C-SPAN: Electronic Voting News Conference (2 p.m.)

[Patsy Stone]

http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/schedule.csp

News Conference

Electronic Voting Machines

Election Data Services
Kimball Brace , President, Election Data Services

Mr. Brace talks about an updated study on voting equipment usage for the November 2006 election.

This was originally scheduled for 1 p.m., but the Snowjob was pushed back from 11:45 to 12:15, so I guess this is delayed.

[AtLiberty]

1. Thanks

!!!

[Kurovski]

2. On now. it will be interrupted by Hastert.

[marions ghost]

3. in general

disappointing. At least they had Felton- computer science professor from Princeton-talking about how easy it is to install undetectable code which will change results.

Gary Smith--Forsyth County GA Board of Elections, Diebold defender = particularly unconvincing.

However Barbara Simons is doing her best to tackle the really tough questions and makes sense.

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

Bio of Barbara Simons
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=2074

In addition to serving on the Board of the Verified Voting Foundation, Barbara Simons is co-chair of ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM), which she founded in 1993. She was President of ACM, the premier organization for computing professionals, from July 1998 until June 2000.

An expert on electronic voting, Dr. Simons was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She is also participating on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Secure Electronic Registration and Voting (SERVE) Project.

Dr. Simons is a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the Distinguished Service Award from CRA, the Norbert Wiener Award from CPSR, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from EFF. She was ed by C|NET as one of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100 Women in Computing.” Science Magazine featured her in a special edition on women in science.

[Awsi Dooger]

4. I'm watching the replay now

Kimball Brace made some references that made it sound like he is familiar with this forum of at least the prevalent themes. He said Democrats in particular are pushing for hand counted ballots and absentee ballots but they might regret what they wish for and it's not a panacea. He emphasized that absentee ballots, if not filled out correctly, could be rejected or improperly read by the machines especially if you try to erase something.

Also, he said voting equipment is a "once in a lifetime purchase." He said it's not like buying a PC where you upgrade to a new one every few years. "You buy it and you live with it until you retire and someone else takes over." Brace said that was the reality of voting machinery and the budgets simply weren't sufficient to make frequent changes.

He called optical scan a very delicate process. "If timing marks are off none of the ballots will be counted right. That may have been part of the problem in Cuyahoga County in the May primary."

Brace said the over votes were still somewhat prevalent in optical scan since some voters will inevitably circle the donut hole instead of filling it in, and the machine isn't equipped to read a situation like that.

I only caught the last 10 or 15 minutes but those were the highlights of that final portion.