Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm

[Flabbergasted]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html


As we move toward the November mid-terms, we're beginning to a more detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a nation in less than a week: two major new reports from independent research groups detail the myriad security breaches, and procedural and technical problems in the 2006 Ohio primaries; stories from early voting in Texas indicate that the paperless DREs in at least two counties may have a partisan bias; another major new report from the University of Connecticut details a whole raft of security vulnerabilities in Diebold's optical scan voting machines; finally, BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.

None of this news bodes well for the November mid-terms, which are less than a week away. In fact, what the reports described below indicate is that voters will flock to the polls to vote on fragile, untested alpha systems that, when they break, cannot be fixed by the on-site poll workers; the votes that are recorded cannot be adequately verified by a post-election audit, even if a voter-verified paper "receipt" is printed by each machine and saved by the county; and individual counties may or may not have the technical capacity to actually carry out the task of tabulating all of the electronic results (forget about the paper receipts!) from all of the machines in a coherent and reliable manner.

In sum, people will show up on November 7th at many precincts across America, they will select items on a touch-screen, a lucky few of them will see a paper record of their choices (correctly marked or not) scroll by under a glass, and they will return home having participated in a bit of high-tech political theater that may or may not amount to a bona fide election.

If you think that I overstate things just a bit here, then by all means, read on.

Table of Contents
Way to go, Ohio
Lack of training and vendor blackmail
Lack of training and precinct meltdowns
Machine malfunction and possible fraud
Nothing adds up
More missing stuff, and more eyebrow-raisers from the second report
What about the VVPAT?
Problems in Texas and Florida
Problems with Diebold optical scanners
Vote multiple times on a Sequoia machine by holding down the yellow button
Conclusions and some recommendations
Postscript for Cuyahoga County