

NCVV note: Not having provisional ballots in the Pulaksi Co. satellite precincts was a violation of
section 302 of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. But, who cares about breaking a federal law?

From KATV:
Pulaski County Without Provisional Ballots
Location: Little Rock
Posted: October 20, 2004 3:11 PM EST
URL: http://www.katv.com/news/stories//181815.html

Little Rock (AP) - Remote sites for early voting in Pulaski County do not have provisional ballots, so voters whose ballots are challenged have no way to vote.

Elections director Susan Inman says challenged voters will be directed to the county courthouse to cast disputed ballots until provisional ballots can be delivered to seven satellite voting locations. The ballots should be in place by Monday.

Early voting is underway statewide in advance of the November 2nd general election.

Inman blamed a state Supreme Court order September 23rd that halted printing of ballots statewide while the high court decided whether to order independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's name stricken from the ballot.

The high court on October first overturned a lower court decision that had barred Nader from the ballot, clearing the way for counties to print ballots with his name on them.

Copyright 2005 katv, LLC

Pulaski County At it Again: Voter Registration Database Problems/No Provisonal Ballots in Satellite Precincts

2005-04-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

NCVV: What is not reported here - the Pulaski County Election Commission failed to provide provisional ballots in the satellite locations which is a violation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, sec. 3. The Kerry Legal Team, along with NCVV and other campaign heads in the state went three rounds with chairman Larkowski urging him to get the provisional ballots in the satellite precincts promptly. His reply to NCVV: that he had the "blessing of three attorneys, including himself. And please don't perpetuate this." The satellite precincts were without provisional ballots for a minimum of seven days, even with voter registration database problems sending voters to the incorrect precincts.

Many provisional ballots cast unnecessarily in state

BY CHARLIE FRAGO

Posted on Thursday, November 4, 2004

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story/adg/97781

It wasn’t like Ohio, but Arkansan voters cast provisional ballots across the state in Tuesday’s election.

In many cases, they voted provisionally unnecessarily, causing confusion and anger for many voters and extra work for election officials.

Unlike Ohio, where approximately 150,000 provisional ballots figured prominently in the presidential contest between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the exact number of such ballots used in Arkansas is not known.

State election officials said they would have to wait for county election commissions to certify their results before announcing a total number of provisional ballots cast.

On Wednesday, as provisional ballots were being processed, election officials tried to figure out how many of them had been used and how to avoid the misuse of such ballots in future elections.

Misinformation in the media and old-fashioned word of mouth all contributed to voters demanding to cast provisional ballots when they didn’t have to do so, election officials said.

In Pulaski County, somewhere between 700 and 1,000 provisional ballots were cast, said Election Director Susan Inman.

Her staff was still determining the number on Wednesday, she said. The election commission planned to hand-deliver the provisional ballots to County-Circuit Clerk Carolyn Staley’s office as soon as possible so that Staley’s staff can research voter registration information on each provisional ballot to determine if the person who cast the ballot was a registered voter.

Next week, the commission likely will hold hearings for any voter who cast a provisional ballot that might not be counted because their registration could not be verified, Commission Chairman Jerry Larkowski said.

The exact date of those hearings has not been determined, he said.

The commission is scheduled to certify the election, including the provisional ballots and the approximately 7,000 absentee ballots on Nov. 12.

Larkowski said he visited more than 20 polls Tuesday and noticed a "recurring problem" with the voter-registration database. In his estimation, about "60-70 percent" of provisional ballots cast were the result of problems with the database. "I’ve said all year that the people who vote in every election aren’t going to have problems. It’s the people who came out yesterday who had not voted in four years that might have run into problems. They wouldn’t have had a chance to clear up problems with their registration [in May’s primary or earlier]."

http://www.nwahomes.com/story_print.php?paper=adg&News=section&storyid=97781
Copyright © 2001-2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved. Contact: webmaster@nwanews.com

Pulaski Co. Machines Flip Votes: Vote Totals Flawed

2005-04-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

NCVV: We just love Pulaski Co. We told their Election Director Susan Inman that the iVotronic toucscreen and optical scanner software was flawed and did not count the votes. She informed NCVV that I was wrong, my thinking was flawed and that my head was "buried up something". Article below: Inman's totals were wrong, and she's quoted saying "Ours is generated off of the voting system", which was flawed. But instead of admitting the machines are faulty, she blames the county clerk Carolyn Staley. The county clerks office takes the vote totals from the VOTING MACHINES and enters them on the Secretary of State's election software. The clerk doesn't have the totals. The election commission provides them to the clerk from the voting machines.

When we questioned the AR Sec. of State's attorney Tim Humphries about why counties were allowed to amend their totals after the certification deadline, his reply was 'we had to amend to get our totals right'. Mr. Humphries also stated to us that there is no provision under AR law that provides for amendment certification. What that means? They make the rules up as they go. Note: one candidates' votes were 'flipped' and given to her opponent. She got them back and was declared the winner. How? She went to all the precincts in her district and got her vote totals first. She knew the totals were hers.

http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg§ion=National&storyid=99872

Pulaski County’s tallies flawed, so state to ‘amend’ Nov. 2 vote result

BY JAKE BLEED

Posted on Thursday, November 25, 2004

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story/adg/99872

Two days after certifying final results for the Nov. 2 election, the Arkansas secretary of state’s office said it must "amend" those results after discovering an error in how votes were counted in Pulaski County. "We’re going to have to amend the certification results for Pulaski County," said Janet Miller, deputy secretary of state for elections and public relations. "Their hard copy and what they sent us on the computer was wrong."

Miller said her office has asked all 75 counties to confirm that the vote totals submitted to the secretary of state match those recorded by county election commissions.

Susan Inman, director of elections for the Pulaski County Election Commission, said the county had submitted accurate totals to the office of County Clerk Carolyn Staley, whose office then filed those numbers with the secretary of state. "Ours is generated off of the voting system," Inman said. "It’s taken by paper to the county clerk’s office, and someone at the county clerk’s office takes that paper and types it into a Web form."

Inman added, "You can see how an error could occur in that process."

Janice Hay, Staley’s chief deputy, said her office spent Wednesday "trying to verify" vote totals but would not come up with final numbers until Monday. "Our verification process is going on right now, and we have not completed it," Staley said. "We have to verify each and every precinct and their totals."

Hay described her office as the "middle party" in the system.

Several differences can be found between vote totals on the secretary of state’s Web site — www.arelections.org— and those on the Pulaski County Election Commission’s site — www.votepulaski.net.

For example, the secretary of state’s site reported U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., receiving 155,290 votes in Pulaski County, as of late Wednesday.

At the same time, the county’s Web site showed Snyder receiving 97,733 votes. Snyder defeated State Rep. Marvin Parks, RGreenbrier, in the race for the 2 nd Congressional District seat.

The margin of victory, according to the secretary of state, was 102,416. According to the county, the margin was 44,622.

A constitutional ban on gay marriage received 92,723 votes, according to the secretary of state, and 96,062, according to the county. Both report that measure passing by a wide margin.

Another constitutional amendment that would extend term limits for state lawmakers failed by 59,809 votes, according to the county, and by 58,442 according to the secretary of state.

Inman said the differences could result from the counting of provisional ballots, which continued until this week. "But they should only be different in maybe one or two or three," Inman said. "Small numbers."

State Rep.-elect Dawn Creekmore, D-Hensley, said she alerted the secretary of state to a problem in how Pulaski County votes were recorded in her race against Republican opponent Penny Kemp of Shannon Hills.

The secretary of state’s Web site showed Creekmore losing in Pulaski County with 659 votes to Kemp’s 1,305. Instead, Creekmore said, those results should be reversed. "I drove around and got the results," Creekmore said. "I knew them. Then we came home and saw the numbers on TV and the numbers were the exact opposite."

The county’s Web site show’s Creekmore receiving 1,327 votes in Pulaski County and Kemp receiving 637.

Creekmore, whose district includes area of Saline and Pulaski counties, was named the winner in the race.

The secretary of state had certified its election results Monday, saying that vote totals posted on its Web site were accurate.

However, votes for write-in U.S. Senate candidate Glen Schwarz changed between Monday, when he had 74 votes, and Wednesday, when he had 213. "We’re auditing the results, to see if what they sent us matches what was on file at the county," Miller said.
Copyright © 2001-2004 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved. Contact: webmaster@nwanews.com

FL Officials Threaten to Sue Over iVotronic Touchscreen Flaw

2005-04-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

Posted on Fri, Jul. 09, 2004

Documents detail more voting machine flaws

BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
meklas@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - As state and Miami-Dade County election officials work to approve software that will clear up a nagging problem with touch-screen voting machines, a Herald review of internal election department documents has found that there are a host of other flaws that have never been publicly acknowledged and are not expected to be fixed by the new programming.

The situation has led to a fractious relationship between Miami-Dade, the state and the touch-screen machine maker, Electronic Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb. At one point, a state Division of Elections e-mail shows, Miami-Dade Assistant County Attorney Murray Greenberg threatened to sue the company -- and make it ''close up shop nationally'' -- if more problems were discovered with the equipment that was certified as working two years ago.

In a June 3 letter to ES&S, obtained by The Herald in a public records request, Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan demanded answers to three problems with the iVotronic equipment that she said could take ''labor intensive and costly'' actions to fix. She asked ES&S to resolve these issues ``expeditiously:''

• The central database machines used to tabulate votes are incapable of holding all the audit data at once, requiring a ''labor intensive and costly'' solution that could complicate a recount in a close race. Audit data is used to back up the system.

• The optical scanners used to read absentee ballots have problems when information is merged from the three machines the county uses.

• And the county could potentially mix up votes if it were to try to use phone lines to transmit data from the polling places to the election center, which it doesn't plan to do.

ES&S RESPONSE

ES&S Senior Vice President Ken Carbullido responded to Kaplan on June 14, noting that each of the problems could be resolved if the county alters its procedures, reconfigures its software or, if it wants to transmit data from the polling places, redo the programming code in the machines or retrain its staff.

He acknowledged on Thursday, however, that the problems are ''separate issues'' from the so-called ''audit anomaly'' that brought a team from his company to Miami-Dade this week. The team tested a program intended to repair a problem in which the computers garbled serial numbers in the machine's audit trail. In a close election requiring a recount, that problem might make it difficult to tell what votes were cast on a particular touch-screen machine.

MAKE CHANGES

All of the problems can be addressed by the November election if Miami-Dade officials make a few changes in the way they use the equipment, said Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer expert the county hired to independently review its electronic voting system and make recommendations.

But, Jones said, the extent of the flaws expose a major failing of the system: ``The fundamental problem is the data formats used were never designed to handle a county as big as Miami-Dade.''

DISAGREEMENT

Carbullido, the ES&S vice president, disagrees with that conclusion, saying that the company's machines are used by even larger counties, like Chicago's Cook County.

The e-mails and correspondence from April 15 to June 28 obtained by The Herald show that state election officials were caught completely off guard in mid-May when the story broke about the audit-trail problem in ES&S' iVotronic touch-screen machines.

The state first blamed Miami-Dade officials and then directed their fire at ES&S. Paul Craft, head of the Division of Elections' certification department, which has to approve equipment and software before it can be used, blamed ES&S for filing an incomplete application for certification.

''The [audit trail] anomaly is present in the [touch-screen] systems used in all counties,'' Craft wrote on May 15. The only difference, he said, was that most other counties did not transmit the voting data to flashcards like Miami-Dade does, so the problem took longer to surface elsewhere.

As Craft and other officials were insisting publicly that the failure of the machines to record the correct serial numbers in post-election audits was just an ''anomaly,'' he and another election department official, David Drury, were privately expressing bigger worries.

EXPLANATION SOUGHT

'The state of Florida desires a `very detailed explanation,' as neither Paul nor I can accept this anomaly being described as a random event,'' Drury wrote in an e-mail to ES&S account representative Sue McKay on May 25.

The finger pointing extended to other parties as well. ES&S officials blamed the state's bureaucratic certification process for failing to allow them to fix the problem they admitted they had known about.

And Greenberg, the Miami-Dade assistant county attorney, chastised an analyst with the state Division of Elections for writing a letter to Secretary of State Glenda Hood and creating a public record of the problem.

While tensions are still raw, Jones said, he noted that he is ``impressed by Miami-Dade officials and their willingness to admit they have a problem.''

Jones said the problem rests with the software, known as Unity, and added that it is up to ES&S to decide how far it wants to go to make it better able to perform in large counties.

The lesson, Jones said, is ``the belief that a software program is correct is almost always wrong.''

''All we have are a choice between imperfect systems,'' he said. ``Frankly, the work Miami-Dade has done up to this point leaves me fairly confident they can do a good job.''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9111841.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

When Undervotes Equal Bad Programming/Ballot Design

2005-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Excerpt:

TEST CONFIRMED: Universally without a shadow of a doubt every under vote detected in our sample proved that the issue or race was missing from the ballot. Beyond a doubt there were problems with the programming for this election in Coconut Creek Precinct 12F and Ballot Style #12. It is clear then that the Under votes from the ES&S iVotronic Voting machines were not under votes (no votes) decided by the voters but were in fact not included on the voter’s ballot itself.

Full article:

http://www.ecotalk.org/FirstParallelElection.htm

NCVV: It is important to understand the importance of undervotes on voting machines. Election officials and vendors will tell you that they are caused by people choosing not to cast a vote in a race. However, a study conducted in FL found that was not the case.

In fact, the undervotes were a result of the races MISSING from the ballots-it wasn't that voters chose not to vote, it was that they could NOT vote. Yet another flaw discovered with electronic voting. FL machines recently showed an high number of undervotes in their gambling initiative election. There was only one issue on the ballots requiring a for or against vote. So how could their be 1700+ undervotes in that election?

AR has an enormous amount of undervotes in almost all our races. e.g. 44,000 in one race alone. That is just absurd and quite frankly, not possible. But AR election officials will tell you that it's because we go to the polls and chose not to vote in 'protest'.

Parallel Election conducted in FL finds that undervotes were caused by races not on ballots and not because voters chose not to vote. I bet if we conducted parallel elections in Arkansas we would discover the same thing occuring on our machines, as they use the same software and are the same models as the ones conducted in the FLstudy.

Optical Scanner Voting Machines Set To Reverse Vote Count

2005-04-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

Optical Scan Voting Machines Set to Reverse Vote Count

NCVV Note: This article is crucial regarding AR votes. We vote on optical scanners in 48 of our 75 counties. AR is gearing
up to purchase new voting equipment under the statewide HAVA plan. The SOS office seems to be leaning toward optical scanners statewide. During the 2004 presidential election optical scanners in North Carolina and Florida both began subtracting votes when the counters hit 32,767 and 35,000 respectively. They rolled over like odometers on a car, and began to subtract votes. How did this happen? The vendors sold the states equipment with too small a memory.
*This article states the bug was discovered two years ago by the vendor BUT NEVER FIXED. ES&S has been aware that their machines SUBTRACT the vote and kept selling these machines anyway without ever fixing the bug? Isn't that illegal? Where's the Lemon Law? Where's the outrage? Where are the fines and penalties due them?

Gambling vote glitch mars tally

BY ERIKA BOLSTAD AND CURTIS MORGAN
ebolstad@herald.com

Broward County corrected a computer glitch Thursday that had miscounted thousands of absentee votes, instantly turning a slot-machine measure from loser to winner and reinforcing concerns about the accuracy of electronic election returns.

The bug, discovered two years ago but never fixed, began subtracting votes after the absentee tally hit 32,500 -- a ceiling put in place by the software makers.

''Clearly it's a concern about the integrity of the voting system,'' said Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman, a canvassing board member who was overseeing the count. ``This glitch needs to be fixed immediately.''

The problem, which resulted in the shocking discovery of about 70,000 votes for Amendment 4, a measure allowing a referendum on Las Vegas-style slots at parimutuels in Miami-Dade and Broward, came to light just after midnight Wednesday when Broward's canvassing board shut down.

Lieberman, Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes and several lawyers on both sides of the gambling amendment noticed votes suddenly disappearing on Amendment 4.

The problem was quickly traced to software in what is known as the central tabulation machine, a computer that collects data from optical scanners that read the individual mail-in ballots.

Besides reversing the Election Night outcome on a controversial gambling question, the error spurred finger-pointing and provided more ammo for critics of high-tech voting.

Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on ''inadvertent human error'' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error.

Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. ``It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.''

FINGERS POINTED

County officials blamed Election Systems & Software, the company that sold the machines and counting software to Broward.

County officials say they think ES&S failed to follow through on a problem that was brought to their attention two years ago, during the 2002 general election.

ES&S spokeswoman Becky Vollmer said the glitch -- which limits the number of votes that can be counted in each precinct to safeguard against ballot stuffing -- will be fixed in software updates they are submitting to the Division of Elections next year.

''This was not an error with the tabulating system,'' Vollmer said in an e-mail. ``This was a programming oversight that caused the results reporting software to contain incorrect information for preliminary, unofficial results. No votes were lost and no other ballot questions were affected.''

But Broward County Administrator Roger Desjarlais said ES&S was accountable. ``I believe they had an obligation to fix it. They just have an obligation to provide a product that works.''

ISOLATED PROBLEM?

While Broward insisted that the problem had exposed another hidden bug in the electronic voting system, the view was different in Tallahassee.

Alia Faraj, Hood's spokeswoman, said ES&S had not previously submitted any information about the counting cap in its tabulation software, which is supposed to be certified by the Secretary of State's Office.

But she said programmers had admitted a ''human error'' in setting up the absentee count and said there were no reports of similar problems from any of the 15 counties in the state that use electronic systems, 11 with the same ES&S gear. Another 21 use ES&S systems to tabulate paper ballots counted by optical scanners.

Other counties that use the same vote-counting software say they've never encountered the problem and it was never brought up at the users group meetings held annually.

Theresa LePore, Palm Beach County's elections chief, said her technology experts were aware of the potential issue, but that nothing like that had happened in the county, which uses different software. ''As long as you know about it, you can turn it off,'' LePore said.

The tabulation software was set to reverse the vote count at 32,500. It was triggered when Broward counted all 97,535 absentee ballots in one mega-precinct Tuesday night and early Wednesday.

The glitch only affected Page 2 of the ballot -- the one with five of the amendment questions -- because it contained only statewide measures that drew enough voting to trigger the cap, county officials said.

OTHER RESULTS STAND

Results on the other amendment questions were changed, as well, but, unlike the gambling question, their outcomes had not been in doubt.

When they saw the count going haywire, election officials were able to go to individual scanners feeding the main computer and obtain the correct vote count. Suddenly, they found thousands of uncounted votes that gave the gambling initiative a big boost.

Opponents of the amendment said they were suspicious of the newfound votes, especially because 94 percent of the 78,000 votes cast on Amendment 4 were in favor of the amendment. Other votes from Broward were 65 percent in favor.

''It certainly seems statistically remarkable,'' said state Rep. Randy Johnson, a Republican from Winter Haven who is chairman of No Casinos from Celebration.

CRITICS SPEAK UP

Lale Mamaux, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, said the miscount had proved the necessity of a paper trail that Florida elections officials have resisted for voting machines.

Broward was able to correct the count because they could simply run the absentee ballots through scanners again. That can't happen with touch-screen voting.

Wexler, an outspoken critic of Florida's election system, sued to create a paper record for manual recounts in close elections like the contentious 2000 presidential race. A federal judge rejected the suit late last month.

ANOTHER BLACK EYE

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said such errors can undermine public confidence.

''The bigger picture is that it cast doubt on the accuracy of the elections,'' she said. To resolve any concerns, Rodriguez-Taseff said Broward should recount everything -- not just absentees.

The miscounted votes were the second major flaw in Broward's election, which was also marred when thousands said they didn't get their absentee ballots in the mail.

''I wish it hadn't happened, in that we're trying to regain credibility for this office,'' Snipes said. ``But people will have to look at the whole issue and put it in perspective.''

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/10103931.htm

Herald staff writers Mary Ellen Klas, Luisa Yanez, David Kidwell, Jason Grotto and Joe Mozingo contributed to this report.

2002: Pulaski Co. Runs Out of 100,000 Ballots

2005-04-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

NCVV note: Notice that FOX News fails to mention the amount of ballots that were run out of in Pulaski Co. The judge did not extend voting hours in Pulaski Co. The GOP filed a counter suit and the court threw it out. The polls closed on time.

Typos, Machines and Mother Nature All Affect Polling

Wednesday, November 06, 2002
By Amy C. Sims

STORIES
BACKGROUND

•
Voters to Air Election Day Nightmares
NEW YORK — Everything was supposed to be different this time around, but voting glitches still plagued Election Day, despite the introduction of advanced voting machines and increased training for poll workers.

In South Dakota more than seven thousand votes could be held up until early Wednesday morning because of a faulty computer chip in Davison County.

Election workers in Mitchell have stopped counting votes until they can make repairs. A replacement chip is on the way from Omaha, Nebraska.

In Pulaski County, Ark., a judge extended voting until 9 p.m. after the Democratic Party sought an injunction, a state Democratic chairman said.

Chairman Ron Olive cited inexplicable delays at polling sites and a number of precincts that have reported running out of ballots. The Democratic Party has been contacted by numerous voters who, because of these problems, have not been able to vote.

"We simply cannot let another election go by with disenfranchised voters. The citizens of Pulaski County deserve a fair opportunity to vote."

Pulaski County is a majority Democrat county, and the GOP said if Pulaski is going to be open, the whole state should be open.

Georgia has 22,000 touchscreens, the country's largest amount, and also may have the biggest problem on their hands. In two counties, officials said problems could result in contested elections and lawsuits.

In one county, ballots in at least three precincts listed the wrong county commission races. Officials shut down the polls at one point to fix the problem but didn't know how many wrong ballots were cast or how to correct errant votes. In another, a county commission race was omitted from a ballot.

Elsewhere, some machines froze up and others had to be rebooted. Dozens were misprogrammed, and cards voters need to access machines malfunctioned.

"They are locking up, and we have to turn them off and turn them on. The voting is taking a little longer," said Mary Cranford, election superintendent in Georgia's Coweta County.

There are now 510 counties nationwide with electronic voting systems, according to Election Data Services, a Washington, D.C., research company. That's 16 percent of counties representing one in five registered voters.

"A lot of these products were rushed to market," said Rebecca Mercuri, a Bryn Mawr College computer science professor and expert on election technology.

Mercuri warned that some problems with the new touchscreen systems may never be known because they lack paper backups for double-checking ballots.

Diebold Election Systems, which supplied machines for Georgia and Maryland, said election officials never asked for such features, which worries Mercuri.

She said any misprogramming isn't always obvious, "so there's no way to prove that [a machine] didn't cast a vote for Candidate B when you cast for Candidate A."

In Montgomery County, Md., where results of a tight congressional primary race were delayed by faulty planning, a programming error caused machines at 30 precincts to display a ballot with a header reading "Democratic."

The header would normally be blank, but the glitch does not affect the tally, an elections administrator said.

Republicans and Democrats have reported ballot shortages in some Minnesota precincts, and there is concern that the secretary of state may not have printed enough ballots for the higher-than-usual turnout in that state.

Chicago election officials reported a number of minor glitches in the early voting around Illinois. Cook County elections spokesman Scott Burnham said a sheriff's deputy in Cicero had to escort out a reportedly drunk election judge.

Three central Florida counties reported problems with optical scanners. Machines malfunctioned at a South Miami precinct. An electrician was called to a Broward County precinct running on battery power, where voters were reportedly putting their ballots in a box to be counted by hand.

Some who showed up to vote drove off before a precinct in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, Fla., finally opened 20 minutes late.

Once the poll opened, some voters said they had trouble feeding the optical scan ballots through the machines -- and some English-speaking voters said they were given Spanish-language ballots.

In Texas, WFAA television is reporting that voting machines are mistakenly programmed, and spits out errors when straight party-line voting is registered.

Two-thirds of the 91,000 absentee ballots in Jefferson County, Colo., have a typographical error that experts say could lead to a court challenge of election results.

The ballots tell voters to "mail by Saturday, Nov. 5." But Saturday was Nov. 2; Tuesday, Election Day, is Nov. 5. Ballots mailed on Nov. 5 will arrive too late to be counted.

The error could open the door for the losing candidate to contest the outcome of especially close races, such as the contest between Republican Sen. Wayne Allard and his Democrat challenger Tom Strickland.

In Cherry Hill, N.J., a computer glitch caused voting machines to malfunction in about three-quarters of the township's 46 voting districts. Some voters had to use paper ballots while repairs were taking place.

In Indiana, Democratic Rep. Julia Carson, in a tight race for a fourth term, came to the polls early to vote, but her machine broke down when she pulled the lever.

Election officials in Delaware are worried there might be some confusion among voters because of this year's redistricting, which shifted thousands of voters into new districts or precincts.

Most Missouri voters were greeted by rainy weather Tuesday morning, and the electricity was out at 6 a.m. At scheduled poll openings in the rural town of Vienna, some voters were turned away at the courthouse. People began voting by flashlight around 6:30 a.m.

Voters casting ballots for state treasurer in Manchester, Conn., were given the choice Tuesday morning of Republican Ross Garber or Democrat Deniss Nappier. The problem is, the Democratic incumbent's name is Denise Nappier.

The secretary of the state's office said Nappier's name was misspelled on all the voting machines in the city, but was spelled correctly on a sample ballot the town sent to the state.

"We're not quite sure what happened there," said Larry Perosino, a spokesman for the secretary of the state.

The Justice Department announced it was sending 324 federal observers and 108 Justice Department personnel to 26 counties in 14 states to monitor the general election.

Fox News' Carl Cameron and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Arkansas Times Blog Rallies on HB1360

2005-04-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

http://www.arktimes.com/Weblogs/WeblogItemDetail.aspx?WebLogItemID=6d6117f0-25e8-49e5-a1cd-6e54215170f3&WeblogID=dabe8285-8214-4a72-ae7c-7ed16bb5ed5b&type=0&method=0

AR Times Blog
Back to Weblog

Monday, February 21, 2005 - 2:35:08 PM
A piece of good news

The House did do something right for a change. It passed and sent to the Senate HB 1360 to provide a paper trail of voting on electronic voting machines.

The Hutchinson Bros., front and center on all the God squad legislation, were in the tiny number of reps who didn't vote for this bill, which passed 79-6. Empty symbolism, calculated for political advantage, is their stock in trade. Nuts and bolts good government -- in the form of honest, verifiable voting -- they have no interest in.

NOTED: Lisa Burks of Conway, a tireless advocate for voting accountability, wants the Senate to delete an amendment that exempts seven counties from providing paper trails -- Union, Columbia, Ouachita, Pulaski, Faulkner, Perry and Conway
Add Comments

Comments and Responses

Yeas: 79

Abernathy Adams Adcock Berry Blair Blount

Bond Borhauer Bradford Burris Chesterfield Clemons

Cook Cooper Cowling Creekmore Davenport Davis

Dobbins Dunn Edwards Elliott D. Evans L. Evans

Everett Fite Flowers George Glidewell Goss

Green Hardwick Hardy Harris Jackson Jeffrey

D. Johnson J. Johnson Kidd Lamoureux Lewellen Mack

Mahony Maloch J. Martin M. Martin Matayo Mathis

Maxwell McDaniel Medley Nichols Norton Ormond

Overbey Pate Petrus Pickett Prater Pyle

Ragland Rainey Roebuck Rogers Rosenbaum Sample

Saunders Schulte L. Smith Sullivan Sumpter Thomason

Thompson Thyer Verkamp Walters Wells Wills

Wood

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nays: 6

Boyd Bright Dangeau J. Hutchinson Key Pace

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Present: 2

T. Hutchinson Pritchard

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not Voting: 13

Anderson Bolin Childers Dickinson Harrelson Kenney

Ledbetter Rankin Reep Scroggin Mr. Speaker Willis

Wyatt

    Posted : DemocracyDem 2/21/2005

Considering that the Dim Twins have no moral compass when it comes to anything honest, remember Dim Twin Tim and his residency problems. “I lived in that duplex 2-5 days every week” – come to find out – while “living there” for two consecutive months not one gallon of water was used – explain that! More, Dim Twin Jer – had a similar residency problem, it’s just that Huckabee bailed him out by moving the election date back to keep him compliant. The Dim Twins want no accountability, particularly in their doings and obviously having a verified paper trail does not appeal to their warped self and party interests in assuring that voting stays honest. It is sad that these two “morally courageous ”, “politically ambitious lions” for the religious right have in 6 short weeks put into serious question what was at one time a fine political name in Arkansas. Daddy and Uncle Asa must be proud. To hell with good government, what is in it for our agendas and us? (Dim Twins – February 21, 2005)     Posted : 2/21/2005

This is needed KUDOS to the GOOD House Members who see this as VERY IMPORTANT a fair Clean vote is just what some in arkansas don't want its evident . we must make sure this passes the SENATE..........     Posted : RLR 2/21/2005

What is that now? God 100, the State of Arkansas 1? Feeling a little left behind here as a taxpayer and resident.     Posted : NWAdem 2/21/2005

My understanding was that the Democrat Secretary of State was against this bill because it would mean that some precincts would not receive money from HAVA. I am curious as to what agenda opposing this bill would help?     Posted : dimtwin1 2/21/2005

ARKANSAS BLOG: Good question. We'd be curious about the answer. (And thanks for reading.)    2/21/2005

The "Democrat Secretary of State" can be against it, but the Legislature got it right. If some precincts are in jeopardy of not getting any HAVA funding, then fix it - not having a verifiable paper trail at the ballot box is "bad business" for the state and every voter. Daniels is a smart guy and he'll find a way to make sure that HAVA funding will be available to all. After all - today it's the law!     Posted : 2/21/2005

The "Democrat Secretary of State" was able to add an amendment allow those counties currently using electronic voting machines without a paper trail to continue to do so. Voters in Pulaski and some other large counties will not get to verify their vote thanks to Janet Miller and company in the SOS's office. She recently sent out an email complaining that someone said she was opposed to verified paper trail. She says she wasn't opposed, but she never has said one good thing about it. In fact, she has made serveral statements to the press raising questions about having a paper trail. She also tried to claim requiring such a paper trail would cost the counties millions of extra dollars since they only have 18 million. This is strange since I have a ADG article in which she said the machines they wanted would cost 26 million. Something doesn't add up here folks. People are expressing their thoughts as to why she seemed to want to derail this. Apparently a particular company she likes doesn't have a verified paper trail machine. Really makes me and others wonder.....     Posted : 2/21/2005

I am responding to the recent inquiry of why the current "Democratic Secretary of State" and his deputy of elections oppose HB 1360. Hey man, this is a no-brainer - follow the money! The additon of the printer requirement by HB 1360 will cut into the profit margin of any company winning the contract. It's no secret around the Capitol that one of the conditions for winning the voting machine contract is that a certain lobbyist, who is also a convicted felon, and currently employed by Ron Fuller Enterprises, must be hired by the company as part of the deal. Additionally, it's not much of a stretch to predict the current Secretary of State will not seek office next time and become a highly paid consultant to this certain lobbyist. After all, he would be the "expert" on election law and voting machine needs. And could somebody explain to me why the SOS elections deputy and the head groundskeeper are poised to make more than the SOS legal counsel who is the only real expert in that office?

Don't forget that the current SOS was forced to resign from the Labor Dept for misuse of State funds and other questionable activities. Plus for over the last 20 years the SOS has been a close confidant of Nick Wilson - who better to learn from on how to make big bucks off the State. Remember - always follow the money.     Posted : 2/22/2005

ARK. BLOG: Interesting, though we'll reserve judgment having no idea about any of this. But we can contribute a response we got from Rep. Jeremy Hutchinson, explaining his lonely opposition to the bill:

"I honestly have developed somewhat of a friendship with Charlie [Daniels] and some of his staff. I know that it's hard for you to believe that some Democrats like me personally but it's true. I happened to be in committee when they raised concerns about the funding. We as Republicans should want this more than anybody since 72 or so of the courthouses are Democrat, but if the SOS says we can't pay for it without depriving some counties of electronic polling machines than I will trust the SOS whose job it is to administer elections."

   2/22/2005

A comment re: J. Hutchinson

- so you voted against a bill that would require a paper trail for all elections...because we couldn't pay for it? Hmm? When has that ever stopped our leg from doing the right or in many cases the wrong thing. Case in point - HB1012 - sponsored by guess? J. Hutchinson - this bill will require the State police to fund training for state officers to become the immigration police. In the body of the bill it asks for reimbursement from Homeland Security for those costs. Every heard of an "unfunded mandate" - you know where you are promised the money from the feds and don't get it. See state education and health care for a detailed explaination. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Daniels and using the cover of not being able to fund, as reason to vote no, is cowardly and it is shallow - 79 got it right and the 6 no's are feeling the heat and trying to look for cover. Won't work here!     Posted : 2/22/2005

ARK. BLOG: Sec. of State Charlie Daniels' office called to say they have seen these comments and want to "set the record straight."

Daniels supports HB 1360. He was concerned about some of the funding problems, but he has never been opposed to the concept or its implementation.    2/22/2005

The Times is right, I absolutely want the amendment stricken and the bill remanded to the House, and have been very vocal about this to the Senate. To quote Verified Voting.org "it is absurd to have paper receipts in some AR counties and not all, what gives?" If we are going to do this, let's do it right.

All Arkansas voters should be able to verify their votes, not all but the ones in seven counties. And adding the paper won't cost as much to the counties as they have been led to believe. There are less expensive machines on the market that come equipped with paper/printer/disabled voter devices integrated on the machine. Accupoll is one of them. Accupoll quoted me machine prices at $3000 each in bulk. Since we can't get an exact number of machines that will be purchased (we've asked), let's use this example. 4400 machines x $3000 = $13.2 mil, 2000 machines would be 6 mil. That's well under the $18 million the state has allotted to spend, leaving some for election management pc's etc. Furthermore, some of the $7 million they've alloted for voter education can be trimmed down and added to the $18 million for machine purchase.

According to the list of voting machines in the counties that we obtained, we totaled roughly 811 machines used in the 75 AR counties. 4400 machines may be a highly inflated estimate.

Although I don't endorse any vendor, I'm using this one as an example of how this is doable. I do like some of their machine features, the costs, the paper/printer/audio device and the prevention of undervotes. AR has an enormous amount of undervotes. That undervote prevention coud make a big difference in the vote count as this machine highlights the screen and tells the voter if they have failed to vote. This machine also prevents multiple voting.

Urge your Senators to strike the amendment and remand the bill to the House. Then urge the House to vote YEA to 1360 sans the amendment. Let's work to get ALL machines equipped with a paper record of the vote and see if we can't get our elections cleaned up and counted accurately.

http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ Link to the Ledge. Let them hear from you.

Lisa Burks

National Coalition for Verified Voting

Arkansas Headquarters     Posted : Lisa Burks 2/22/2005

What is amazing to me is that the SOS's office doesn't know how many machines are needed in the state, yet they told a legislative committee that it would cost 18 million. How can you know the cost if you don't know how many machines are even needed? Also, why did they say it would cost 26 million for the optical scan machines, and now it's 18 million. As Lisa Burk's comments show, the numbers do not add up. VVPT machines can be bought for much less than 18 million if you bother the call around to other vendors.

Legislators AND REPORTERS need to ask these questions of the SOS's office

:

How many machines need to be bought? (When asked by a voter, SOS's office in an email said they didn't know.)

What vendors have been contacted for bulk purchase prices?

What are the prices per VVPT and non-VVPT machine for the various vendors?

These have to be answered before the SOS' office can honestly claim we don't have enough money. By the way, if you say we can't afford to have VVPT machines when you don't really know that to be the case, I'd also say you are opposing verified paper trail machines. It's interesting that the SOS's office claims they don't oppose the bill yet Hutchinson and others voted against it based on the SOS's made up cost estimates. What other purpose were these inflated figures for but to increase opposition to the bill.

As for the previous post about some sort of deal with Ron Fuller, wasn't he the guy that got us in the contract over ASSIS that cost us about 60 million dollars? How much money will be made off this 18 million by similar "consultants?" Under Arkansas law current SOS officials could be awarded lucrative consulting contracts after they leave their current positions, and nobody would ever know. Legislators AND REPORTERS need to wake up and start asking some hard questions here.     Posted : DemocracyDem 2/22/2005

I really liked the post pointing out that the SOS claimed a gigantic figure for the cost of paper ballots without saying how many machines were to be purchased.

Someone once told me this about paperless electronic voting -

Only a crook would want paperless voting.

Aside from crookery, these paperless touchscreen machines are a scam.

The Help America Vote Act was designed by the voting machine vendors.

The only thing the EAC has done is hand out gigantic sums of money to states to buy machines, while saying that it does not have the funding to set standards and testing for the voting machines.

Some of these "brand new" machines count backwards after they reach a certain number of votes, as happened in North Carolina and in Florida.

For a taste of what paperless voting can bring you, go to www.ncvoter.net and see our 2004 news page.

    Posted : NC Voter 2/22/2005

I have been amazed at the response that HB 1360 has generated. Everyone knows this is the right thing to do – so why the opposition? This has made me curious so I attempted to do some research on my own. If you haven’t seen the current budget for the Secretary of State, you might find it interesting. What I have been able to find out is that included in the Secretary of State’s budget (HB 1271 passed by the Senate yesterday, 34-0, and is on the way to the Governor to be signed into law) is over $26.8 million allotted to HAVA. Part of this amount includes 4 salaried positions ranging from $73,000 to $49,000. I could not find out what these positions entail, or what their requirements were to implement HAVA. However, what I did learn was that Chuck Daniels, son of the Secretary of State, and James Miller, the Secretary’s personal driver, are in two of those positions.

What is going on here?

· The Secretary of State does not know whether they have $18 million or $26 million.

· After two years they can’t tell us how many voting machines they need or how much they will cost.

· How much HAVA money has been spent so far and for what?

· Inflated voting machine numbers and costs.

· Favoritism for certain vendors and side deals with shady lobbyists.

· Family members being paid from federal funds.

Where does this stop? No wonder they won’t provide a detailed accounting of HAVA funds. DemocracyDem was right – LEGISLATORS and REPORTERS need to wake up and ask some hard questions.

    Posted : 2/23/2005

© Copyright 2004-05. Arkansas Times. All Rights Reserved.

Top 10 Reasons For Paper Ballots on Evoting Machines

2005-04-03T20:30:00.000-07:00

NATIONAL COALITION FOR VERIFIED VOTING (NCVV)
ARKANSAS HEADQUARTERS

TOP 10 REASONS FOR PAPER BALLOTS ON EVOTING MACHINES

1. EVOTING MACHINES ARE NOT RELIABLE. Electronic voting machines have broken down, frozen up, mistabulated votes, issued 'ghost votes', and even subtracted votes across the nation. There are thousands of examples of machines failure. These reports are far too numerous to ignore and show a serious problem regarding the functionality of electronic voting machines. See votersunite.org for more information.

2. EVOTING MACHINES NOT VIRUS/HACKER PROOF. Many of our nation's vote tabulations are transmitted on central vote tabulators (which are just laptop comupters) via the internet on Windows operating systems. Many other evoting machines are connected to the Internet separately. There are currently over 680,000 viruses, worms and trojan horse viruses of which many open ports allowing hackers in via remote access on Windows Operating Systems. The internet is simply too unsecured to place vulnerable votes on this system. Two vendors were found to have stored vote totals unsecured on the internet. Transmitting the vote totals via wireless means is just as insecure. Wireless phones can get viruses, e.g. Nokia and wireless systems have been hacked. e.g. T-Mobile.

3. PROGRAMMING 'SOURCE CODE' IS SECRET. The programming code or source code gives the machines their instructions. The 'source codes' or programming by the vendor is 'proprietary' and owned solely by the vendor. These programming codes cannot be examined by local election officials. There are currently machines used in actual elections with flawed source code that has not been repaired by the vendor even though they are aware of the flaw. e.g. FL and AR. A former NASA computer scientist testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Dec. 2004 that a 'flag' could be programmed in the source code, causing the vote count to be flipped to the other candidate. There is no way to insure the integrity of the programming, or to insure that honest programming mistakes are not made.

4. VOTES CAST RUN RISK OF NOT BEING COUNTED. There is no way to assure that the vote cast is actually the vote that is recorded in the data cartridge inside the machine.
For example, the touchscreen could show Candidate X, the paper receipt could show Candidate X and the data cartridge shows the vote was actually cast for Candidate Y. Just as bad are the instances of machines 'flipping' the vote and giving the incorrect totals to another candidate. This occurs frequently on both optical scanners and touchscreens. There is no way to verify the vote was cast correctly.

5. THE VOTE IN DATA CARTRIDGE IS 'CERTIFIED' BY ITA'S. ITA's or Independent Testing Authorities are certifying the vote count in secret. Wyle Labs, one of the ITA's is the very same lab that certified one well known vendor's machines that were later found by the Johns Hopkins Computer Security report to be ' seriously and significantly flawed'. How do we know these ITA's are trustworthy? We don't.

6. THE MACHINES ARE PROGRAMMED BY THE VENDORS. They are only 'configured' locally by the election officials, with local election data entered by officials. Votes could possibly be pre-programmed before the election or a simple mistake in programming could occur. e.g. Texas 2002, in three races the vote totals for three different candidates were exactly the same, 18,181. In 2004, North Carolina experienced similar coincidences - with a Senatorial candidate (D) and Presidential candidate (R) receiving the same number of votes: 177,324. Is this programming error, or is this coincidence? Coincidence is unlikely.

7. 'SMART CARDS' ALLOW MULTIPLE VOTES. This is another startling discovery stated the in Johns Hopkins Computer Security Report. In Arkansas, during a local county demonstration involving touchscreen voting machines
the commissioner involved in the voting machine demonstration was allowed to vote twice with the 'smart card'. During the 30 minute demonstration, the touchscreens also failed to operate twice. In 2004 a 'smart card' containing votes had to be sent to Canada in order to extract the vote totals, as local election officials could not extract them , nor did they receive needed technical assistance to do so. How do we know the votes extracted from Canada were correct? We don't. American vote totals have no business being sent to Canada or any other country for that matter.

8. MEMORY ON VOTING MACHINES TOO SMALL. In both N. Carolina and Florida 2004, the optical scan voting machines began to SUBTRACT votes upon reaching the magic number 37,767. Voting machines are supposed to add votes, never subtract them. In North Carolina, on vendor indicated the memory capacity was 10,500 votes on the touchscreen machine. In reality, the machine memory could only hold 3,005 votes resulting in 4,438 votes that were simply lost.

9. MACHINE CALIBRATION 'IFFY' AT BEST. Untrained election officials, or unscrupulous individuals can easily mis-calibrate the touchscreen settings causing the vote for the candidate touched on the screen to be cast for the opposite candidate. This is machine failure and involves human error factor as well. Voters are not educated about the machine calibration, and are not aware they can request to see the screen 'test' to insure the electronic ballot loads properly and the screen highlights the correct candidate prior to casting their vote. Another troubling aspect of touchscreen voting includes inserting a 'triggering mechanism' into the code/calibration in which the voter placing their fingers in a certain combination on the screen could cause the machine to flip the vote to the other candidate.

10. MACHINES LOSE ELECTION DATA. The Republican gubernatorial race in Florida during the 2002 election completely disappeared, removing any record of the vote count. There was no paper record of the election to use as a backup when this occurred. It was discovered a year later that this was a result of a software flaw or 'bug'. The bug also caused the machines to count votes from machines than were not used in the precincts, and were in fact locked away in a warehouse. The vendor had been aware of this software bug for at least one year, has made no effort to repair it and continues to sell these machines and software to the states. In 2005, it was further discovered that the software bug was responsible for the machines not counting votes in the past six FL elections.

SUMMATION: Electronic voting machines have been touted to be easy to use, giving quick election results with no mechanical breakdowns. This is simply not the case. These electronic voting machines have proven to incorrectly tally votes, cost counties more money, take longer to complete elections and cost states millions in recounts (when they can perform one). These are just some of the many reasons why having a paper ballot is a necessity. It is imperative that these machines be equipped with paper ballot (vvpb) audit capacity to insure that every vote cast on them is in fact cast, counted and can be recounted if necessary. Paper ballots/receipts on these unreliable machines will not fix this broken system, however at the very least an audit of the election can be performed to see if the receipts match the machine totals.

*We haven't covered maintenance or repair. Replacement batteries can cost in upwards of $100,000 for 6 -8 batteries. e.g Colorado. What county can afford that expense?

NCVV Contact Information:

Lisa Burks
National Coordinator
National Coalition for Verified Voting (NCVV)
Arkansas Headquarters
lburks@conwaycorp.net

Voters Registered on Incorrect Forms Couldn't Vote

2005-04-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

___ KATV Interact Morning Arkansas Arkansans Take Advantage of Early Voting Thursday October 21, 2004 5:42pm Reporter: Pamela Smith Posted By: Tony Tabor Little Rock -

With just 12-days left until the presidential election, several arkansans are deciding to make their vote count early. Reaction is mixed for some who either say it's been smooth sailing or a challenge, depending on where you went to cast your ballot. They were lining up by the dozens at the Pulaski County Courthouse, one of a hand-full of early voting sites. "It’s obviously much easier, more convenient for most of the people." "It’s working out perfectly. I didn't want to wait until the second in line for hours, so I decided to come out and get it over."

It took about 15-20 minutes for most, but those were the success stories. Not the same reports elsewhere. "I heard out west it was standing room all the way around the block, but here it was great." Mark Leverett, part of a non-profit, non-partisan organization working to ensure the rights of all voters, says some have already felt disenfranchised because they registered on the wrong forms, dated 2003.

"We don't want to happen what happened in the year 2000 because of an error that's not their fault." Leverett says between Pulaski and Jefferson counties, they've taken more than 500 such complaints. The organization urges you to contact your county clerk's office if you have problems or you can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE. » Find More Articles Related To This One Copyright 2004 KATV, LLC

________

NCVV Footnote: Voters should have been allowed to vote if they registered on older registration forms. Why? The newer ones were printed up to use with the statewide voter registration database system. That was not purchased until 2005. A waiver or extension was filed in 2003 to delay the implementation of the new database system. The new forms were not needed. The old ones should have been accepted.

Misprogrammed Computer Chip in Caroll County

2005-04-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

Carroll Co.

A misprogrammed computer chip 'skewed' the vote results for JP candidates.

Excerpt: "BERRYVILLE -- Election results were not certified Monday as planned, after a computer glitch was discovered that skewed results from the JP District 2 race between Rocky Whitely and Duane Coatney. The glitch was discovered by Carroll County Election Commission members when they met to certify election results Monday at the Berryville courthouse.
It is believed that the programming alignment was out of kilter, as provided by Election Systems and Software, the company that programs computer chips to read the local ballots.As a result, ballots for the JP District 2 race will either be hand counted, or re-run through the optical scanner machine once the correct computer chip is provided. http://www.greenforesttribune.com/articles/2004/11/10/news/s1.txt"

Chronology of AR Voting Problems Since 2000

2005-04-03T20:19:00.000-07:00

AR Voting Problems since 2000

Below is a compilation of just a few problems that Arkansas has experienced on electronic voting machines since 2000. These instances were discovered during my research on AR problems. Both touchscreen DRE's and optical scanners have brought some serious anomalies and miscounts into the public eye in our state. I also am adding some other voting problems that have occurred. The machines have been fraught with problems and most election officials still will say that our elections went *smoothly*.

November, 2000

Representative Vic Snyder had many of his votes cast for his opponent on touchscreens made by ES&S. The iVotronics in Pulaskii Co. were miscalibrated when election data was set up. When voters touched the screen to cast a vote for Vic Snyder, the screen lit up for his opponent. It is impossible to say how many of Vic's votes went to his opponent prior to this being reported and the machines recalibrated by local election officials. Recalibration is a machine failure.

November 2002

Pulaski Co. ran out of 100,000 ballots disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. A lawsuit was filed by the Democratic Party to keep the polls open late in the effort to get the ballots to the precincts for the voters. The GOP countered the motion and took it to the Supreme Court, who threw it out and ordered the polls closed on time. I refer to this as the 2002 PC Ballot Debacle. The ballots that were available were missing candidate names, including the Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor, Ron Sheffield. In Jefferson County, three thousand voters were intimidated by poll watchers for the GOP and discouraged from voting. I was unable to find any articles or record of voting machine problems from 2002. However, the same machines were used. *Note, many AR ballots are printed by ES&S in Omaha, NE. Accenture software printed the poll books that sent voters all over Pulaski and other counties to incorrect polling places.

May, 2004 (AR Preferential Primary)

A meltdown occurred with voting machines during the AR primary. Problems as follows: misprogrammed computer chips in optical scanners in Fulton, Sevier and Craighead Co's resulting in hand recounts, optical scanners would not scan the ballots due to swelling from humidity - this resulted in hand recounts in 10+ counties, machines froze and wouldn't operate, software printing the voter books froze machines and would not print the pollbooks, delaying early voting in at least 10 counties. Candidates names left off ballots in Jefferson County, lawsuit filed and dismissed there. ES&S printed the St. Francis Co. ballots and delivered them 7 days late delaying early voting by 1 week. Also in St. Francis Co. the optical scanners failed to register any votes for Republican candidates in the Presidential and US Senate races. A hand recount was done and a total of 12 votes were discovered to have been cast. "Phantom votes" appeared in Prairie Co. in which more votes were shown cast than registered voters on the machines. Pollbooks printed by Accenture software, which froze and wouldn't print the books, left hundreds of voter names off the books and caused delays to early voting in 10 counties. The Fulton Co. clerk refused to pay ES&S for the faulty computer chip, but was forced to pay for it, even though it was misprogrammed. Sevier Co. also had ballot design problems as the local printer's employee failed to print the bar codes on the actual ballots, not the test ballots, resulting in the machines failing to scan the ballots for votes. The employee was later fired. But were the votes counted? *there is no penalty under AR law for delaying early voting.

November, 2004

Pike Co. a 'sensor' problem with the ES&S optical scanner forced an ES&S technician to be flown in from Dallas to repair the machine. The technician told the clerk the machines were fixed. Scripps Howard News Service survey discovered that 690 votes for president were lost on the machines - after the machines were reported to have been fixed by the technician. By the time this was discovered it was too late for the county clerk to perform a hand recount. As a result, the almost 700 votes were still lost.

Crittenden Co. optical scanners did not count 1 in every 10 votes cast for president according to the Scripps Howard News report. Employees report they use Sequoia machines there. Crittenden Co. also had ballot design problems. Reportedly county employees designed their ballot with no 'bubble' beside the vice presidential candidates names and all federal candidates on one side, county and state candidates on the other. The ballot designers placed one bubble for the grouping of candidates. Voters were confused and placed bubbles by every candidate's name, and voted for different parties unknowingly, this caused many overvotes- which are not counted. County election officials immediately faulted the voters and stated their ballot design was excellent.

Pulaski Co. vote totals did not match, resulting in their certification being amended. Excerpt: "Ours is generated off of the voting system," Inman said. ES&S iVotronic touchscreens are used there with known software bugs that tell the machines to garble the vote data and delete memory areas full of vote counts. Election officials there were informed of this problem in July, and used the machines anyway. See www.votersunite.org/info/auditbug.asp . Candidate Dawn Creekmore was declared the loser in the state representative race discovering after that her vote count had been flipped, giving her opponent Penny Kemp the win. Ms. Creekmore was astute enough to have gotten her totals from the precincts in her district, and reported that her vote totals were reversed to the Secretary of State, thereby changing her to the winner in that race. Excerpt: State Rep.-elect Dawn Creekmore, D-Hensley, said she alerted the secretary of state to a problem in how Pulaski County votes were recorded in her race against Republican opponent Penny Kemp of Shannon Hills.

The secretary of state’s Web site showed Creekmore losing in Pulaski County with 659 votes to Kemp’s 1,305. Instead, Creekmore said, those results should be reversed. "I drove around and got the results," Creekmore said. "I knew them. Then we came home and saw the numbers on TV and the numbers were the exact opposite." The county’s Web site show’s Creekmore receiving 1,327 votes in Pulaski County and Kemp receiving 637.

Pulaski Co: August 2004: The Pulaski County Election Commission redistricted three of the oldest, largest African American polling precincts, closing them and moving thousands of elderly voters with no vehicles to the IMAX theatre across town. A brouhaha ensued, with State Rep. Linda Chesterfield, St. Senator Tracy Steele, and the National Coalition for Verified Voting addressing a public hearing demanding their precincts be restored. The efforts were successful, and these elderly voters won their fight against possible disenfranchisement. The election commission was also advised by me regarding the problems with the software used on their voting machines that were discovered in July, 2004.

Carroll Co. A misprogrammed computer chip 'skewed' the vote results for JP candidates. Excerpt: "BERRYVILLE -- Election results were not certified Monday as planned, after a computer glitch was discovered that skewed results from the JP District 2 race between Rocky Whitely and Duane Coatney. The glitch was discovered by Carroll County Election Commission members when they met to certify election results Monday at the Berryville courthouse.
It is believed that the programming alignment was out of kilter, as provided by Election Systems and Software, the company that programs computer chips to read the local ballots.As a result, ballots for the JP District 2 race will either be hand counted, or re-run through the optical scanner machine once the correct computer chip is provided. http://www.greenforesttribune.com/articles/2004/11/10/news/s1.txt"

www.votersunite.org.

Employee Says Machines Have Error Rate

2005-04-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

NCVV: We've included this WA article becuase it describes exactly how optical scanners can mistabulate votes. Read on.

This document was modified last on Dec 02, 2004 - 11:53:44 PST.

Errors in Skagit vote count point to statewide problem
By JAMES GELUSO

Mistakes by counting machines could affect outcome of election
The machines used by Skagit County to tally votes made at least 36 mistakes in the count for the governor's race, which was decided by just 42 votes statewide.

It's impossible to tell whether some of the mistakes occurred on the first or the second count, according to county election officials.

The race between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire was so close that there was an automatic machine recount of the votes.

The recount narrowed the gap even further, to the point where the standard error rate of the machines used by Skagit and other counties could affect the outcome of the governor's race.

Skagit County uses optical-scan ballots, as do most of Washington's 39 counties. Errors of a similar scale throughout the state would mean that the count's margin of error substantially exceeds the narrow gap produced in the recount.

Rossi was officially declared governor-elect on Tuesday, when Secretary of State Sam Reed certified the election results. State law required an automatic recount, by machine, because the original margin of victory for Rossi was less than one-half of one percent. Had it been less than 150 votes, a hand recount would have been mandatory.

The recount narrowed Rossi's margin to just 42 votes, but if either party seeks a recount by hand, they will have to pay for it. Both campaigns have indicated they will announce their plans for a possible hand count on Friday.

Errors in Skagit County's system raise the possibility that neither the original count nor the recount were accurate.

So it's possible that more people voted for Gregoire than voted for Rossi - or that Rossi really won by a larger margin.

In Skagit County, errors occurred when the machines either counted a ballot twice in the first count, or missed counting a ballot in the second count, said Skagit County Elections Supervisor Erika Kubischta.

It's impossible to tell which happened in each case, but the result is the same - a candidate getting one less vote in the second count than in the first. It happened 13 times to Rossi and 19 times to Gregoire.

In four more cases, the number of ballots counted in a precinct decreased, but the number of votes received by each candidate didn't change.

The differences are detectable only when the precinct-by-precinct vote counts are analyzed. A review of the results by the Skagit Valley Herald found the 36 mistakes, as well as the possibility for many more.

In all, the first and second counts matched in only 38 of the county's 113 voting precincts. (The county has 116 precincts, but two have no voters and one has only one voter, who is given a ballot from an adjacent precinct to protect her privacy.)

The mistakes are caused when the machine jams, Kubischta said. The machine takes ballots from a stack, moves them across a scanner, and then sends them around a drum to a pile at the bottom of the machine. That's done at such a high speed that the ballots often get jammed in the machine - especially absentee ballots, which have been folded. Absentees make up 58 percent of the ballots cast.

When the machine jams, it displays an error message, Kubischta said, instructing the operator to either re-scan the ballot because it wasn't counted, or to remove the ballot because it was counted before the jam.

But sometimes the machine gets it wrong. Maybe two ballots got fed in and it only recognized one. Maybe it counted a ballot but didn't think it did. It's hard to say exactly what went wrong, only that the machine isn't perfect.

Kubischta said she was told by Election Systems and Software, the machine's Nebraska-based manufacturer, that even when all the ballots are flat, the machines have an error rate of about one for every 10,000 ovals it must read.

With four ovals in the governor race - for Rossi, Gregoire, Libertarian Ruth Bennett and write-ins - that means one per 2,500 ballots. Skagit County had 52,724 ballots counted, which means about 21 mistakes can be expected in each count of the governor race.

That's not normally enough to make a difference, but the Washington governor's race is believed to be the closest race of its magnitude in American history.

There might be more mistakes that the machines made, but differences between the first count and the recount make it impossible to prove they happened.

Aside from the mistakes, there were two reasons for differences between the first count and the recount:

n In 57 precincts, more ballots were counted the second time than the first time. Most of those are probably because a batch of ballots wasn't counted the first time after an election worker put them in the wrong basket.

n Another 20 votes were added to the mix through the enhancement process. On the second count, any ballot with no vote for governor caused the counting machine to stop. Out of 944 such ballots, 20 were considered to have votes that were too light for the machine, and election workers darkened the oval.

A mistake that resulted in a higher count for a candidate could be one of those factors. Or it could be a machine mistake - a vote missed on the first count, or counted twice on the second count. Elections workers didn't keep proper records during the first count, Kubischta admitted, so it's unknown exactly how many of those ballots were missed.

Kubischta was out of state during most of the first count due to a family emergency, so the counting and record-keeping was done without her supervision.

If a hand recount is done in the county, each precinct will be essentially counted twice. A hand recount involves separating the ballots in each precinct into stacks by candidate, then having two people count each stack until they come up with the same number.

The machines counted each precinct twice. And in two-thirds of the precincts, the machines came up with different numbers.

Kubischta said the current machines will be replaced before next fall's elections. The manufacturer doesn't plan to have the county's current machines certified for compliance with federal standards that will go into effect in 2006, so Skagit County will look for new machines early next year. The machine's design will be one of the factors considered, Kubischta said, in an attempt to reduce the number of jam-related errors.

http://skagitvalleyherald.com/articles/2004/12/02/news/news02.prt

James Geluso can be reached at 360-416-2146 or by e-mail at jgeluso@skagitvalleyherald.com

© 2004 Skagit Valley Publishing

Serious 'Bugs' in ES&S Election Software: Affects AR Machines

2005-04-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

Many serious bugs in ES&S election software are finally being revealed, in spite of ES&S' claims that their software is reliable. The latest bugs to surface, just today, affect the data from optical scan machines as well as from iVotronic paperless voting machines. Bugs revealed so far include:

1) March, 2004. Indiana discovers that ES&S has installed uncertified software on the iVotronics in four counties. The reason? The certified version doesn't tabulate the votes correctly.
http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1706282

2) May, 2004. Miami-Dade, Florida. Memos written nearly a year before show that there are serious bugs in ES&S software, and they are probably present in all ES&S counties. They cause the audit log data to be scrambled and fail to account for ballots cast. This is the version ES&S installed in Indiana — knowing full well about the audit bugs that had not yet been publicized.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1084316008117
For a simple description of how these bugs work, see http://www.votersunite.org/info/auditbug.asp .

3) July 9, 2004. More and more bugs in the ES&S election management software are revealed in memos written by Miami-Dade election officials to ES&S over a month ago. The central tabulation machines don't have the capacity to handle all the audit data, they have problems when optical scan information is merged, and they can't reliably accept data passed over the phone lines. ES&S response? Fix the problems yourself by changing your procedures.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9111841.htm

If your county uses ES&S voting equipment, make sure the county officials are aware of this information. How many more bugs are exposed in unpublicized memos to ES&S or still hidden in the software? How many bugs are hidden in the other vendors' software?

Paper ballots are clearly more important than ever.

Thanks!!
~ the VotersUnite team
———————————————
http://www.progressreport.org

IVotronics Fail To Count 44,000 Votes in FL:

VOTING -- FLORIDA TOUCH SCREENS DRAW (MORE) SCRUTINY: Belated public scrutiny of a report on tens of thousands of ballots tossed out for irregularities in Florida's 2002 elections revealed that "the rate of so-called undervotes, or blank or incomplete ballots, in the 2002 gubernatorial election was nearly three times higher in counties using touch-screen machines (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-florida6aug06,1,4223380.story?coll=la-home-nation) as in those with optical scan systems." The report shows "more than 44,000 votes weren't counted (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/9321494.htm) " in the governor's race won by the president's brother, Jeb Bush. Activist groups are calling on Gov. Bush to give voters in touch-screen counties the option of using paper ballots, but so far the governor has refused, even as his own party has been circulating fliers advising constituents to " Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today (http://www.sptimes.com/2004/07/29/State/GOP_flier_questions_n.shtml) ." The Miami Herald reports record numbers of voters may ask for absentee ballots (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9308534.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp) because of suspicions about the touch screen machines.

Daniels Offers Mix of Touchscreen/Optical Scanners to AR Counties

2005-04-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

http://epaper.ardemgaz.com/Default/Client.asp?Enter=true&skin=ArkDaily&Daily=ArDemocrat

Daniels tweaks state voting machine plan
BY MICHAEL R. WICKLINE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Counties would have the option of either installing only touch-screen voting machines or putting optical scan voting equipment in their county with one touch-screen machine per polling site under Secretary of State Charlie Daniels’ latest plan.
On a touch-screen machine, voters vote by touching a screen. On an optical scan machine, voters mark a paper ballot that’s later placed into an optical scan unit that reads the marks and tabulates the votes.
The state’s Help America Vote Planning Committee endorsed Daniels’ plan on Monday without any debate.
Janet Miller, deputy secretary of state for elections and public affairs, said voting machines in Arkansas must comply with the Help America Vote Act by the primary election in May 2006. State officials hope to have all 75 counties’ voting machines comply with the federal law by the end of next year, she said.
Last month, Daniels proposed putting optical scan voting equipment in all of the counties with one touch-screen voting machine at each polling site. That proposal abandoned Daniels’ initial 13-month-old plan to put only touch-screen voting machines in each county.
Forty-eight of Arkansas’ 75 counties use some form of optical scan voting equipment. But some county clerks said last month that they prefer the touch-screen machines to the optical scan machines, although there has been debate in election circles about the security of the touch-screen machines.
Daniels subsequently decided to tweak his plan to give counties the option of either only using the touch-screen machines or the optical scan machines with one touch-screen machine per polling site based on feedback from county officials, Miller said.
"This is a compromise," she said in an interview. "Some want to keep the option of having [touch screen] electronic voting and some wanted paper. We want to give everybody the resources and information to comply with [the Help America Vote Act], but we don’t want to force a financial burden on them if there is another option available to comply with the federal law."
At least one touch-screen machine is required for each polling site for disabled individuals to comply with the Help America Vote Act enacted by Congress in 2002, she said.
County election officials said they are pleased with Daniels’ latest plan.
"I am happy to have that choice," said Susan Inman, election coordinator in Pulaski County.
She said Pulaski County’s optical scan voting equipment is about 10 years old, and "we’re looking at replacing something anyway."
Boone County Clerk Melinda Muhlford said she’s glad that Daniels is giving counties a choice. One of the county election commissioners in Boone County favors the touch-screen machines over optical scan machines partly due to the lower price, she noted.
Miller told the Help America Vote Act planning committee that the state has $17.8 million in federal funds and $712,000 in state funds to purchase new voting machines to comply with the Help America Vote Act.
Additional funds for purchasing the machines would be paid by the counties, she said, although it hasn’t been determined by how much that will cost them.
Purchasing only touch-screen voting machines for each county could cost roughly $21 million, Miller said.
Purchasing the "precinctcount" optical scan voting machines with one touch-screen machine per polling site could cost roughly $26 million and that’s "a high estimate," Miller said.
"We’ll try to negotiate a better price than I’m quoting," Miller said.
Daniels plans to issue a request for proposals for voting equipment manufacturers to bid on this contract.
The "precinct-count" optical scan voting machines allow voters to find out whether they have voted for more than one candidate in a particular race at a polling site, and either correct their mistake or get another ballot. These machines also allow votes to be tabulated at the polling site.
Garland, Pulaski and Sebastian counties have these machines.
Miller said it’s not clear what type of voter education program would be required for counties with "central-count" optical scan voting equipment to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.
"Central count" optical scan equipment doesn’t allow voters to find out whether they voted for more than one candidate in a particular race at the polling site. Votes are tabulated at the county courthouse with this equipment.
Forty-five counties have this type of voting equipment.
In a related development, Miller said the secretary of state’s office on Friday released a request for proposals to overhaul the state’s voter registration list.
The deadline for proposals is Nov. 1, she said. The voter registration list must be upgraded by January 2006 to comply with the Help America Vote Act, she said.

This story was published Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Copyright © 2004, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

ES&S Sells State of IN Software Designed NOT To Tabulate The Vote

2005-04-03T18:51:00.000-07:00

ES&S SELLS INDIANA SOFTWARE DESIGNED NOT TO COUNT THE VOTE

NCVV Note: This software is the nefarious Unity software that instructs machines to ignore votes, and was responsible for votes not being counted in the past six FL elections. Update: AR is voting on these machines in Boone, Pulaski and Faulkner Co.

http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1706282

March 11, 2004
Election Commission Bails Out Voting Machine Maker In Time for May Primary

By Karen Hensel and Loni Smith McKown
I-Team 8

What began as an I-Team 8 investigation into voting technology got hot late Wednesday night. On the grill: Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the maker of touch-screen voting machines used in Indiana and across the nation.

Heated debate about voting machines ignited fireworks Wednesday.

”Am I so damn stupid…that for me to use the word "work," do you understand that to run an election for something to work, it's gotta count the votes?” asked an exasperated election commissioner S. Anthony Long to ES&S executive Ken Carbullido.

Indiana election commissioners were disgusted late Wednesday night with answers to questions about new touch-screen voting systems. “If we could fine you, I'd make the motion now,” said Long. Carbullido replied, “Sir, I stand behind the answer I gave you.” Long said, “It would work. But then you tell your clerks it won't work because it won't tabulate the votes. I don't believe this.”

The I-Team first told you about a conference call last week that panicked four county clerks. They were told the certified software in their new electronic voting machines might not tabulate the votes. We have since found a way to make it work and that's why I was able to answer to you correctly today and say it will work,” said Carbullido.

“When you say we gotta use it, you say we gotta dust it off and find out ways to make it work. Come on!” said Long.

“I just think I was absolutely lied to by your CEO and I'm more than on the slow burn about it. I sat in this room and you all lied to me. You're so derelict in your duties that you can't look at a piece of paper and answer the question? Give me a break,” said Brian Burdick, who also serves on the election commission.

They had come all the way from Omaha with apologies. “We at ES&S made the mistake of loading the wrong version of firmware on their units,” said Rob McGinnis, ES&S.

A version of embedded computer code used by Johnson, Henry and Wayne Counties in November was actually illegal because it had not been approved by the state.

“We've changed our corporate policies and procedures to require thorough reporting of the status of certifications as well as any movement of product from warehouse to customer sites to the field,” said Carbullido.

Three of the panicked clerks wanted to re-use the illegal software they used in November. A fourth clerk with brand-new machines, Vandergurgh County's Marsha Abell, was ready to throw in the towel and return her federal reimbursement money to the state. “I have my check in my folder and I'm willing to give it back to the state and use my punchcards,” she said.

“Bailing you guys out is just beyond distasteful for me,” said Burdick.

The state did bail them out. With reservations, the commission approved use of the illegal software for the May primary. “I don't want any county or the state to be out any more time or effort because of the condition ES&S has put everybody in and I think this is time to put up or shut up,” said Long.

The solution is temporary. The deadline for ES&S to certify software is October first. If the deadline isn't met, the four counties will have one short month to figure out how residents will vote this fall for governor and for president. “I just want to say, I feel sorry for you guys,” said Burdick.

A losing candidate could challenge an election conducted on uncertified equipment. ES&S will put up a $10 million performance bond against any legal expenses or problems that arise. ES&S is still racing the clock to certify new software before the fall election.

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County to Receive Federal Funds for Touchscreen Voting

2005-04-03T18:45:00.000-07:00

NCVV: I've always found it interesting that out of state newspapers contact me for voting information fairly often. Arkansas papers have only contacted me twice in 4 years. Even though the AR Democrat Gazette nor the AR Times have given this issue the coverage it merits, I will give them both a thumbs up for helping us get the paper trail bill passed in AR.

County to receive federal funds for touch-screen voting
Friday, June 18, 2004
By MATT SANDERS Statesman Staff Writer

The federal Election Assistance Commission announced earlier this week that the state of Missouri will be receiving a $45 million grant to overhaul its election operations.

Missouri is one of only 21 states to receive the money, which comes from $2.3 billion the bipartisan federal commission will be distributing this year. The money is being distributed as part of the Help America Vote Act, a piece of legislation well-known to election activists and officials.

The amount of money Stoddard County will receive is not known as of yet, but County Clerk Don White said he has some reservations about how the new regulations attached to the money will affect the county's voting system.

"We might end up having to close down some of our polling places," White said.

The reason: New regulations concerning voters with disabilities.

One of the provisions of the legislation is that each polling place be equipped for voters with disabilities. While this doesn't necessarily require touch-screen machines, according to many voting rights groups, the state has interpreted the law to mean touch-screen machines are required.

"It's a part of the law, and if we had to abide by it, it's going to be a lot of money spent," said White. "The county clerks will have to combine and close precincts. I cannot see how closing precincts is going to help America vote."

The machines are mired in controversy, as activists have brought up a myriad of problems they say plague the systems. Lisa Burks, leader of the Arkansas-based National Coalition for Verified Voting, said there are numerous security issues surrounding the machines.

"These machines are highly susceptible to hackers," said Burks. "Some of the machines are not hooked up to the Internet. However, the main vote tabulations, in many cases, are transmitted over the Internet via Windows operating systems."

The machines that aren't hooked up to the Internet can also be hacked into via wireless means, said Burks.

And the programming codes, she said, are proprietary codes created by the vendor, meaning election officials don't have access to them.

But Spence Jackson, communications director with Secretary of State Matt Blunt's office, said there are safeguards to prevent such things from happening.

"There's something called the Independent Testing Authority that has to certify and review all the machines nationally before they can be verified at the state levels," said Jackson. "A lot of companies are trying to tailor their machines to address those concerns and alleviate the fears a lot of voters have of electronic voting."

Jackson said Blunt has vowed to only certify machines that have a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, allowing voters to make sure they've made the correct vote and aiding recounts if needed. No machines have as of yet been certified through Blunt's office.

However, Burks said the audit trail may not be enough. If the machines are programmed incorrectly, many of them won't tabulate the vote correctly, even though the machine and its printout might show the voter that his or her intended vote was cast, she added.

These changes may not be felt immediately, thought, since the implementation of electronic voting machines isn't expected to be complete in Missouri until 2006.

Other money out of the $45 million will be used for less controversial means, like setting up a statewide database of eligible voters linked to state and local agencies.

"What that database will do is link, in real time, the Secretary of State's office, all 116 local election jurisdiction offices, as well as the state departments of health, revenue and corrections," said Jackson.

The database will alleviate problems seen in Missouri elections in 2000, such as convicted felons voting, duplicate registrations in multiple counties and registering in the names of the deceased.

Other money has also been used to re-train Stoddard County poll workers. A seminar was recently held at Jackson to help educate local workers on important election matters.

As of yet, nothing is set in stone, and White is unsure what will come of the new HAVA rules by the November election.

But he said that Stoddard County's current optical scan system works.

"We have probably got the best election system right now this county's ever had," said White.

http://www.dailystatesman.com/story/1070746.html

Matt Sanders may be reached via email at msanders@dailystatesman.com

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Tangled Web of American Voting

2005-04-03T18:42:00.000-07:00

Article & Essay: The Tangled Web of American Voting

An investigation into the serious election problems that occurred in various state primaries and the behind the scenes difficulties with our voting system.
By Elaine Kitchel

This is a follow-up to Ms. Kitchel's earlier article, Today Indiana, Tomorrow Your State

Tangled does not even begin to describe the messy web made of our voting system. It’s not only tangled; it’s matted, convoluted, and it stinks to high heaven. And dead center in the web is a dangerous little “black box” with a red hourglass on it. The black box is inside each and every voting machine, and it holds the source code for every function of encoding, decoding, identification, authentication, and tallying of votes put into it. And the source code belongs to the two companies which manufacture and sell the electronic voting machines that could be responsible for counting roughly 80% of the votes in November’s election.

What else does the black box hold? Ah, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. In the case of Diebold, which has sold electronic voting machines all over the country, including twenty counties in Ohio, a key state, the box holds a nifty little piece of code that can be opened without a password using Microsoft Access. According to Bev Harris, activist and author of Black Box Voting, this code makes three ledgers. The first ledger is the actual vote and tally. This can be sent off from a precinct to the state’s central election location. But the second ledger can be manipulated to reflect any votes and tallies one wishes. The results from this ledger can be sent instead of the first, with no one being the wiser. It’s so simple, anyone who can read can do it. Now isn’t that handy? No one knows what the third ledger does, except Diebold, and probably ES&S. Read more about this here: Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program.

Another big player in election machines is ES&S. What would you say if you knew that the founders of Diebold and ES&S were brothers? That’s right; Todd and Bob Urosevich are top dogs in each of these companies. Bob Urosevich, the CEO and founder of ES&S, oversaw the development of the software that is now used in his brother’s Diebold machines. I’m betting both have a similar code inside the black boxes. Cozy, isn’t it? Both are Republicans and have influential Republicans Walden O’Dell and Chuck Hagel in the upper reaches of their corporate structures, and these men have promised to “deliver” the election to George Bush. It’s easy to see how that could happen, now that we know what’s in the black boxes. And what’s more, neither company will declare that what comes out of its machines represents the actual vote. Even so, states just keep buying the machines.

Some states have had trial runs of their ES&S/Diebold machines already. In its primaries, California had numerous problems with its Diebolds. Some estimates of failure rates of the machines go as high as twenty-five percent. Many of California’s voters were not able to vote at all. As a result, California’s election oversight committee has decertified the machines and recommended to the state’s Attorney General that Diebold be criminally charged for violation of California’s election law. Diebold is scrambling to repair sections of the code and get re-certified.

Arkansas has some of the same problems. Lisa Burks, an election activist, writes, “Unfortunately Arkansas still uses the ES&S machines sold by the corrupt vendor in our elections. We have had major problems with their optical scanners, including misprogrammed computer chips during our recent May 18th primary.” Even so, some of Arkansas’ machines were “reconditioned” and sold to Florida, where they remain still.

Burks continues to say that there are shenanigans aplenty. Here’s just one. “A local printer I spoke to told me that he was told to print infrared sensitive numbers on the backs of ballots, not by election officials, but by the vendors. ES&S in our case. We have their machines in 55 of our 75 counties. That printer knew I was active on the voting machine issue and asked me why they would have him do such a thing. He said he questioned the infrared numbers being printed on the backs of the ballots, but did it because ‘they told him to.’ He did this for a period of time, did not say how long, then the vendors suddenly told him to stop doing it.” Burks states that she could find no one related to the elections who knew what the infrared numbers were used for.

Remember, in 2002, Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to felony charges that he took bribes, evaded taxes, and accepted kickbacks. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, “Part of the case involved Business Records Corporation, which has now merged to become Election Systems & Software. Arkansas officials said the scheme involved Tom Eschberger, an employee of BRC. Eschberger got immunity from prosecution for his cooperation. Today, he’s a top executive of ES&S.”

And don’t forget Florida. There’s no way to give you a real sense of how messed up Florida is. An entire book would not be enough. But here are a few things to consider:

· DBT On-Line of Boca Raton has now admitted wrongdoing after being sued by the NAACP for violating Floridians’ civil rights in the 2000 election. They have turned over to the NAACP’s lawyers a report indicating that the state, under the supervision of Katharine Harris, ordered the purge of 94,000 voters and, according to the company’s data, no more than 3,000 would have been illegal voters. Most, though not all, of the purged names belonged to black Democrats.
· Sandra Mortham, a Republican, was responsible for bringing ES&S machines into Florida as a lobbyist for the company. The funny thing was, she was also a lobbyist for the Florida Association of Counties, which was purchasing the machines. Mortham has admitted taking kickbacks from ES&S for every machine sold to the Association.
· Ed Kast resigned his post last Tuesday as Florida’s election chief. Kast’s resignation comes as scrutiny of the 2004 election process intensifies, and after some voting machines in the primaries failed to respond to voters’ input.
· Jeb Bush recently signed into law a bill doing away with the witness signature previously required on absentee ballots. Absentee ballot fraud has been an ongoing problem in South Florida, with candidates often buying ballots or stealing them from unsuspecting senior citizens in nursing homes and condominiums. In 1997, a Miami election was overturned for this kind of fraud.

Don’t hold your breath for a fair election in Florida. In fact, don’t hold it for a fair election anywhere. Without a paper trail, votes simply cannot be verified, and that’s what unscrupulous politicians and their accomplices in the voting machine industry are depending on. How hard is it to make a paper trail? Here’s what a Diebold spokesman had to say: “While Diebold is certainly capable of producing receipt printers, we currently have no plans to manufacture receipt printers primarily because our customers haven’t requested it.” Some states are beginning to request it since that statement was made, but not many.

Every voter has the right to expect his vote to be counted. And every voter has the right to make his election officials PROVE that a fair election has taken place in his state. But without a paper trail that verifies each vote, no election official can prove the reliability of the vote. This opens the door for litigation to improve the system. Ed Kast won’t be the only official resigning this year.

So if the picture for a fair election is so bleak, why should you vote? Here are a few reasons:
· Most election officials are decent folk. You may live in a county or precinct where officials take great care and do their jobs. Your vote may get counted.
· If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain. Can you really keep your mouth shut for four more years?
· If you do vote, and your party’s vote is skewed or manipulated, you can help fix the problem by joining in a suit against the offenders. Often, this is the only way to change things.

So why isn’t Kerry worried? Why isn’t he holding his nose? We’ve heard nothing from him on this issue. We know why Bush isn’t complaining. Is John Kerry confident there will be more talented hackers on the Democratic side? Does he know something we don’t? I’m puzzled. Aren’t you?

Here’s John Kerry’s website, where you can find an address if you would like to write to ask him.

Read more about the paperless vote: Count the Vote, as well as Ms. Kitchel's earlier article, Today Indiana, Tomorrow Your State.

Elaine Kitchel lives in Indiana where she is a research scientist. She closely watches the political scene and writes about it, instead of jumping from her 4th floor office window in disgust. You can email Elaine at Elaine@interventionmag.com

Posted Sunday, June 13, 2004

Reside in Faulkner or Pulaski Co? Your Vote's a Crap Shoot

2005-04-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

The election supervisor for Miami Dade County, FL resigned in frustration and in disgrace over yet another discovery that the ES&S iVotronic voting machines failed to count the vote on a gambling initiative. Bad programming code told the machines to ignore the votes. And they did. The problem of the machines ignoring the votes was determined to have affected the last SIX FL elections.

How did this happen? The machine software code is flawed. The software programming code instructs the machines to take votes from non existing memory areas and scramble the vote data. The vendor, ES&S has known about these flaws in the Unity software for well over 2 years and has not fixed the problem. How many times do these machines have to fail before election officials get a clue?

How does this affect AR? We vote on these machines using the same flawed Unity software in Pulaski and Faulkner Co. with no paper record of the vote. Voters: Call Secretary of State Charlie Daniels and demand he throw these faulty machines and their sofware out of AR elections. Secretary Daniels: 501-682-1010. An accurate vote count depends on this.

Lisa Burks
Conway, AR

AR Machines Need Paper Receipts In All Counties

2005-04-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

2 in House say machine votes need receipts
BY MICHAEL R. WICKLINE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Two months after barely winning election, state Rep. Ray Kidd, D-Jonesboro, says he intends to introduce legislation to require touch-screen voting machines to produce a paper receipt for voters to verify their votes and to use in recounts.
Kidd said the receipts would be placed in a box at the polling site so they’d be available in the event of a recount, and voters would be precluded from taking away their receipts.

He’s working on details for the proposed bill with Rep. Denny Sumpter, D-West Memphis, chairman of the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"Denny and I are concerned that we have a paper trail, so if we have a machine failure of some sort or there is some question and we need a re- count, that we have a paper trail," said Kidd, who defeated Republican Byron Holt of Brookland by 16 votes in the Nov. 2 election.

"We are talking about a cashregister-type paper that would record the vote and have a paper trail. We would like the voter to have a chance to look at the vote and change the vote," he said.
Kidd said the legislation will be introduced in the next month or so, and it’ll be designed to restore voters’ confidence in elections.

"The general public as a whole is mad and p***** off and fed up with our elections. They are losing faith," he said in an interview last week at the state Capitol.
This proposed legislation in the 85th General Assembly could influence what type of voting machines Arkansans use in the next several years.

Alaska, California, Ohio, Nevada and Wisconsin have mandates for touch-screen voting machines to produce paper receipts, said Jennie Bowser of the National Conference of State Legislatures. Nevada’s mandate was the only one in effect for last year’s election, she said.

Legislation requiring these machines to produce paper receipts failed in 15 states last year, she said.

In Arkansas, Secretary of State Charlie Daniels has said he wants to give each of the 75 counties the option of using only touch-screen voting machines or optical-scan voting machines with one touchscreen machine per polling site by the May 23, 2006, primary, to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.
With an optical-scan machine, voters mark a paper ballot that’s later placed into an optical-scan unit that reads the marks and tabulates the votes.

The state has $17.8 million in federal funds and $712,000 in state funds to purchase new voting machines to comply with the federal law, according to the secretary of state’s office.

Purchasing only touch-screen machines for polling sites in each county could cost roughly $21 million, and buying optical-scan voting machines with one touchscreen machine per polling site could cost roughly $26 million, although officials in the secretary of state’s office said they hope to get a better deal than that.

Sumpter said the proposed legislation, if enacted, could have an effective date that is after Daniels’ initial purchase of voting machines for counties.

"I am not worried about one [touch-screen ] machine at each polling site. What I am worried about is when we eventually get to a complete DRE [direct recording electronic] voting system and then you really open yourself up to some voter confidence issues," he said.

Touch-screen machines are the most common type of direct recording electronic machine.
Sumpter acknowledges that requiring these touch-screen machines to produce paper receipts will cause administrative problems for election officials.

He said that’s why he and Kidd are trying to work with the secretary of state’s office on the proposed legislation.
Janet Miller, deputy secretary of state for elections and communications, said Daniels wants to see the details of the proposed legislation before taking a position on it.

"From purely an election administration standpoint, there are problems associated with the voter-verified paper audit trail," she said.
"However, from the voters’ standpoint, we are sympathetic to concerns that the folks have of being able to verify the accuracy of their vote and make sure their vote is counted," Miller said.

Miller said adding an attachable printer to these voting machines to produce "a voter-verified paper trail" could lead to paper jams, and she worries about the potential violation of ballot secrecy with these receipts.
Blind voters wouldn’t be able to review these receipts, although the intent of the Help America Vote Act is to allow the blind to be able to vote independently and secretly just like other voters, she said.

Lisa Burks of Conway, national coordinator for the National Coalition for Verified Voting, said these machines are going to break down no matter whether they produce a paper ballot or not.

Voters often lose the secrecy of their ballots when they ask poll workers for help in voting on the touch-screen machines, and blind voters could vote by audio under federal election law, said Burks, who waged an unsuccessful challenge to U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Little Rock in the Democratic primary last year.

Miller said voting equipment manufacturers estimate that purchasing touch-screen machines that produce paper receipts would cost $200 to $400 per machine beyond the initial cost of $3,000 to $3,500 per machine.
"What we certainly don’t want to do is to force an extra financial burden on the counties because we need to be able to help them comply with HAVA [Help America Vote Act] as much as is possible with state and federal money," she said.

Burks said the touch-screen voting machines already are expensive.
"Having the paper ballot [with these machines] is worth any amount of money to make sure the vote is counted because that is the bedrock of our democracy and the Voting Rights Act," she said.

Miller said she hopes the secretary of state’s office is in a position in late March or early April to request proposals from voting equipment manufacturers to provide voting equipment that complies with the federal Help America Vote Act.

That would give the state about a year to make sure each county has compatible equipment by the 2006 primary election, she said.

"If paper is the selected or preferred method of voting, maybe a statewide optical-scan solution is the best choice," Miller said.
Susan Inman, elections director for the Pulaski County Election Commission, said the state’s largest county has used touchscreen machines that don’t produce paper receipts in early voting since 2000.

"It is a matter of trusting the technology or not trusting the technology. If you want paper ballots, just have paper ballots," she said.

http://epaper.ardemgaz.com/Default/Client.asp?Enter=true&skin=ArkDaily&Daily=ArDemocrat

NCVV footnote: HB 1360 was later passed by the House and Senate. But not as it was originally introduced. 1360 passed out of committee after being voted down in the first committee hearing. The SOS office then tacked on an amendment that excluded seven AR counties from the paper requirement. The counties: Pulaski, Faulkner, Ouchita, Perry, Union, Conway, Columbia. AR now has 68 of our 75 counties required to have paper receipts, but disenfranchises seven of our most populace counties. Not good enough. We thank the Legislature for their efforts on HB 1360. We must see to it that all votes in Arkansas are counted, not all but seven counties worth. We thank the Legislature for their efforts on HB 1360.

AR Among Dirty Dozen of Democray over 2000 Vote Totals

2005-04-03T18:23:00.000-07:00

Arkansas among 12 states that did not release official ballot counts in 2000

Votes at risk in some states

By Thomas Hargrove and Michael Collins
Scripps Howard News Service

Call them the dirty dozen of democracy.

Election officials in 12 states did not report how many ballots were cast when they certified 26,349,619 votes for president four years ago, making it impossible to know how many votes were lost because of inaccurate counting machines or other tabulation errors.

Most are still unprepared to check for missing votes this November, increasing the odds that America will face another uncertain presidential election. Experts warn that the mistakes painfully discovered in Florida in 2000 could be repeated.

"This is really embarrassing," said Deforest Soaries Jr., chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission created by Congress to fix Florida-like voting problems. "How can we ever measure the error rate without having the global vote numbers?"

Eleven states did not release official ballot counts in the 2000 presidential race -- Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indiana counted the number of ballots cast, but published the information more than three months after results were certified and well after winning candidates had assumed office.

Texas political activist Madeleine Hervey said the failure to collect that data shows a lack of respect that many election officers have for voters. "They don't give a fig, a flying fig," she said.

Hervey believes her ballot was among an estimated 41,000 votes lost during the 1998 general election in Dallas County because of a computer glitch in the county's electronic voting machines. "My vote got flushed," she said.

Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia reported complete election figures four years ago. There were 80,644,664 ballots cast, but only 79,039,401 presidential votes counted. Much of the 1,605,263-vote difference was caused by inaccurate tabulating equipment, state and local officials agree.

Florida drew the world's spotlight in 2000 when 178,145 ballots didn't register a vote for president, about 2.9 percent of all ballots cast. Election experts suggest that the undervote -- the difference between the numbers of ballots cast and votes counted -- should be investigated whenever it exceeds 2 percent in major elections.

Yet for all of the flaws uncovered in Florida, Sunshine State officials counted the number of ballots cast so that the size of the problem was immediately obvious. Election activists increasingly are worried over what happened to a quarter of the nation's vote in those states that didn't count ballots.

"You'll never know if a patient has a fever if you don't even have a thermometer," said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a nonprofit clearinghouse of election-reform information.

Scripps Howard News Service contacted top election officials in all 12 states, asking for a ballot count from their election archives in an attempt to estimate possible tabulation errors. Only Delaware and Indiana provided a complete accounting for the 2000 election, although officials in three other states said they still hope to eventually provide the data.

"This information is something we've always had internally, but we've never made this into a public record," said Delaware Commissioner of Elections Frank Calio.

Scripps Howard compared the ballots cast against the votes recorded for president four years ago and gave Calio a report showing an above-average undervote in the state's most urban area. New Castle County reported 212,995 presidential votes counted out of 220,871 ballots cast. The apparent difference of 7,876 votes represents an undervote of 3.6 percent, which is worse than Florida's and almost twice the national average.

"I find it difficult to understand the huge undervote in New Castle," Calio said. "That research was eye-opening. We've never had any reports of anything going wrong with our machines. We need to find out what the problem is. We're not going to whitewash this."

Several other states' chief elections officers readily agreed their vote accounting procedures in the past were inadequate.

"We are aware of this now and I am trying to do something about it," said Texas Secretary of State Geoffrey Connor. Members of his staff began "talking about this internally" in April when a Scripps Howard reporter asked why Texas does not count its ballots, Connor said.

Ten states -- Arkansas, Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin -- promised they would try to issue county-by-county ballot counts in November. But most of them have yet to make a successful accounting despite attempts to do so in recent elections.

One state that did present a successful ballot count for the 2002 general election was Maine, where Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky convinced state lawmakers to approve reforms mandating a ballot count in all voting jurisdictions.

"The 2002 general election was the first time we've done this calculation," Gwadosky said. "But our voter turnout tends to spike dramatically on presidential elections. So this November will be our first real test."

According to Gwadosky's first attempt at tracking lost votes, the state issued 511,609 ballots in 2002 and counted 505,190 votes for governor, an undervote of just 1.25 percent. But that apparent undervote was incorrectly reduced by an error from the town of Lisbon, where 1,715 more votes were counted than reported ballots cast.

"Because the total-ballots-cast figure was a new part of the process ... some errors occurred in those tabulations at the local level," said state spokesman Doug Dunbar.

Mississippi officials are still preparing a report comparing the number of votes counted against the number of ballots cast in the 2002 general election, even though the Mississippi legislature mandated that counties begin reporting the data that year. "We're still trying to finalize everything," said state spokesman David Blount.

Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark said he is hopeful he can count the ballots more quickly in November.

Tennessee officials were able to complete a review of ballots cast in the 2000 presidential election, but were unwilling to release the findings. "We didn't get good information," conceded Tennessee Elections Coordinator Brook Thompson. "We know some of the county numbers were not correct."

Thompson said the findings from counties with credible information were disturbing. "Punch cards were the worst," he said. "We had something like 96.5 percent of the vote count, or that there was a drop-off of about 3.5 percent, for punch cards."

At Scripps Howard's request, Missouri officials for the first time tried to tally ballots cast in the last presidential race and were able to compile reports from 77 of the Show Me State's 116 election jurisdictions. "We will request complete information from all counties in November," said state spokesman Spence Jackson.

Missouri officials said there were at least 37,149 more ballots cast than votes were counted for president four years ago, with at least 10 counties reporting a rate of undervoting worse than Florida's. The worst was an undervote of more than 7 percent of the ballots cast in St. Clair County.

Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels said state lawmakers in 2001 required an accounting of all votes that did not tabulate correctly. But so far, the state has not prepared such an accounting.

"I think so," Daniels said when asked if the state will report spoiled ballots in November. "It's always good to have all the data on hand to make decisions. How does each county stack up? Are the polling workers properly trained?"

Both Wisconsin and Oklahoma officials said they could count the number of ballots cast, but they had never been asked to do so in past elections. "It wouldn't bother us at all to start counting this," said Oklahoma State Elections Board chief Michael Clingman.

"Wisconsin actually does collect the number of voters who come to the polling place," said Wisconsin State Elections Board Executive Director Kevin Kennedy. "The real problem is that by the time we get those numbers reported from our 1,850 municipalities, nobody pays any attention to the information."

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita said it was "an anomaly" that Indiana was slow to report ballots cast in 2000, and promised to report the information on election night this year. But Rokita said his office "has never completed an official tally" of undervotes or made a formal comparison between votes counted and ballots cast.

"That's because, in Indiana, the county clerks have a lot of the responsibilities for putting on elections," Rokita said. "To get that data and then to come in and force a recount or a special election based on that, well, we have no legal jurisdiction to do that."

Officials for Alabama and Pennsylvania said they are not in a position to make a complete accounting of ballots cast come November.

Publication Date: 07-09-2004

Pope Co: Ballots Marked With Mysterious Device

2005-04-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.couriernews.com/archivedstory.asp?ID=901

ICOR discusses complaint on problems with ballots

The Informed Citizens of Russellville met Tuesday night at the Russellville Police Department.

Rudy Rudolph, group moderator, said Wednesday that the highlight of discussion was the recent complaint filed in Pope County Circuit Court with the county Election Commission. He said he and Gerhard Langguth have been informed by Circuit Judge John Patterson the complaint is going to continue, adding they are confident something will be done pertaining to the issue.
Pope County residents filed a complaint alleging election illegalities during the counting of ballots on the Nov. 5 general election in the county. Rudolph stated the purpose was not to accuse anyone of wrongdoing but bring it to people’s attention.
The complaint alleged that “persons involved in the processing of ballots did place marks upon ballots that had been cast. Election officials have publicly explained that a significant number of early voter ballots were marked with instruments that could not be read with the automated tabulation machinery and that this required them to mark over the elector’s votes so that a tedious hand count would not be required.”

The complaint cites the Arkansas Code, chapter 7, section 7-1-103, paragraph that states no person shall alter or attempt to alter any ballot after it has been cast. Complainants asked that the matter be investigated.

Rudolph said Wednesday that ICOR members have scheduled another meeting for 7 p.m. Tuesday at the police department.
Copyright © 2005, Russellville Newspapers, Inc.

Infrared Numbers Anyone? Arkansas Had 'Em

2005-04-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

Of all the places in all the world, we had to walk into this one.
Unbelievably, this had been happening in our own back yard.

One day in the spring of 2004 I walked into a print shop in AR to have some business cards printed.
The local printer and I got to discussing the printing of the county's ballots and the fact that they
had lost much business since the state went with electronic voting. This printer happened to
have read some about my work on the voting issue. He then asked me a question that has since
blown the lid off the voting community.

His question? Why do they have me print infrared numbers on the backs of the paper ballots? What
purpose might that serve?

I did my dead level best not to let my jaw drop. I replied "I have no idea,
unless that's where they get their screwy vote totals." This printer then preceeded to inform me
that it wasn't Arkansas election officials that had him do this, it was the vendor. The printer told me that
the vendor came in, told him to print infrared (invisible) numbers on the backs of the paper ballots. They
did this for a period of time and he did print the infrared numbers on the ballots, 'because they told me to'.
The printer then told me that the vendor suddenly told him to stop, with no explanation given. The printer told
me that he never felt comfortable with this policy, but that he did it anyway because he was told to do it.

The vendor in that county, and in most of AR counties is ES&S. This particular county votes on optical scanners with paper ballots. So if they were doing this in one little AR county, where else are they doing this?

I provided Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org with this information. She then took this information on a 10 state
road tour and made a stop in Omaha, Nebraska at the ES&S company headquarters. An employee at ES&S did confirm that they used infrared ink on paper ballots. Here's what Bev Harris posted to Black Box Voting.org last summer.

Unusual ink on ES&S ballots

6. We received a report from Lisa Burks in Arkansas about a printing plant that was asked to create special infrared codes on the back of ES&S ballots for the May 18 primary. A document provided to us by an ES&S employee in Omaha corroborates this, and describes a number of different inks, with a cryptic note that the infrared ink will suffice "for the purpose intended." Herein lies an example of the flaws inherent in privatization of a public trust like the voting system. We should, as citizens, be able to ask for documentation about exactly what that means. Instead, this becomes an investigation by a consumer group, because the manufacturers consider their ballot creation and vote-counting processes to be trade secrets, and sometimes they refuse to answer or fail to tell the truth about what they are doing. We have submitted this documentation to optical scan ballot experts for more review.

___________

So what do infrared numbers on the backs of optical scan ballots mean? When the tabulator tabulates the ballots scanned, where is it reading those numbers from? The marks on the ballot, or the infrared numbers on the back? The sensor scans the marks. How do we know the sensors aren't programmed to 'sense' infrared ink and not pencil or pen? Who knows. We sure don't. But we sure don't like it and we sure don't like not being able to get any answers.

Needless to say, this was a huge and alarming discovery. What have election officials had to say? Not much. We'll keep you posted.

Lisa Burks
National Coaliton for Verified Voting
AR Headquarters

2005-04-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

This was used in the 2004 election. fyi...all these problems occurred in AR on opscans.

NATIONAL COALITION FOR VERIFIED VOTING (NCVV)
CHECKLIST FOR OPTICAL SCAN MACHINES

THINGS TO WATCH FOR:

1. Ballots swelling due to humidity, not feeding through the scanners. Contrary to opinion, the paper ballots used on optical scanners are highly susceptible to humidity which will cause them to swell. The swelling of the ballots prevents them from being run through the scanner. This happened in at least 10 counties in AR in May and 5 Southern states that we know of as well. What needs to be done: Hand count of the paper ballots.

2. Incorrect machines being placed in incorrect precincts-ballots won't scan through those machines. These machines should be numbered with precinct number, make sure machine numbers match precinct number. Voting machines should NOT be swapped out during the elections.

3. Misprogrammed chips - if the machine tabulates 0 votes for candidates, that's a huge indication of a misprogrammed chip. The paper ballots should then be counted and the total count from the ballots used instead of machine counts.

In some instances in AR, optical scanners have malfunctioned and cast all the votes for one candidate instead of dividing them accordingly. Optical scan computer chips have also shown zero votes cast for candidates in several different races when in fact there were several votes cast for those candidates. A hand counting of the optical scan paper ballots found these votes and discovered the machine had not counted any votes.

* Ballot programming errors = misprogrammed computer chips.

AR had 3 counties with misprogrammed ES&S computer chips in May.

4. Local printers and ES&S both print AR ballots, ES&S then programs the computer chip from the ballot information. Check to see that the bar codes are correctly placed on the optical scan ballots. If the bar code is not on the ballot, then the chip will be misprogrammed and the vote count will not be tabulated accurately.

5. Once machines are set in the precincts, they should NOT be removed - if the machine breaks down, they should be shut down and not used. Technicians should never remove the machines from the precincts to repair them and return them to the precinct, ever.

6. If the precincts run out of ballots:

Optical scan machines will NOT read photocopied ballots. This will require a hand counting of the photocopied ballots, and they should not be put through the scanners.

7. Optical scanners will only read the special pens provided by the vendors. Pencils and other types of ink pens will not be read by the scanner. Check to see that the pens are the correct pens used for marking the ballots. Ask your election supervisor to show you what the correct marking pens look like.

******

2005 Update: there appears to be some conflicting statements regarding whether or not optical scanners will scan a photo copy and or will actually scan a pencil or black/blue ink mark. Computer scientist Doug Jones from the Univ. of Iowa states the latter info.

Contact:

Lisa Burks
National Coordinator, NCVV
lburks@conwaycorp.net

Machines in FL fail To Count Votes in Past 6 Elections: AR Uses Them in 2 Counties

2005-04-03T16:41:00.000-07:00

Noteworthy excerpts on iVotronic touchscreen voting machine use in FL. Number of iVotronics used to 'count' AR votes: Pulaski Co. 35; Faulkner Co. 5. These machines should be thrown out now. We spoke to every election official from the county level to the SOS office in July and August about not using these flawed machines. They used them anyway. Now, more fallout on ES&S iVotronics from FL...

The county spent $24 million on new iVotronic voting machines, but in their first major test, the 2002 general election, poll workers fumbled with the machines, resulting in a countywide electoral meltdown.

But less than a year into her tenure, a flaw was discovered in the iVotronic machine's auditing system. County elections officials thought they had the glitch remedied, but instead they temporarily lost most of the data files from the 2002 elections.

But the bad coding instructed machines to ignore the votes.

*Note election officials standard responses to machine failure: a) the uncounted votes would not have changed the outcome of the election b) poll workers did it c) voters went to the polls NOT to cast a vote. (undervotes) These are three of the more frequently lame excuses made by election officials. This time there was only ONE choice, there could be no undervote.

Posted on Fri, Apr. 01, 2005

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/11282281.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

GOVERNMENT
Dade election chief Kaplan resigns

Faced with questions over voting deficiencies, Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan suddenly resigned Thursday.

BY NOAKI SCHWARTZ AND TERE FIGUERAS NEGRETE
nschwartz@herald.com

Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan resigned Thursday amid increasing pressure from county officials who had grown frustrated with a succession of problems that included several hundred votes being lost in the most recent election.

County Manager George Burgess described the decision as mutual but acknowledged that he felt improvements could be made to the department. Kaplan, who could not be reached for comment, will be immediately replaced by her chief deputy, Lester Sola, pending County Commission approval.

This week Burgess launched an audit of the Elections Department and a review of six local elections after Kaplan reported that a faulty computer program did not count hundreds of votes in a March 8 referendum. Miami-Dade voters rejected the measure that would have allowed slot machines at local race tracks and jai-alai frontons. Broward County voters approved slots.

While Kaplan said the uncounted votes would not have changed the referendum's outcome in Miami-Dade, the parimutuel industry sent a letter to Burgess Thursday calling for a new election.

''We will pursue all remedies available under the law,'' said lobbyist Ron Book, who represents the parimutuels.

OTHER PROBLEMS

Burgess said the trouble with Kaplan wasn't confined to the March 8 election. That ''was part of a series of issues: differences on how we approach things,'' Burgess said. He said Kaplan had made some improvements to the department, pointing to the success of the high-stakes November presidential election.

Nonetheless, Kaplan's downfall was quick. A veteran Chicago elections official who had overseen voting in countries around the globe, Kaplan took the Miami-Dade job in June 2003 as the County Commission's choice to rescue the disaster-prone Miami-Dade elections process. Less than two years later, the one-time savior leaves with a tattered reputation.

County officials were desperate to shed the area's reputation for flubbing elections after the 1997 voter-fraud scandal and the 2000 presidential recount.

The county spent $24 million on new iVotronic voting machines, but in their first major test, the 2002 general election, poll workers fumbled with the machines, resulting in a countywide electoral meltdown.

Kaplan came in with 33 years on the Chicago board of elections, where she'd been the main elections troubleshooter. She also had successes and fond memories of consulting for elections in Kosovo, Zambia, Indonesia and China -- where she said she was mistaken for Madonna because she is blond.

Kaplan is still highly regarded in Chicago, said a former colleague who feared Miami politics contributed to his friend's swift fall from grace.

''They were fortunate to get someone of her talent,'' said Tom Leach, longtime spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which does not answer to a county manager or other politicians.

TROUBLE BEGINS

Kaplan beat out 120 other applicants for the $150,000-a-year job in Miami-Dade. But less than a year into her tenure, a flaw was discovered in the iVotronic machine's auditing system. County elections officials thought they had the glitch remedied, but instead they temporarily lost most of the data files from the 2002 elections.

By August 2004, then-County Commission Chair Barbara Carey-Shuler sent a memo to Burgess calling the county's elections Department ``the laughing stock of the nation.''

This February, county Inspector General Chris Mazzella issued a scathing report, accusing the department of poor oversight of campaign financing in the November election. Kaplan disagreed, saying there were ''many misstatements'' in the report.

The situation reached a boiling point this week when Kaplan alerted Burgess that a review showed unexpectedly high numbers of undervotes -- where ballots are cast but no choice is made -- in the March 8 referendum. The Elections Department found 1,246 electronic undervotes in comparison to 61 on absentee ballots.

Kaplan explained that about one-third of the electronic undervotes were caused by an election worker's miscoding a computer program.

The error affected cases in which voters made a selection but didn't push the red flashing ''vote'' button at the top of the machine. In such cases, poll workers are supposed to insert a cartridge that tells the machine to count the vote. But the bad coding instructed machines to ignore the votes.

Regarding the remaining two-thirds of the undercount, Kaplan said only that her staff found that some residents were confused by the ballot question and left without completing their vote.

She swiftly reassigned two supervisors in charge of the coding. Kaplan also blamed the Election Systems & Software, the company that makes iVotronic.

NOT RESPONSIBLE

The company responded in a statement: ``In this instance, the primary responsibility for this particular aspect of preparing for the election lies with the county.''

Burgess called her response ''inadequate'' and ''unacceptable.'' Mayor Carlos Alvarez agreed. ''To make excuses and assume a defensive posture doesn't solve anything,'' he said.

On Wednesday, Kaplan had a lengthy closed-door meeting in Burgess' office, followed by another on Thursday. The difference: At the second, she was followed in by the county's head of employee relations, there to finalize the details of Kaplan's departure.

© 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

__________________
When Unity sofware flaw was discovered in July 2004:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/9111841.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Posted on Fri, Jul. 09, 2004

Documents detail more voting machine flaws

BY MARY ELLEN KLAS
meklas@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - As state and Miami-Dade County election officials work to approve software that will clear up a nagging problem with touch-screen voting machines, a Herald review of internal election department documents has found that there are a host of other flaws that have never been publicly acknowledged and are not expected to be fixed by the new programming.

The situation has led to a fractious relationship between Miami-Dade, the state and the touch-screen machine maker, Electronic Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb. At one point, a state Division of Elections e-mail shows, Miami-Dade Assistant County Attorney Murray Greenberg threatened to sue the company -- and make it ''close up shop nationally'' -- if more problems were discovered with the equipment that was certified as working two years ago.

In a June 3 letter to ES&S, obtained by The Herald in a public records request, Miami-Dade County Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan demanded answers to three problems with the iVotronic equipment that she said could take ''labor intensive and costly'' actions to fix. She asked ES&S to resolve these issues ``expeditiously:''

• The central database machines used to tabulate votes are incapable of holding all the audit data at once, requiring a ''labor intensive and costly'' solution that could complicate a recount in a close race. Audit data is used to back up the system.

• The optical scanners used to read absentee ballots have problems when information is merged from the three machines the county uses.

• And the county could potentially mix up votes if it were to try to use phone lines to transmit data from the polling places to the election center, which it doesn't plan to do.

ES&S RESPONSE

ES&S Senior Vice President Ken Carbullido responded to Kaplan on June 14, noting that each of the problems could be resolved if the county alters its procedures, reconfigures its software or, if it wants to transmit data from the polling places, redo the programming code in the machines or retrain its staff.

He acknowledged on Thursday, however, that the problems are ''separate issues'' from the so-called ''audit anomaly'' that brought a team from his company to Miami-Dade this week. The team tested a program intended to repair a problem in which the computers garbled serial numbers in the machine's audit trail. In a close election requiring a recount, that problem might make it difficult to tell what votes were cast on a particular touch-screen machine.

MAKE CHANGES

All of the problems can be addressed by the November election if Miami-Dade officials make a few changes in the way they use the equipment, said Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer expert the county hired to independently review its electronic voting system and make recommendations.

But, Jones said, the extent of the flaws expose a major failing of the system: ``The fundamental problem is the data formats used were never designed to handle a county as big as Miami-Dade.''

DISAGREEMENT

Carbullido, the ES&S vice president, disagrees with that conclusion, saying that the company's machines are used by even larger counties, like Chicago's Cook County.

The e-mails and correspondence from April 15 to June 28 obtained by The Herald show that state election officials were caught completely off guard in mid-May when the story broke about the audit-trail problem in ES&S' iVotronic touch-screen machines.

The state first blamed Miami-Dade officials and then directed their fire at ES&S. Paul Craft, head of the Division of Elections' certification department, which has to approve equipment and software before it can be used, blamed ES&S for filing an incomplete application for certification.

''The [audit trail] anomaly is present in the [touch-screen] systems used in all counties,'' Craft wrote on May 15. The only difference, he said, was that most other counties did not transmit the voting data to flashcards like Miami-Dade does, so the problem took longer to surface elsewhere.

As Craft and other officials were insisting publicly that the failure of the machines to record the correct serial numbers in post-election audits was just an ''anomaly,'' he and another election department official, David Drury, were privately expressing bigger worries.

EXPLANATION SOUGHT

'The state of Florida desires a `very detailed explanation,' as neither Paul nor I can accept this anomaly being described as a random event,'' Drury wrote in an e-mail to ES&S account representative Sue McKay on May 25.

The finger pointing extended to other parties as well. ES&S officials blamed the state's bureaucratic certification process for failing to allow them to fix the problem they admitted they had known about.

And Greenberg, the Miami-Dade assistant county attorney, chastised an analyst with the state Division of Elections for writing a letter to Secretary of State Glenda Hood and creating a public record of the problem.

While tensions are still raw, Jones said, he noted that he is ``impressed by Miami-Dade officials and their willingness to admit they have a problem.''

Jones said the problem rests with the software, known as Unity, and added that it is up to ES&S to decide how far it wants to go to make it better able to perform in large counties.

The lesson, Jones said, is ``the belief that a software program is correct is almost always wrong.''

''All we have are a choice between imperfect systems,'' he said. ``Frankly, the work Miami-Dade has done up to this point leaves me fairly confident they can do a good job.''

© 2004 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com

_________________________________________

July 28, 2004

Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

IAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.

The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times.

"This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition.

After the disputed 2000 presidential election eroded confidence in voting machines nationwide, and in South Florida in particular, the state moved quickly to adopt new technology, and in many places touch-screen machines. Voters in 15 Florida counties - covering more than half the state's electorate - will use the machines in November, but reports of mishaps and lost votes in smaller elections over the last two years have cast doubt on their reliability.

Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes.

After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high.

Voting problems plagued Miami-Dade and Broward Counties on that day, when touch-screen machines took much longer than expected to boot up, dozens of polling places opened late and poorly trained poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. A final vote tally - which narrowed the margin first reported between the two candidates by more than 3,000 votes - was delayed for a week.

Ms. Reno, who ultimately lost to Mr. McBride by just 4,794 votes statewide, considered requesting a recount at the time but decided against it.

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future.

The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May.

The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem.

In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said.

The flaws would not have affected vote counts, he said - only the backup data used for audits after an election. And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway.

State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none.

Touch-screen machines, officials say, are programmed not to record two votes, and if no vote is recorded, they say, it means the voter did not cast one.

But The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, in a recent analysis of the March presidential primary, reported that voters in counties using touch-screen machines were six times as likely to record no vote as were voters in counties using optical-scan machines, which read markings on paper ballots.

The A.C.L.U. of Florida and several other voting rights groups have sued to overturn the recount rule, saying it creates unequal treatment of voters. Counties that use optical-scan machines can conduct recounts, though only in extremely close races.

Mr. Kaplan says that the system crashes had erased data from other elections besides Ms. Reno's, the most recent being municipal elections in November 2003. Under Florida law, ballot records from elections for state and local office need be kept for only a year. For federal races, the records must be kept for 22 months after an election is certified. It was not immediately clear what the consequences might be of breaching that law.

Mr. Kaplan said the backup system was added last December.

An August 2002 report from Miami-Dade County auditors to David Leahy, then the county elections supervisor, recommended that all data from touch-screen machines be backed up on CD's or elsewhere. Professor Jones said it was an obvious practice long considered essential in the corporate world.

"Any naïve observer who knows about computer system management and who knows there is a requirement that all the records be stored for a period of months," Professor Jones said, "would say you should obviously do that with computerized voting systems."

Buddy Johnson, the elections supervisor in Hillsborough County, which is one of the state's largest counties and which also uses touch-screen machines, said his office still had its data from the 2002 elections on separate hard drives.

Mr. Kaplan of the Miami-Dade elections office could not immediately explain on Tuesday afternoon the system crashes in 2003.

Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor and member of the election reform group, said she requested the 2002 audit data because she had never heard an explanation of the supposedly lost votes that the A.C.L.U. documented after the Reno-McBride election.

"People can never be sure their vote was recorded the way it was cast, but these are the best records we've got," she said. "And now they're not there."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

County Clerk Advisory Committee: Advising Your County Clerk

2005-04-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

2003-2004 AR County Clerk Advisory Committee:

Melinda Reynolds - Faulkner
Melinda Mulford - Boone Co
Karen Pritchard - Washington Co
Janet Tweedle - Monroe Co.
Carolyn Staley - Pulaski Co
Britt Willford - Ouachita Co
Mary Lou Slinkard - Benton Co
Doris Tate - Sebastian Co.
Helen Bradley - Jefferson Co
Carolyn Cook - Drew Co.
Patti Hill - Crawford Co.

We do know that the Faulkner and Boone County Clerks are pro touchscreen machines with no paper receipt. The Ouachita County clerk spoke against HB 1360 (paper trail bill) in February at the 1st Legislative Committee Hearing.

Candidate Wins Despite Being Left Off Ballot

2005-04-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

NCVV: There is simply no excuse whatsoever for a candidates name to be left off the ballot. The candidate pays a filing fee to be on the ballot. The candidate pays to run, part of that fee covers being placed on the ballot. Do you mean to tell us that the election commissions are not looking over the ballots to check for errors prior to the elections beginning? This happens more than you think. In 2002 Ron Sheffield, Democratic candidate for Lt. Governor was left off the ballot in Pulaski Co. our largest county. Throughtout these reportings you've seen a recurring theme of aggravation: no penalties under current AR election law cited by the SOS attorney Tim Humphries. Contact the ledge. Get them on this.

NO DECISION MADE ON BALLOT DISPUTE
By Amy Riggin/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

No decision has been made by the Jefferson County Election Commission on whether a White Hall man and his mother can vote again after a state representative race was mistakenly omitted from their ballots during early voting.

Election coordinator Taylor Eubank said Wednesday the commission met Tuesday night to conduct training for election workers but did not discuss the issue involving the two voters.

"The commission is going to try and get it resolved as soon as they can," Eubank said.

A candidate for state representative told the Jefferson County Election Commission on Monday that the race was not listed on two ballots cast during early voting in the May primary.

Stephanie Flowers, a Democratic candidate for state representative, District 17, was accompanied by one of the voters, James Bell, of White Hall, who cast his vote at the courthouse on May 5. The other voter was his mother, Cassie Bell, who voted by absentee ballot.

Eubank said the District 17 race should have been on the ballots for precinct 721, which is the precinct in which Bell and his mother reside.

Flowers said when she learned that the race was not on the ballot she called the County Clerk's Office. She said the problem has since been corrected on the voting machines.

"But the fact remains that Mr. Bell has already pulled the curtain and his mother already sent the ballot in," Flowers said. "Mr. Bell would like to be able to vote in that race."

Flowers said she was told that only two people had voted before the problem was corrected. She also said 122 absentee ballots had been sent out prior to the mistake being found, but not all of them were in precinct 721.

Commission Chairman Trey Ashcraft said that Bell's vote was the only one affected at the courthouse.

Commissioner Stuart Soffer suggested that if it is determined to be legal by Tim Humphries, general counsel for the Secretary of State's office, the county clerk should make up a supplemental ballot for Bell and supplemental absentee ballots with the race included where necessary.

"There is no provision for doing that in state law," Humphries said in a telephone interview Tuesday. "It's up to the election commissioners on how they handle it."

Ashcraft took Bell's information Monday and assured him that the commission would deal with the matter.

"We don't have access to the answer right now," he said.

Soffer assured Bell that the mistake was "unintentional."

"It is darn frustrating and I can understand how mistakes can happen," he said. "We want to do what is reasonable and prudent."

LTE on Pulaski County Voting Machines

2005-04-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

August 2004

Comment: Dear Editor:

I presented crucial information on the iVotronic touchscreen electronic
voting machines made by ES&S to the Pulaski County Election Commission in
order to provide education on recently discovered serious 'software bugs'
in their programming source code. Residents in Pulaski Co. be warned: you are voting on these machines with flawed software, 35 of them to be exact.

Most everyone has heard about the disappearing 2002 gubernatorial
election results in Florida that recently was discovered. Those votes and
the data disappeared on iVotronic voting machines due to a
programming 'bug' that tells the machine to misread data and garble the
data. It begins when the mis-programmed source code tells the machine
to display a 'low battery' image, even though the battery is not low. The
low battery image then serves to signal the machine to garble vote data
compiled in the memory areas.

This software programming bug was first
discovered in Miami Dade county and was reported to ES&S over one year
ago. As of this writing ES&S has made no effort to correct the
programming code. Florida officials, prior to Hurricane Charley, were
seriously considering suing ES&S over this disaster with their voting
machines.

I strongly urged the Pulaski County Election Commission to follow the
guidelines I presented them from computer scientist Doug Jones from the
University of Iowa, who was commissioned by Miami Dade county to do a
report on the flaws in the programming code.

Our
vote is too important to lend to machines with flawed programming code
designed to scramble the data. If you want to be sure your vote is not garbled, I urge you to phone Susan Inman and the Pulaski Co. Election Commission at 501-340-8383 and urge the commission to lock away those iVotronic machines and throw away the key.

For more information on the 'bug's found in iVotronic machines go to
votersunite.org/info/auditbug.asp.

Side note to Pulaski County Clerk Carolyn Staley: You did the best you could
with software that was inherently flawed that certainly was no fault of
your own. Someone owes you an apology at the very least.

Lisa Burks
National Coordinator
National Coalition for Verified Voting
501-450-9854
lburks@conwaycorp.net

AR Ballot Programming Errors: Codes on Ballots, Chip Didn't Match

2005-04-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

Ballot Programming Errors in Three Arkansas Counties, May 2004 1) Sevier County The chip programmed by ES&S for the county's optical scan counted all ballots as blank. The test ballots were printed correctly, and the pre-election testing was successful. But then the ballots for election day were printed in a different print run.* After consulting with officials from Election Systems & Software, it was determined that the codes on the computer chip and the codes on the ballot didn’t match.

2) Fulton County The chip programmed by ES&S for the county's optical scanner didn't work. ES&S claimed that the printer didn't send them all 16 ballots needed for the programming. The printer said he did send the entire set of ballots, and his records showed that the weight of the package mailed to ES&S was the weight of 16 ballots.** Riverside Graphics printer Michael Eaton insisted his company sent ESS [sic] a full set of ballots. “We printed the ballots for Independence County where there are three times as many people and we didn’t have any problems. We’ve had this problem with ESS before,” said Eaton. ... He said Riverside Graphics checked its postage records, and the weight of the package sent to ESS was consistent with a package containing 16 ballots.

3) Craighead County The chip programmed by ES&S for the county's optical scanner gave one candidate all the votes for constable. A manual recount revealed the error.*** A recount was made in the District 13 constable race because returns from Precinct 20 showed one candidate received all 158 votes cast in the precinct, and the opposing candidate doubted that. The incident was traced back to a computer chip coding error, and the result of the recount was that both candidates had received votes in the precinct. * Ballots counted by hand in primary elections.

The DeQueen Bee; May 24, 2004. ** No explanation for ballot machine malfunction. South Missourian; May 27, 2004; by George Jared, Staff Writer. *** Commission OKs results of elections. Jonesboro Sun, May 28, 2004. By LeAnn Askins. See: ES&S in the News ... the system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent.

From VotersUnite.org Mess Up Du 'Jour information provided VU by AR Activists.

2003: Voting Problems Strike Pulaski County Again

2005-04-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Remember this was on Accenture software. We now have a contract with ES&S. Let's see how that unfolds...

Voting Problems Strike Again in Pulaski County

Wednesday November 05, 2003 5:19pm Reporter: Beejal Patel Posted By: Tony Tabor

Little Rock - It's the day after elections and as always it seems, Pulaski County election officials are sorting out just how bad voting problems turned out to be.

Almost 17,000 people voted in Little Rock's bond election and the usual problems cropped up again. Dozens of people, including some elected officials, had trouble voting because they were not on the registration lists.

Election Director Susan Inman says she's counted at least 300 people who had trouble casting their ballot on Tuesday. "For the most part, these were people who normally voted and were sent to another location and not notified or given a reason why they were moved."

Even Election Commissioner Charles King had trouble at the poll, the same one he's voted at for the last 5-years. "I go in and jokingly ask them how many people have been turned away because they were not on the rolls and they told me none. As they we're looking up my name, I was the first one to be turned away because I was not on the rolls."

The day after elections, Circuit County Clerk Carolyn Staley says her office is reviewing the lists. Anonymous sources that did not want to appear on camera tell Channel 7 that some of the people, who supposedly were not on the lists, were not eligible to vote.

In other cases, poll workers simply missed their names.

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Pulaski County Voter ID Cards Contained Errors

2005-04-03T15:44:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Word around town was that Carolyn Staley's office was hooked up to AASIS and used Accenture. The rest of the state was on Accenture's voter registration database system. Anything going right on either of those systems would be a miracle. And not the fault of the county clerk who had no control over it. AR purchased a voter registration database contract with ES&S (who else) for $4.9 million. We think those voter cards had better be 14k gold when they go out for that amount of taxpayer dollar spent.

New voter ID cards may contain errors

by Jeff LeMaster
editor

Voter registration identification cards were sent out last week for the registered voters of Pulaski County.

The cards contain such information as a voter’s precinct, Senate and House of Representatives’ numbers, as well as the polling location for each precinct. Because of realignments, due to new population information from the 2000 census, some voters’ information will have changed since the last election.

The only problem is that polling locations, which are determined by the county election commission, have not yet been determined and will not be announced until a public hearing Feb. 27 in Little Rock.
Newspapers, including the Jacksonville Patriot, will print the locations earlier that week. The cards that were sent out by the county/circuit clerk’s office recently listed polling sites that are potentially incorrect.

Susan Inman, director of elections, said that her office has been flooded with calls from confused voters since the cards were mailed out last week.

All information on the cards, besides the polling locations should be accurate, Inman said.

“I think the county/circuit clerk’s office was premature in sending out the cards [because of the lack of confirmation about the polling sites],” Inman said.

Butch Davis, alderman of ward 2 in Sherwood, said he recently received cards for his household, and that they contained some surprising information.

“One card was addressed to my father-in-law, and he died two years ago,” Davis said.

Davis’ own card listed his polling site as being in Ward 3 of Jacksonville.

“I’m not sure how an alderman in ward 2 of Sherwood would end up voting in ward 3 of Jacksonville,” he said. “I called [the clerk’s office] and told them that if they needed any help, that I would be glad to help them.”

Neither County/Circuit Clerk Carolyn Staley or her deputy clerk, Janice Hay, could be reached for comment.

Pulaski County Blames Carolyn Staley Again

2005-04-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

Pulaski County sees lapse at polls
Failure to record voters’ parties in primary a problem for 2 runoffs
BY CHARLIE FRAGO
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Pulaski County poll workers in 15 precincts did not identify the party affiliation of voters in the May 18 primary, so county officials scrambled Wednesday to prevent Republican voters from casting ballots in two Democratic runoffs on June 8.
Somewhere between 1,000 and 1,100 voters who cast ballots in the Republican primary in those precincts possibly could vote in the Democratic runoffs for county-circuit clerk and District 34 state House representative because poll workers did not note party identification in poll books, County Attorney Karla Burnett said.
Under state law, when poll workers verify a voter’s identity, they should mark in the poll book whether that person is voting in the Democratic, Republican or nonpartisan races.
On Wednesday, Election Commission Director Susan Inman said her office will provide the clerk’s office with other information collected by poll workers to solve the problem.
"I’m sorry about that. All my workers didn’t do what they were supposed to do correctly, but it will be rectified," Inman said.
In all but one of the precincts, Inman located lists that voters signed when given ballots. That list should identify a voter’s party affiliation, she said.
County-Circuit Clerk Carolyn Staley’s office has responsibility for recording the primary votes and determining who qualifies to vote in the June 8 runoff. Chief Deputy Janice Hay said that without the 15 properly completed poll books, her job has been made much harder.
"The clerk’s office is just floored that there was no documentation at these polls," Hay said. "We’ve been working overtime to make sure we do our job. We can’t do that when we don’t get what we need from the Elec- tion Commission."
Hay said the lists signed by voters when they received ballots won’t help much.
"That will take us hours. They’re not in any alphabetical order," Hay said.
Burnett said she asked the clerk’s office to concentrate on the 1,000 to 1,100 Republican voters who cast ballots at the precincts.
"We’ll start there," Burnett said. "It’s unfortunate this happened, but it falls back on the clerk’s office to correct this one."
Signs will be posted at the precincts to remind voters that it is a Class A misdemeanor to vote in a Democratic runoff if they voted in the Republican primary, Burnett said.
Fewer voters faced hassles in the primary election than in recent elections in Pulaski County and the confusion that characterized the November 2002 election was averted.
But scattered problems remained. About 100 voters in two precincts in Little Rock got voter cards with incorrect information leading them to the wrong polls in the primary.
Election officials said most of the problems in the county arose from confusion over precinct boundary changes that created new polling sites for many voters.
State elections official Pam Ratliff said mistakes like those committed by Pulaski County poll workers happen in every primary.
"The only thing a county can do is work around it," she said. "The real problems will be the legibility of the signatures and the time constraints."
Early voting for the runoff started Monday.
Inman said the voting lists supplied to the clerk’s office as well as the signs warning against crossover voting should lower the chances of anyone voting who shouldn’t.
"In the worst-case scenario, we’ll instruct the poll workers to ask the question of which primary they voted in. And the voter, if they’re going to lie, that falls on the voter."

This story was published Thursday, May 27, 2004
Copyright © 2004, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

Ballots Swell in Garland Co. Machines Mixed Up in Precincts

2005-04-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

NCVV: We love this one. 'few, minor glitches'. Ballots swelling and not scanning is a huge problem, and a big one. That means a handcount has to be performed. We beg to differ with this reporter. Placing the incorrect machines in the wrong precincts causes the machines not to scan the ballots that don't match their machine. Votes don't get counted. That's anything BUT mimimal, minor and a glitch.

Minimal problems reported
   BY DON THOMASON The Sentinel-Record

   With voter turnout as light as expected, election officials only had to
deal with a few minor glitches in Tuesday's preferential primary election.
Election returns Page 5A
  Tom Gaither, voting machine technician with the Garland County Election
Commission, attributed most of the problems to the weather.
   "With all the rain we've had and the amount of moisture in the air
yesterday, the rolls of (voting machine) tape got damp and swelled." This
caused quite a bit of smudging as the first two or three feet of tape went
through the machine, but as the tape dried out, the problem vanished, he
said.
   The only other problem noted was two machines that ended up at the wrong
place, according to Susan Childs, the Commission's acting executive
secretary.
   Ballots being cast by voters at Piney Baptist Church just after 7:30 a.m.
were being rejected by the machine. It was discovered the machine should
have been at First Baptist Church of Royal, who had Piney's machine.
   Childs said she made new memory packs for the two machines and swapped
them out instead of physically moving the machines.
   As predicted by Garland County Clerk Nancy Johnson, voter turnout was
light.

Misprogrammed Computer Chip: Fulton County

2005-04-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

NCVV: AR seemed to have an extrodinarily high rate of 'potato passing' in the May primary due to misprogammed chips being blamed on the ballot printers. However, ES&S was one of those printers. We saw literally 10+ counties run out of ballots with low voter turnout expected and predicted by local election officials and the SOS office. Curiously enough, we had misprogrammed computer chips in at least 4 of those same counties.

No explanation for ballot machine malfunction

Staff Writer

05/27/04
GEORGE JARED
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No one has accepted responsibility for a malfunction in a ballot scanner that forced Fulton County election officials to count ballots by hand for the primary election May 18.

But despite the problem, the final vote tallies were certified by the secretary of state’s office May 20.

Fulton County Clerk Gene Maguffee blamed the problem on a microchip in the county’s optical voting scanner. He said the chip was programmed by Electronic Service Systems in Omaha, Neb.

“Chip malfunction is not what happened,” said ESS spokesman Meghan McCormick. McCormick blamed the problem on the printer of the ballots, Riverside Graphics in Batesville. She said they sent only two of the required 16 sample ballots needed for programming. “We coded for the ballots we had,” she said.

Riverside Graphics printer Michael Eaton insisted his company sent ESS a full set of ballots. “We printed the ballots for Independence County where there are three times as many people and we didn’t have any problems. We’ve had this problem with ESS before,” said Eaton.

ESS didn’t program the chip used in Independence County, said Eaton.

He said Riverside Graphics checked its postage records, and the weight of the package sent to ESS was consistent with a package containing 16 ballots.

Maguffee said he’s contacted the Election Board in Little Rock and informed them he isn’t going to pay ESS for their services. “The chip didn’t work and I don’t feel like we should pay them when we had people counting ballots all night,” he said.

The state election board and the county jointly pay for services like the ones provided by ESS, Maguffee said.

Voters in Fulton County will return to the poles June 8 to determine who their sheriff and county judge will be.

In the Fulton County sheriff’s race, long-time deputy and former Fulton County Sheriff Carroll Traw will face Justice of the Peace Walter Dillinger. Traw garnered the most votes in the primary with 1,198. Dillinger was a close second with 1,179 votes. The winner of the runoff will not face an opponent in November.

In the county judge’s race Charles Willett of Salem will square off against Jerry Smith of Mammoth Spring. Willett, received 1,095 votes to narrowly defeat Smith, with 1,022 votes.

The winner of the Willett/Smith runoff will face Republican candidate Gary Phillips in the November general election.

The primary’s most lopsided contest was for county clerk. Deputy clerk Vickie Bishop received 2,322 votes to soundly defeat opponent Evalene “Ebb” Glisson with 872 votes. “I’m glad this is over. I’m so tired from campaigning,” a belated Bishop said after the final tally came in on election night.

Fulton County Assessor Jerry Humphries and county coroner Steven Barker defeated challengers Greg Jackson and Clell Cox, respectively, to retain their positions.

The closest race in the primary was for constable in the Afton Township. Incumbent Lenard Pickle received 60 votes to defeat challenger Shannon Wood by a single vote.

The lone justice of the peace race in the primary went to incumbent Jimmy Marler. Marler (285 votes) beat challenger Gene Garner (101 votes).

In the Cleveland Township, Larry Davis (59 votes) defeated Mike Hess (51 votes).

Officials at the Fulton County clerks office said several precincts voted together in this election. Fulton precinct voted with Mount Calm; Viola precinct voted with Vidette-Bayou and Big Creek; and Southfork voted with Wilson.

Bishop said each precinct still retains its own voter book at the courthouse.

Unofficial numbers reported last week for the Sharp County district judge race between Mark R. Johnson and R.T. Starken were incomplete. The final tally was Johnson 3,212, Starken 842. All other totals published remained the same.

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Nov. '04: Pulaski Co. Totals Flawed-State to Amend Results

2005-04-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Pulaski County’s tallies flawed, so state to ‘amend’ Nov. 2 vote result

BY JAKE BLEED ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

    Two days after certifying final results for the Nov. 2 election, the Arkansas secretary of state’s office said it must "amend" those results after discovering an error in how votes were counted in Pulaski County.
    "We’re going to have to amend the certification results for Pulaski County," said Janet Miller, deputy secretary of state for elections and public relations. "Their hard copy and what they sent us on the computer was wrong."
    Miller said her office has asked all 75 counties to confirm that the vote totals submitted to the secretary of state match those recorded by county election commissions.
    Susan Inman, director of elections for the Pulaski County Election Commission, said the county had submitted accurate totals to the office of County-Circuit Clerk Carolyn Staley, whose office then filed those numbers with the secretary of state.
    "Ours is generated off of the voting system," Inman said. "It’s taken by paper to the county clerk’s office, and someone at the county clerk’s office takes that paper and types it into a Web form."
    Inman added, "You can see how an error could occur in that process."
    Janice Hay, Staley’s chief deputy, said her office spent Wednesday "trying to verify" vote totals but would not come up with final numbers until Monday.
    "Our verification process is going on right now, and we have not completed it," Staley said. "We have to verify each and every precinct and their totals."
    Hay described her office as the "middle party" in the system.
    Several differences can be found between vote totals on the secretary of state’s Web site — www.arelections.org — and those on the Pulaski County Election Commission’s site — www.votepulaski.net.
    For example, the secretary of state’s site reported U.S. Rep. Vic Synder, D-Ark., receiving 155,290 votes in Pulaski County, as of late Wednesday.
    At the same time, the county’s Web site showed Snyder receiving 97,733 votes. Snyder defeated State Rep. Marvin Parks, R-Greenbrier, in the race for the 2 nd Congressional District seat.
    The margin of victory, according to the secretary of state, was 102,416. According to the county, the margin was 44,622.
    A constitutional ban on gay marriage received 92,723 votes, according to the secretary of state, and 96,062, according to the county. Both report that measure passing by a wide margin.
    Another constitutional amendment that would extend term limits for state lawmakers failed by 59,809 votes, according to the county, and by 58,442 according to the secretary of state.
    Inman said the differences could result from the counting of provisional ballots, which continued until this week.
    "But they should only be different in maybe one or two or three," Inman said. "Small numbers."
    State Rep.-elect Dawn Creekmore, D-Hensley, said she alerted the secretary of state to a problem in how Pulaski County votes were recorded in her race against Republican opponent Penny Kemp of Shannon Hills.
    The secretary of state’s Web site showed Creekmore losing in Pulaski County with 659 votes to Kemp’s 1,305. Instead, Creekmore said, those results should be reversed.
    "I drove around and got the results," Creekmore said. "I knew them. Then we came home and saw the numbers on TV and the numbers were the exact opposite."
    The county’s Web site show’s Creekmore receiving 1,327 votes in Pulaski County and Kemp receiving 637.
    Creekmore, whose district includes area of Saline and Pulaski counties, was named the winner in the race.
    The secretary of state had certified its election results Monday, saying that vote totals posted on its Web site were accurate.
    However, votes for write-in U.S. Senate candidate Glen Schwarz changed between Monday, when he had 74 votes, and Wednesday, when he had 213.
    "We’re auditing the results, to see if what they sent us matches what was on file at the county." Miller said.

http://epaper.ardemgaz.com/Default/Client.asp?Enter=true&skin=ArkDaily&Daily=ArDemocrat

Firms Vie To Tally AR Votes: Here a Lobbyist There a Lobbyist

2005-04-03T15:23:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Here's the same article published in different area in the state from 2003.

Firms vie to tally state’s votes

BY MICHAEL R. WICKLINE

Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2003

Email this story | Printer-friendly version

With several million federal dollars in hand to purchase new electronic voting machines, Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels is getting a lot of advice about which ones to buy.

Diebold Election Systems Inc. of McKinney, Texas; Hart Inter-Civic Inc. of Austin, Texas; and Sequoia Voting Systems, also of Austin, have hired lobbyists in Arkansas to help pitch their products to Daniels and others.

A spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., says that company hasn’t ruled out putting an Arkansas lobbyist on its payroll, too.

Microsoft’s lobbyist in Arkansas says he has helped Tru-Vote International of Nashville, Tenn., which uses Microsoft’s technology, set up a meeting to make a sales pitch. And a few county clerks and election officials have even thrown their support behind particular machines.

In another twist, the Arkansas Democratic Party’s executive director has told an aide to Daniels in an e-mail that the party probably will oppose the state purchasing equipment through Diebold because Diebold Inc. ’s chief executive officer said in a recent invitation to a Republican fund-raiser at his mansion that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year."

All this jockeying is going on although Daniels has yet to issue a request for proposals from companies to provide machines in 13 counties by the Arkansas primary election next May 18. "I am not surprised at the amount of activity," says Daniels. "Matter of fact, I expected that. This is a major change from the status that we have now."

The Help America Vote Act, enacted by Congress last year in response to the disputed presidential election results in Florida in 2000, requires that voting machines be accessible to the disabled and blind and that the state overhaul its voter registration list.

So far, Daniels has received $6.1 million in federal funds under the Help America Vote Act.

The federal government has awarded $2.5 million to him to replace punch-card systems or lever machines in Arkansas, Baxter, Benton, Boone, Desha, Faulkner, Hot Spring, Jefferson, Marion, Mississippi, Saline, Searcy and White counties and reimburse Columbia and Union counties for replacing their machines.

Under federal law, all Arkansas counties are required to have voting machines accessible to the blind and disabled by Jan. 1, 2006.

Michael Cook sent the anti-Diebold e-mail to Daniels’ aide, Janet Miller, deputy for elections. It said the party "will probably have to oppose Diebold as being the vendor for Arkansas’ voting machines" due to the actions of Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell. "A voting machine vendor should be 100 percent non-partisan in all of their actions," said the Sept. 15 e-mail obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazetteunder the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. "A not unreasonable request of a voting machine vendor," he said.

Cook attached a copy of a request from the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Andrew Grossman, to sign a petition to express outrage that O’Dell would promise to deliver an election to President Bush in an invitation to a GOP fund-raiser. That invitation came as Diebold was vying for a place on Ohio’s favored-vendor list, which it won. Diebold Inc. is based in North Canton, Ohio.

O’Dell said in mid-September that he regrets the wording in the invitation to the fund-raiser and intends to lower his political profile.

Cook said in an interview that he intends to talk with the Arkansas Democratic Party’s executive committee soon about whether to take a stance against Diebold.

Marty Ryall, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, said he would be concerned if a chief executive officer of a voting equipment company was closely tied to the Democratic Party.

But Daniels, a Democrat who was the state’s land commissioner from 1985-2003, said he won’t allow the Arkansas Democratic Party’s position to have anything to do with voting equipment that he buys.

He noted that he read on the Internet that most of the ballots cast in the last election were made on machines of Diebold and ES&S. That item referred to them as Republican companies, according to Daniels. ES&S says it has voting machines in 55 of Arkansas’ 75 counties. Diebold doesn’t have any in Arkansas, according to state Board of Election commissioners. Spokesmen for both companies said they do business in a nonpartisan fashion. "I am nonpartisan when it comes to the voting machines and my job as the chief election officer for the state of Arkansas," Daniels said. "I have to look at it from what is best for the state of Arkansas and not leaning one way or the other for a vendor."

Former state Rep. Ted Mullenix, R-Hot Springs, registered as a lobbyist for Sequoia on Aug. 11 and former state Rep. Courtney Sheppard, D-El Dorado, registered for Diebold on Sept. 4, according to secretary of state records.

Bill Stotesbery, vice president of marketing for Hart, said the company is in the process of hiring Martha Harriman of Van Buren as a lobbyist.

Becky Vollmer, a spokesman for ES&S, said company officials have talked to a number of lobbyists about working for them, but no one has been formally hired.

Lobbyist Don Tilton of Little Rock, whose clients include Microsoft, said that at the request of Microsoft he set up a meeting in the secretary of state’s office for TruVote, which uses Microsoft technology. "Do I really believe somebody is going to extraordinarily influence something like this?" asked Tilton. "The answer is no. This is serious business. A lot is at stake."

Among the county clerks, White County Clerk Tanya Burleson said she likes ES&S and Hart machines but prefers Hart’s eSlate machine. "It is very light and very userfriendly and runs off batteries and is not a touch screen," she wrote in a Sept. 17 e-mail to the secretary of state’s office.

Jim McCarthy, election coordinator in Benton County, said he backs Sequoia’s touch-screen machine, although Benton County Clerk Mary Lou Slinkard and the county’s election commissioners favor Hart’s machine. "As for me personally, I would like to stay with punch-card voting, but, oh well," McCarthy wrote in a letter dated Aug. 22 to Daniels.

Daniels hopes to the issue his request for proposals in the next few weeks and award a contract around Jan. 1. The request also will seek price estimates for either deploying one machine at each polling site in the other counties or replacing all of the current systems in the counties, depending on how much federal money is available for this in the next few years.

http://www.nwanews.com/story.php?paper=adg§ion=National&storyid=40584

Craighead Co: 1 Candidate Receives ALL 158 Votes Cast

2005-04-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

NCVV: machines used were optical scanner, problem was due to a misprogammed computer chip.

5-28-04 Jonesboro Sun.
Commission OKs results of elections

By LeAnn Askins

After 10 days of discussions over voting machine problems on election night, the results of the May 18 primary election in Craighead County were certified Friday.

Don Parker II, Craighead County Election Commission chairman, said he "feels secure" that the results are accurate despite mechanical problems which included the malfunction of one vote-counting scanner on election night.

A recount was made in the District 13 constable race because returns from Precinct 20 showed one candidate received all 158 votes cast in the precinct, and the opposing candidate doubted that.

The incident was traced back to a computer chip coding error, and the result of the recount was that both candidates had received votes in the precinct. However, the recount did not change the outcome of that race.

"This is a fluke, according to our computer software programmers," Parker said Friday.

The commission chairman received a letter shortly after the election from the company that provides the computer hardware, software and ballot stock to the county -- Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb. -- explaining the problem.

Although the problem was corrected, Parker stressed to residents Friday that other options will be considered for future elections.

Despite the addition of three military votes that were added before the votes were certified, there were no changes in the winners of races. Counties were required to certify votes by 5 p.m. Friday to leave time for military votes and absentee votes from other countries to arrive.

http://www.jonesborosun.com/archivedstory.asp?ID=9486

2002: Controversy Greets Early Voting in Jefferson Co.

2005-04-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

Online News

CONTROVERSY GREETS EARLY VOTING
By Judy Normand/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF

Early voters were met Monday at the Jefferson County Courthouse by poll watchers from the Republican Party of Arkansas who demanded identification and challenged voter ballots.

The Democrats' "Team Arkansas" had barely concluded its early vote rally across the street from the Courthouse when the trouble began.

Under the watchers' eyes, both voters and county officials received what they called unexpected -- and unnecessary -- scrutiny of the election process.

Trey Ashcraft, chairman of the Jefferson County Election Commission, said it was obvious the Republicans' actions were targeting African-Americans.

In a press release, Michael Cook, executive director for the Democratic Party of Arkansas, criticized Sen. Tim Hutchinson and the Republican Party for intimidating and harassing African-American voters in Jefferson County and for giving the poll watchers notarized credentials he said were apparently forged.

"Their papers did not seem to be in order," Ashcraft said.

"Tim Hutchinson and the Republican Party have claimed that they want to reach out to African-American voters, but when election time comes they have nothing to offer but intimidation and harassment," Cook said. "We ask Tim Hutchinson and his party to stop disenfranchising African-American voters and obstructing the democratic process."

During Monday's voting, poll watchers were seen asking voters to either produce identification or risk having their ballots challenged.

"A voter does not have to show an ID as long as it's noted on the ballot," Secretary of State Sharon Priest said. "They (poll watchers) can challenge a ballot, but they cannot ask for an ID or even talk to the voters."

Several voters received pointed requests from poll watcher Allison Johnson to produce identification, and refused -- a right, Priest said, that is protected by law.

Voter Bonita McCray also refused the ID request, saying "When she insisted, I put my ID back in my purse. They had no right to do this."

Officials in the clerk's office said several would-be voters became so frustrated and offended by the process that they left without casting a vote. Deputy Clerk Charlotte Munson reported a poll watcher had actually walked behind her counter to photograph voter information on her computer screen.

The watcher, she said, also asked for identification from, and then photographed, a first-time voter who was visibly shaken by the action.

"This woman (a poll watcher) was looking over my shoulder, and this is my business, not hers," the agitated voter said later.

Poll watcher Chris Carnahan admitted a colleague had been using photography to document aspects of the voting process, but said he did advise the person to put away the camera.

"We're here to ensure a clean and fair election," he said.

Johnson also accused a deputy clerk of not requesting IDs from prospective voters and said workers had no challenge ballots prepared.

"They refused to accept challenge ballots," Johnson said.

Ashcraft said this was not true. He was unable to say exactly how many ballots were challenged, but said there had been "several."

Ashcraft said he was disappointed in the Republican "Gestapo" tactics.

"They're trying to intimidate and prevent voters from participating in the Democratic process," Ashcraft said. "The registered voters feel insecure and the photos are inexcusable. They (Republicans) know they can't win, so they're trying to steal this election. This is politics at its worst. They're breaking the law and it's disgusting."

At least twice, Ashcraft summoned a deputy from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office to escort "watcher" Diane Jones out of the clerk's office for what he said was definite interference with the voting process.

Cook said the tactics used by the Republican workers clearly crossed the line from poll watcher to voter obstruction.

Marty Ryall, director of the Republican Party of Arkansas, said in a telephone interview that different groups of poll watchers will continue to be sent to the Jefferson County Courthouse each voting day until Nov. 5. Ashcraft countered with a promise to produce "watchers" of his own -- of the Democratic persuasion.

2000: Vic Snyder's Votes Cast for His Opponent on Touchscreens

2005-04-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

NCVV: Machines that break down should NEVER be removed, repaired or opened during an election. They should be unplugged and locked down (removed from service or use) until after the election is over. Calibration is aligning the screen properly, so that the screen lines up with the voters intended candidate when they touch it. The calibration must be done every time the machine is turned on. NOT every 2 days. In 2004 I asked the Pulaski Co. Election Commission at a public hearing how often they calibrated their machines. The reply: every 2 days. They've been calibrating them incorrectly for 4 years. Furthermore, any voter may request the machine be calibrated in their presence prior to casting their vote to check for accuracy.

Voting machines err, misread Snyder votes
AUSTIN GELDER
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Complaints about glitches in Pulaski County's new computerized voting system rolled in Thursday as early voters reported trouble getting their X's into the right boxes.

    More than two dozen people called U.S. Rep. Vic Snyder's office Thursday with stories of uncooperative voting machines that kept marking the wrong candidates.

    Poll workers are standing by to help voters complete their ballots correctly, but officials for Snyder's campaign fear voters might accidentally be choosing the wrong candidates.

    "I'm worried about the possibly hundreds of people who may not have realized they didn't cast the vote that they wanted to," Snyder campaign manager Steve Harrelson said. Snyder, a Democrat seeking a third term, faces Republican Bob Thomas of Little Rock.

    Katibell Perdue was among the 28 people who called Harrelson on Thursday to report trouble at the polls.

    Perdue uses a computer every day, so she said she wasn't intimidated when she went to cast her ballot using the new system Thursday afternoon. She changed her mind, though, after it took her five tries and the help of a poll worker to mark her ballot.
    "When I touched the screen to vote for Vic Snyder, it lit up the opponent's name," Perdue said.

    Harrelson wonders what will happen with people who don't want to spend extra time figuring the new system out.

    "What if someone gets frustrated and just doesn't vote? What if somebody gets intimidated and drops it and leaves?" he asked.
    Pulaski County Elections Coordinator Sandy Dyer doesn't think computer problems are causing people to mistakenly vote for candidates they didn't choose, but she still plans to check all machines that have prompted complaints.

    "We feel like we're addressing it," she said.

    Electronic voting came to Pulaski County for the first time this year, and 52 machines were set up for the two-week early voting period.

    Machines that cause problems for voters are taken off-line and fixed immediately, Dyer said.

    Batteries in the machines must be replaced every two days, and the machines must be calibrated every day or two, she said.
    Calibrating helps the computers match the spot a voter taps with the corresponding information on the touch screen. Voting machines that need to be calibrated might not register the intended vote.
    Virginia Buck isn't sure what went wrong with the machine she used Thursday at the Walker Tennis Center in Little Rock. She said she marked her vote for Snyder and went on to fill out the rest of her ballot. When she went back to double check her votes, she found a mark beside Thomas' name.

    "To me, it's horrifying to think what would have happened if I'd not taken the time to go back. I'm sure a lot of people didn't do that," she said.

    Dyer and the Election Commission brought in 28 more Votronics machines last week to handle a crush of early voters. The extra machines added to the original stock of 25 voting machines in hopes of trimming the lines at early voting sites.

    "The lines were long, and people were concerned about the length of time it was taking them to vote," Dyer said.

    Three of the new Votronics machines were initially set aside to be used only in demonstrations, but Dyer sent them out to polling sites soon after early voting began to help absorb the higher-than-expected turnout.

    The machines will only be used for early voting.

    More than 15,000 people have already visited early voting sites in the past two weeks, and Dyer said she expects the numbers to far exceed 1998's tally of 15,853 early voters by the time early voting ends.

    Voters cast the first ballots on the 25 newest machines Thursday, Oct. 26, after supplier Elections System & Software of Omaha, Neb., trucked them in.

    Twenty of the new machines are on loan from the supplier, Pulaski Election Commission Chairman Ron Oliver said. The other five new machines, along with the three demonstration machines, will likely stay in Pulaski County.

    The Election Commission plans to keep those eight machines in lieu of the two more expensive voting machines, called ADA Kiosks, that didn't work as well as they'd hoped, Oliver said.

    The two kiosks are designed to help disabled and blind people vote without assistance, but they didn't meet expectations during test runs and were never used in Pulaski County for this election, Oliver said.
    The Election Commission paid $107,375 for 25 Votronics machines and two ADA Kiosks earlier this year. If Elections System & Software accepts the proposed deal, Pulaski County will end up instead with 33 Votronics machines.

    Early voting continues through 3 p.m. Saturday at Walker Tennis Center, Southwest Recreation Center, Harvest Foods on Cantrell Road, Laman Library in North Little Rock, Jacksonville City Hall, Harvest Foods in Maumelle and Jack Evans Senior Citizens Center in Sherwood. Early voting will continue through Monday at the Pulaski County Courthouse.

***************

Arkansas Primary Blues

2005-04-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

NCVV Note: We are not the formal complaint agency for the state. That would be the State Board of Election Commissioners. These are just the complaints we received. We could not file individual complaints for these voters, only voters can do this. In order to have a bonafide and legal complaint a voter must file a formal complaint in writing to their local election commission and to the State Board of Election Commissioners. Otherwise, it's dust in the wind. Here's just some of the problems encountered by voters in the May, 2004 AR Primary:

One Voters Woes at AR Polls:

Went to the polls on Tues. I had moved from right across the street about 3 weeks ago. Got my new Driver's License last week. Went to the old poll because that's where I'm still registered. Showed my license - dummy me, I hadn't read the BN submission of 5/17 - and expected a ballot. The election czar at that venue looked up my name and there it was. Then she looked at my license. Guess what? Nope! I had to go across town to vote. "How?" I asked. "I'm registered here!" She gave me a form to fill out and called the other polling place. Told them she was sending me over. "No problem." she said.

Got there and they wouldn't let me vote because I wasn't in their book. I showed them the form she signed. The poll worker said, "They HAD to let you vote over there if you were in their book!" I told them, "No, she said I had to come over here." He said, "Go back and tell them we said you had to vote there because you aren't in our book." I said, "I have a better idea. YOU call and tell them that. I don't intend to drive all over Little Rock at $2.00 per gallon until the polls close, arguing with you people!" He called and, after a lengthy conversation, hung up and gave me a ballot.

Wait, it gets better! I marked the ballot and took it to the guy at the counting machine. The man I'd talked to ran over and said, "We can't put that through the machine. You aren't registered here!" I asked what I was supposed to do with it. (I know what I WANTED to do with it! But that's another story.) He held up my ballot, waved it around for the world to see and said, "We have to send it to the Clerk's Office for counting." First I said "Well, so much for secret ballot!" He folded it in half and sheepishly said, "Sorry."

Then I said, "So you're gonna send this to Carolyn Staley to count? Great!" He just shrugged. (He wasn't just a poll worker; he was with the Clerk's Office.) I asked if it would get counted in time. He didn't know. But the thing is, when we went in there, they were griping about the low voter turnout!!!

NCVV Footnote:

*This is one example of the many complaints that we received about the plethora of voting problems experienced in Arkansas during the May preferential primary. Estimates are that at least 50% of the voter precincts were changed in Pulaski County alone and voters were not on the voter books in any locations they were sent to. One voter from Fort Smith called to report that precincts there ran out of ballots at 3:00p on Election Day, and officials told voters to return at 5:00p. When those voters did return at 5:00p as they were instructed, there were still no ballots and they could not vote.

*Another voter, who was also a candidate in St. Francis County called to say that he received many calls from his supporters telling him that he was not on several ballots in that county. Calls to the St. Francis County clerk were answered and we were told that ES&S printed their ballots in Nebraska, and were late delivering them - delaying early voting there for five days. The clerk was under the impression that this candidate was on the ballots he was supposed to be on. However, the candidate received too many calls stating the opposite to convince us that he was not on the ballot. There were at least two candidates not on the ballots that we know of. One State Representative was not in the voter book in one county. Candidates: send us your ballot problems if you had any. Voters, send us your candidate info.

*There was at least one lawsuit filed in Jefferson County over the delays in early voting there. The lawsuit was thrown out by the court and the judge there stated that "the law did not provide any penalty for delays in early voting."

**Here is the summary of problems experienced in our recent May 18th primary elections: Late ballots, delays in early voting, misprogrammed computer chips, software freezing up on voting machines, precincts running out of ballots, precincts being moved, voters not in poll books, candidates names left off ballots and 'humidity' causing ballots to swell rendering them unable to feed through optical scanners. We feel these problems are anything but minor. These are major problems in an election process frought with machine error and violation of election law. The question is, what are we - the voters - going to do about this? Why were these elections allowed to stand? Why were they not thrown out and held again using paper ballots? Why were there no recounts? No wonder there was some apparent low voter turnout, these type scenarios make situations ripe to 'skip' the hassle of going to the polls. And our election officials and the media stated harmoniously that the problems in AR primary were 'minor'. There is a major problem here as you can see. This is how democracy suffers. It is the responsibility of our election officials to provide us with fair and accurate elections. What has happened that allows for our election process to be held in chaos? What are we going to do about it? Calls to the Secretary of State regarding these problems went unreturned. The NCVV will state that as long as election officials turn a deaf ear to the people, and as long as the media aids them by reporting the problems as minor- then nothing will change in our favor. Send us your feedback, and email us with any election problems that you experienced during AR primary or any that you are aware of. We are asking for all reports to be referred to us for documentation.

*Regarding the low voter turnout that was predicted: We received calls stating that voters were standing in very long lines waiting to vote in Bradley County. Could this be one reason that so many counties ran out of ballots? Or was it because ES&S and local printers failed to be prepared and print enough ballots? We do question how some counties ran out of ballots with LOW voter turnout. It doesn't make a lot of sense to us.

Praire County Totals: More Vote Than Registered

2005-04-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

Prairie County Totals: You do the math.

Registered Voters: 1,876

Voted: 1,984

Turnout: 106%

NCVV Footnote: This must be new math. However the numbers keep on growing. If you add the number of Democratic voters in Prairie Co - 2,142 with the number of Republican votes 43 - that totals 2,185 votes cast. Prairie County has 1, 876 registered voters. That adds up to 309 more voting than they show registered.

More new math?

Total Votes Cast in AR in May. 2004 Primary:

More new math?

Total votes cast shown on Secretary of State website: 243,033

Total number of votes cast in Supreme Court race: 304, 451.

This is 61,418 more votes than the total shows were cast statewide. Go figure? We can't figure this out.

These vote totals were taken from the www.arelections.org.

Problems in Pulaski Co. Again: Software Freezes Up Delays Early Voting

2005-04-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; Date: Tuesday, 04 May, 2004 ;
Section: Arkansas; Page: 8

Pulaski County early voting OK despite software problem

BY CHARLIE FRAGO ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
    A computer blip put an unexpected crinkle for two hours of early voting
Monday at seven off-site polling sites around the county.
    Relatively light turnout, though, minimized the problem, election
officials said.
    Shortly after polls opened at 10 a.m., the Accenture software that
allowed poll workers to check voters’ registration information crashed,
forcing poll workers to call the county-circuit clerk’s office before
allowing people to vote.
    "It was a first-day thing," Election Director Susan Inman said. "The
problem is solved."
    When the system froze up, Election Commission workers discovered a
glitch in the software and had the Internet connection up and running by
noon.
    The crash didn’t prevent anyone from voting, Inman said, and only a few
people left because they didn’t want to wait for poll workers to call the
clerk’s office.
    The handful of voters who did leave were at the Delta Trust and Bank
polling location at 11700 Cantrell Road, Inman said.     The chief election
judge at the Delta Bank location, Jean Gregg, said poll workers saved the
departed voters’ information and told them to come back anytime within the
next two weeks of early voting or during the May 18 primary.
    "It was very light voting today — just 39 people — so the computer
problems didn’t matter much," Gregg said. "Calling the clerk’s office — that
part went very smoothly."
    Shortly before polls closed, Inman reported that 320 ballots had been
cast, including 105 at the Circuit Courthouse.
    Janice Hay, County-Circuit Clerk Carolyn Staley’s chief deputy, said
that clerks handled about 100 calls.
    "Luckily, we were on our toes," Hay said. "It’s never an inconvenience
for our office when something like this happens. We’re here to help the poll
workers and serve the election commission in any way we can."
    Jerry Larkowski, chairman of the election commission, praised the
election commission staff, which quickly fixed the problem.
    "I much rather have something like this happen the first day than the
last day," he said.

**************************

Footnote:

The Accenture (partner of Halliburton) software froze up and failed to function in ES&S machines in at least 2 counties on the first day of early voting - Pulaski and Phillips. How many voters were unable to vote while the machines were down? We may never know.

On May 8th-the Accenture software on ES&S voting machines froze up in Phillips County and failed to print the poll book for 10 hours. This delayed early voting until the next day, which is a violation of State election law. However, there is no penalty under the law for delays in early voting. This is however, indirect voter disenfranchisement. The state law provides for early voting to begin on May 3rd, when the voters go to the polls to vote the machines are down. Where those voters issued paper ballots to vote on as the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) recommends in situations like these? We don't know, as calls/emails to Election Commissioners and the Secretary of State went unreturned.

2005 Update: AR SOS office recently paid $4.9 million to ES&S for a voter registration database contract. Their system called Power Profile, is used in New Mexico and that's about all that's known about it.

Delays to Early Voting in 4 AR Counties: No Penalty Under AR Law

2005-04-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

NCVV: We saw misprogrammed computer chips in at least three of these 4 counties as well as late ballot arrivals, running out of ballots, etc.

Early voting runs into delays in 4 counties; suit filed in 1

BY STEPHEN DEERE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

   At least four Arkansas counties have experienced delays in early voting for the May 18 primary, prompting one lawsuit and numerous complaints from voters.

    Phillips, Craighead and Clark counties all reported one-day delays, while election officials in St. Francis County still are not sure when early voting will begin, according to the state Board of Election Commissioners.
    Officials disagreed over whether a fifth county, Polk, had experienced problems.

    Polk County Clerk Terri Harrison said the county has had no delays in early voting. But Susie Stormes, the director of the state Board of Election Commissioners, said information from her office indicated that the county had received some ballots late.
    By law, early voting should have begun Monday. The counties’ individual boards of election commissioners are responsible for getting ballots to the county clerks.

    Officials in Phillips County blame a computer glitch. Craighead County Clerk Nancy Nelms attributed the delay there to election commissioners not having time to meet, and officials in Clark and St. Francis counties faulted printing companies in charge of printing ballots.

    Stormes, who has worked for the state board since 1995, said she could not remember a time when so many counties had problems getting their ballots ready.

    Early voting helps those with limited time and mobility. Depriving a registered voter of one day of early voting could result in them not voting at all, Stormes said.

    "I’m not saying that it has happened, but it runs the risk of disenfranchising a voter," Stormes said. "If you appear to early vote, it may be the only opportunity you have during that 15-day time frame."

    Arkansas law states that early voting should begin 15 days before an election.

    Stormes could not say how many people would likely be af fected.

    "We don’t have statistics compiled on how many people early vote," she said.

    ABSENTEE BALLOTS

  The early voting deadline was not the only one the four counties missed. By law, election commissioners should have given their county clerks absentee ballots on April 23 so the clerks could have begun mailing them out.
    "The mailing of the absentee ballots could be crucial for overseas voters," Stormes said.
    Arkansas Army National Guard spokesman Capt. Kristine Munn said she was not aware of any soldiers’ complaints about not receiving ballots.
    "But I’ll bet you just about anything that for 99 percent of the soldiers that are deployed, it’s probably the last thing on their mind," Munn said. She added that that would change as the November general election approaches.
    Thousands of Arkansas troops, including members of the 39 th Infantry Brigade, are in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.
    Clark County Election Coordinator Karen Wieman called the deadline for absentee ballots theoretical.

    "We’ve always used early voting as our hard deadline, and we’ve never missed it until this time " she said. "In the real world, I think most counties use early voting as the hard deadline."

    Because of the delay, Wieman said the Election Commission would wait until the last day possible to certify the election so the county could receive all the ballots. The ballots still must be postmarked by May 18.

    A problem with a local printing company resulted in Clark County’s early voting delay, Wieman said.
    The Nebraska-based company in charge of printing ballots for St. Francis County also had not sent them in time, said Judy Armstrong, the county’s election coordinator. Ballots are expected to arrive by today or Saturday.

    Although aware of the early voting deadline, Armstrong said she was not aware of the April 23 deadline.
    "I understood that I was supposed to have everything back by [Monday]," Armstrong said, adding that that was what election commissioners had told her.

    Armstrong noted that as election coordinator she was an employee of the St. Francis County Election Commission, whose commissioners are appointed by the local Democratic and Republican parties and the State Board of Election Commissioners.
    Armstrong said she would not be the election coordinator much longer, citing frustrations over election problems.

    "I can’t put up with all this," she said.

    NO PENALTY

  Although the law is clear on deadlines for early voting, it does not provide any penalty for missing those deadlines, said Tim Humphries, an attorney for the Arkansas Secretary of State.

    "There’s no sanctions or anything like that in the law," Humphries said. "They are subject to a court order."

    And that may be what Phillips County faces. On Monday, James "JF" Valley, a Phillips County Quorum Court member and candidate in the primary, sued the county over the one-day delay in early voting.

    Valley asks that extra voting hours be added to make up for the missed time.

    Valley’s suit claims that voters were disenfranchised by the delay and requests a total of 118 hours of ballot access before the May 18 elections, including extra hours to compensate for early voting that was not available on Monday.

    Valley is running in the Democratic primary against Lester Helton. Valley defeated Helton’s son two years ago.
    A hearing in the case is set for 9 a.m. today.

    County Attorney Ashley Higgins called the lawsuit lunacy, saying that much civility in county has been lost. He did not know how officials could add another day of early voting.

    "Where in the world are you going to squeeze that in?" he said.

***********************************
NCVV Footnote:

What good is having early voting under state law, if there is no legislation with 'teeth' in it to provide a heavy penalty for delaying early voting? What recourse do candidates have that have spent their time, energy and effort into getting out the vote- IF they are lucky enough to get a lawsuit filed only to have it called 'lunacy' and then dismissed by the court? This makes no sense. It further makes no sense to pay filing fees that are sometimes extremely expensive to the political parties in the state, only for candidates to discover after the fact that their names were not on the ballots? How is this fair? In the counties where the candidates' names were left off the ballot, they should have immediately had new corrected ballots printed and held the elections over. Our elections in AR are not headed in a good direction for the November General Election. Something has to be done on a state and grassroots level to get these problems corrected. Calls to the Secretary of State and Election Commission regarding these problems went unreturned.
Why have our legislators not introduced legislation calling for hefty fines to be levied against corporations such as ES&S and Accenture (who's software on ES&S machines doesn't function)? When will they get on the ball and see to it that each and every infraction is met with stiff fines and penalties until these occurrences are no more in AR elections? Contact your representatives in the Ledge and get them on this for 2007.

2005 Update: AR no longer has our voter registration contract with Accenture. The AR SOS recently spent $4.9 million a contract with ES&S instead. The product is called Power Profile, we have no idea whether or not it works any better the Accenture's. We do know that Power Profile is used in New Mexico, where numerous problems were reported in Nov. 04.

Misprogrammed Computer Chip in Sevier County

2005-04-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

NCVV Note: This was an optical scanner problem. Sevier Co. problems described below are due to ballot programming errors, or misprogrammed chips. This is a result of the inaccurate or incorrect ballot information being sent to the vendor, in this case ES&S. ES&S then programs their chip from ballots sent to them by the printer. This printer was a local printer in Sevier Co. ES&S also prints AR ballots in Nebraska, where they boast to have printed over 430 billion ballots worldwide.

Machine error forces Sevier County to hand-count votes
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DE QUEEN — A programming problem with a vote-tabulating machine caused Sevier County election workers to have to hand-count ballots, the county clerk said.

The tabulating machine was tested before Tuesday’s election, but the test ballots used were not the same as the actual ballots, County Clerk Sandra Dunn said.

In Pope County, election officials were hand-counting ballots from 23 precincts. Dale Brown, chairman of the election commission, said unofficial overall totals did not match with precinct totals. He said it was probably because of undervotes, ballots that do not have clear selections, or overvotes, ballots with two or more votes.

In Sevier County, Dunn said she did not know why test ballots did not match actual ballots.

"Both ballots came from the printing company that prepared the Sevier County ballots," Dunn said. "The test ballots should have been a representative sample of all ballots printed. The cause of the difference between the test ballots and the ballots delivered to the election commission for use at the polls has not been determined and will be discussed with the printer."

The machine was programmed by Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software. Dunn said company officials prepared the machine’s computer chip using the test ballots, which had different codes from ballots used at polling places.
Unofficial totals were not expected until this morning.

County officials didn’t know how many votes were cast. In the 2000 primary, there were about 2,200 ballots cast.

This story was published Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Copyright and permissions
Copyright © 2004, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

Deputy SOS Says AR Machines Must Be Paper Equipped

2005-04-03T13:50:00.000-07:00

Each DRE must be capable of producing a paper audit trail and of recreating electronic ballots on paper in the event of a recount. Electronic versus paper results must be compared and verified when the machines are publicly cleared and tested. The HAVA is very clear about the requirement that these systems have a paper audit trail capability.
Janet Miller, AR Deputy SOS

NCVV comment: That's fascinating. We would never know this from their
position in 2004 and 2005, that paper receipts will lead to vote selling,
paper jams and be too expensive for the counties to pay for.

9-24-03

Dear NOWArk:    Thank you for contacting the Secretary of State’s office regarding your concern over electronic voting equipment. As Deputy for Elections and Public Affairs, I have been working closely with Secretary of State Daniels and members of our state’s elections community on this and other voting issues.   The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandates that all states, and by extension the counties, install electronic voting technology (Direct Recording Electric, or DRE) at the polls. The HAVA is very specific about the requirement to have at least one DRE per poll in place by January 1, 2006. More immediately, counties using punch cards or lever machines must replace those systems with DRE’s by May of 2004. Thus it is a federal mandate that we move toward electronic voting in Arkansas over the next three years.   At this point we are conducting a comparative analysis of the different electronic voting products on the market. Chief among the issues to consider are the security and reliability of the vote count and the mechanism for providing a paper audit trail.   Companies that manufacture, sell and install DRE’s are required to be tested and certified by an Independent Testing Authority using rigorous security standards set forth by the Federal Election Commission. Most of the experienced election equipment companies, although there are only a few of those in the market, have met these tests.   Each DRE must be capable of producing a paper audit trail and of recreating electronic ballots on paper in the event of a recount. Electronic versus paper results must be compared and verified when the machines are publicly cleared and tested. The HAVA is very clear about the requirement that these systems have a paper audit trail capability. Any voting system purchased by the state will, with certainty, meet the HAVA voting system standards and the standards set by the FEC.   We continue to follow the debate on electronic voting and welcome your concerns and opinions as we move forward implementing the Help America Vote Act. I am available by telephone or e-mail should you have questions in the future. Thank you for the opportunity to share this information and please do not hesitate to call on me if I may be of assistance to you.    Janet Miller  Deputy Secretary of State  501.682.1010  jlmiller@sosmail.state.ar.us <>     

AR SOS Says Democratic Party Not Going to Tell Him About Voting Machine Purhcase

2005-04-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

No url, but pertinent information, so we're printing it. From late 2003, Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Marty Ryall, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, said he would be concerned if a chief executive officer of a voting equipment company was closely tied to the Democratic Party.
 But Daniels, a Democrat who was the state’s land commissioner from 1985-2003, said he won’t allow the Arkansas Democratic Party’s position to have anything to do with voting equipment that he buys.
 He noted that he read on the Internet that most of the ballots cast in the last election were made on machines of Diebold and ES&S. That item referred to them as Republican companies, according to Daniels.
 ES&S says it has voting machines in 55 of Arkansas’ 75 counties. Diebold doesn’t have any in Arkansas, according to state Board of Election commissioners. Spokesmen for both companies said they do business in a nonpartisan fashion. "I am nonpartisan when it comes to the voting machines and my job as the chief election officer for the state of Arkansas," Daniels said. "I have to look at it from what is best for the state of Arkansas and not leaning one way or the other for a vendor." 

__________________________________

Firms vie to tally Arkansans’ votes Lobbyists peddling electronic systems
BY MICHAEL R. WICKLINE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
With several million federal dollars in hand to purchase new electronic voting machines, Arkansas Secretary of State Charlie Daniels is getting a lot of advice about which ones to buy.
 Diebold Election Systems Inc. of McKinney, Texas; Hart InterCivic Inc. of Austin, Texas; and Sequoia Voting Systems, also of Austin, have hired lobbyists in Arkansas to help pitch their products to Daniels and others.
 A spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. of Omaha, Neb., says that company hasn’t ruled out putting an Arkansas lobbyist on its payroll, too.
 Microsoft’s lobbyist in Arkansas says he has helped Tru-Vote International of Nashville, Tenn., which uses Microsoft’s technology, set up a meeting to make a sales pitch. And a few county clerks and election officials have even thrown their support behind particular machines.
 In another twist, the Arkansas Democratic Party’s executive director has told an aide to Daniels in an e-mail that the party probably will oppose the state purchasing equipment through Diebold because Diebold Inc.’s chief executive officer said in a recent invitation to a Republican fund-raiser at his mansion that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year." president next year."
 All this jockeying is going on although Daniels has yet to issue a request for proposals from companies to provide machines in 13 counties by the Arkansas primary election next May 18. "I am not surprised at the amount of activity," says Daniels. "Matter of fact, I expected that. This is a major change from the status that we have now."
 The Help America Vote Act, enacted by Congress last year in response to the disputed presidential election results in Florida in 2000, requires that voting machines be accessible to the disabled and blind and that the state overhaul its voter registration list.
 So far, Daniels has received $6.1 million in federal funds under the Help America Vote Act. The federal government has awarded $2.5 million to him to replace punch-card systems or lever machines in Arkansas, Baxter, Benton, Boone, Desha, Faulkner, Hot Spring, Jefferson, Marion, Mississippi, Saline, Searcy and White counties and reimburse Columbia and Union counties for replacing their machines.
 Under federal law, all Arkansas counties are required to have voting machines accessible to the blind and disabled by Jan. 1, 2006.
 Michael Cook sent the anti-Diebold e-mail to Daniels’ aide, Janet Miller, deputy for elections. It said the party "will probably have to oppose Diebold as being the vendor for Arkansas’ voting machines" due to the actions of Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell.
 "A voting machine vendor should be 100 percent nonpartisan in all of their actions," said the Sept. 15 e-mail obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. "A not unreasonable request of a voting machine vendor," he said.
 Cook attached a copy of a request from the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Andrew Grossman, to sign a petition to express outrage that O’Dell would promise to deliver an election to President Bush in an invitation to a GOP fundraiser.
 That invitation came as Diebold was vying for a place on Ohio’s favored-vendor list, which it won. Diebold Inc. is based in North Canton, Ohio.
 O’Dell said in mid-September that he regrets the wording in the invitation to the fundraiser and intends to lower his political profile. Cook said in an interview that he intends to talk with the Arkansas Democratic Party’s executive committee soon about whether to take a stance against Diebold.
 Marty Ryall, chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, said he would be concerned if a chief executive officer of a voting equipment company was closely tied to the Democratic Party.
 But Daniels, a Democrat who was the state’s land commissioner from 1985-2003, said he won’t allow the Arkansas Democratic Party’s position to have anything to do with voting equipment that he buys.
 He noted that he read on the Internet that most of the ballots cast in the last election were made on machines of Diebold and ES&S. That item referred to them as Republican companies, according to Daniels.
 ES&S says it has voting machines in 55 of Arkansas’ 75 counties. Diebold doesn’t have any in Arkansas, according to state Board of Election commissioners. Spokesmen for both companies said they do business in a nonpartisan fashion.
 "I am nonpartisan when it comes to the voting machines and my job as the chief election officer for the state of Arkansas," Daniels said. "I have to look at it from what is best for the state of Arkansas and not leaning one way or the other for a vendor."
 Former state Rep. Ted Mullenix, R-Hot Springs, registered as a lobbyist for Sequoia on Aug. 11 and former state Rep. Courtney Sheppard, D-El Dorado, registered for Diebold on Sept. 4, according to secretary of state records.
 Bill Stotesbery, vice president of marketing for Hart, said the company is in the process of hiring Martha Harriman of Van Buren as a lobbyist.
 Becky Vollmer, a spokesman for ES&S, said company officials have talked to a number of lobbyists about working for them, but no one has been formally hired.
 Lobbyist Don Tilton of Little Rock, whose clients include Microsoft, said that at the request of Microsoft he set up a meeting in the secretary of state’s office for TruVote, which uses Microsoft technology. "Do I really believe somebody is going to extraordinarily influence something like this?" asked Tilton. "The answer is no. This is serious business. A lot is at stake." Among the county clerks, White County Clerk Tanya Burleson said she likes ES&S and Hart machines but prefers Hart’s eSlate machine.
 "It is very light and very user-friendly and runs off batteries and is not a touch screen," she wrote in a Sept. 17 e-mail to the secretary of state’s office.
 Jim McCarthy, election coordinator in Benton County, said he backs Sequoia’s touchscreen machine, although Benton County Clerk Mary Lou Slinkard and the county’s election commissioners favor Hart’s machine.
 "As for me personally, I would like to stay with punchcard voting, but, oh well," Mc-Carthy wrote in a letter dated Aug. 22 to Daniels.
 Daniels hopes to issue his request for proposals in the next few weeks and award a contract around Jan. 1.
 The request also will seek price estimates for either deploying one machine at each polling site in the other counties or replacing all of the current systems in the counties, depending on how much federal money is available for this in the next few years. This story was published Sunday, October 05, 2003

Copyright © 2003, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.

Note: Mary Ryall was forced to resign in disgrace over missing campaign funds in the amount of $376,000, along with four other members of the RPA being fired for their involvment in this matter.

   