Government rejects e-voting paper trail proposal

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Some folks thought we had already won the war and that we should
abandon federal legislation to stop paperless voting.

I knew that the opponents of voter verified paper ballots would
continue against us. They fought us in NC for almost a year
after we passed the law, and they will be back on our heels
again each legislative session.

Government rejects e-voting paper trail proposal
Grant Gross

December 04, 2006 (IDG News Service) A U.S. government board looking
at ways to improve the security of electronic voting has rejected one
proposal that would have required election officials to use
paper-trail ballots or other audit technologies with the machines.

The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), an advisory
board to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), on Monday
failed to pass a proposal to certify only those direct record
electronic (DRE) machines that use independent audit technology.
Before the 6-6 vote, TGDC members expressed concerns that a
requirement would create a costly mandate to local governments....

But Brittain Williams, representing the National Association of State
Election Directors, said the U.S. banking industry has largely figured
out how to conduct large-scale electronic transactions with few
mistakes. "You say all software is buggy," he said. "The question is,
can you test it to an acceptable list of security? The banking
industry ... moves billions of dollars around every day with this
buggy software without ever producing a single piece of paper."
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005632

Now the anti paper election officials will point out this as
reason against the "placebo" voter verified paper ballots and
towards the independent verification systems (scams).

Look out Maryland, Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina, you may
end up with a VoteHERE device hooked up to each of your DREs, and you
may be stuck with your Diebold machines or DREs.

There was a huge push by NC's State Board of Elections for paperless
verification systems along with DREs, and it was very difficult to counter.

Only federal legislation that has a large number of co sponsors can put an
end to this - paperless verification systems being used in the United States.

[rumpel]

1. TGDC

The individuals comprising the TGDC are as follows:

Chair:
Dr. William Jeffrey
Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gaithersburg, MD

Representing Standards Board:
John A. Gale
Nebraska Secretary of State

Alice Miller
Director of Elections-District of Columbia
Washington, DC

Representing Board of Advisors:
Sharon Turner Buie
Director of Elections-Kansas City
Kansas City, MO

Helen Purcell
Maricopa County Recorder
Phoenix, AZ

Architectural and Transportation Barrier Compliance Board:
Philip G. Pearce
College Station Texas

Tricia Mason
Cheyenne Wyoming

Representing ANSI:
David Wagner (PENDING)
Associate Professor, Computer Science Division
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA

Representing IEEE:
H. Stephen Berger
TEM Consulting, LP-Chair, IEEE SEC 38 (Voting Syst. Stds.)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Georgetown, TX

Representing National Association of State Election Directors (NASED):
Dr. Brittain Williams
Retired professor- Kennesaw State
Tucker, GA

Paul Miller
Voting Systems Manager
Secretary of State Office
Olympia, WA

Other:
Patrick Gannon
President and CEO, OASIS
Billerica, MA

Whitney Quesenbery
Past President-Usability Professionals' Association
High Bridge, NJ

Dr. Ronald Rivest
Professor, MIT-Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Cambridge, MA

Dr. Daniel Schutzer
Executive Director
Financial Services Technology Consortium
New York,NY

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

2. Williams most damaging, Berger former Election Center Crony

that is why I can't understand how people can think we have nearly won
the war.

Anti paper proponents are not going to give up.

They will use every dirty trick they have to promote paperless voting.

Until we OUTLAW paperless voting, we cannot make further gains.

Any state that would have required Voter Verified Paper Ballots
has already done so.

Virginia has already bought a hodge podge of
paperless touchscreens.

Maryland's Linda Lamone is in love with her paperless Diebold,
and the state's democrats even voted to spend millions more on
paperless electronic poll books.

South Carolina is a mostly if not all paperless touchscreen state.

Georgia has what, 22,000 paperless DREs, and that is where Britt Williams comes
in. He lives and works there, and he will strenghten the opposition to
getting rid of the DREs.

Advocates for HCPB are even further away from their dream than before 2006.

Now we see that the so-called "experts" have given their "seal of approval" for
paperless voting.

Expect VoteHERE to make a ton of sales.

Our fight for the remaining paperless states will be even harder.

Didn't someone say VoteHERE spent alot on lobbying for HAVA?

[rumpel]

5. the article seems to say

that the objection was mainly, because it will place an undue burden on the states and counties = money and effort

this should not be acceptable - placing more value on financials and convenience than on protecting each vote.

Besides, the argument of the banks - they make errors all the time - most people do not notice the extra $3.00 here and $1.00 here in fees that are hidden in their statements. I had -$60 some dollars of ATM fees and supposed withdrawals over several days on an unused account with very little funds. Plus of course overdraft fees tacked on, daily negative balance fees through to the date I received their mailing etc. When I called, I told them, why would I try to withdraw from an account I know I have a small balance, and if someone was committing fraud, and to please tell me which ATM branch it shows? They said it was a bank error. (repeated, mind you) If this was a heavily used account, I may not have noticed it. Some years ago, another bank lost a wire to London, and had the gall to tell us it will cost $40 to trace the wire. An attorney had to send a letter and the bank "found" that the wire was taken out of the account but was never submitted. And who gained in the 40 days the funds were sitting at the bank. No apologies - nothing. These are both big banks.
Look no further than the mortgage servicers and credit bureaus and their "proprietary" software, and automatically generated mailings - correcting errors is a pain- because it is all generated by machines. Over the past few years, I think it has gotten worse.

People rely way too much on these systems - watch, it will collapse sooner or later. too.

"What we're saying is we can't tell if they're secure or not," he added. "We don't know how to create requirements to tell if they're secure."
This should be enough reason to stop this insanity.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

6. they cited the banks improperly

The article's subtitle was misleading:

"Government, banking officials claim it's not necessary".

There were no banking officials quoted that I can see.
Its a fracking false argument anyway.
This is our elections we are talking about,
held 1 time a year or every so many years, and not on
permanently and professionally installed ATMS, and with
totally different checks and balances and rules.

Having worked in banking,I have not seen any transaction that was
not backed up with paper, either an individual slip of paper or
a report of the transaction.

A bank I worked at processed 30K + pieces of paper for about 20 branches,
they used an optical scan machine to scan the docs 2 different ways.

This machine worked well, it did kick out some rejects, and we handled those
manually to correct the data created by the scanned images.

Opponents of paper are back, and using any excuse they can.

It would be cheaper to throw away the DREs and buy optical scan, it would
save these paperless states money in 1 year.

If money really were the issue, Maryland would have purchased optical scanners
with the money Ehrlich gave them, instead of Diebold e-poll books.

[rumpel]

7. they are probably referring to Schutzer

[Bill Bored]

3. They had it killed even before LUNCH!

You can watch the video here:
http://origin.eastbaymedia.com/~nist/html/tgdc-1206/

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. the lies and misdirection we are up against

The threat posed to us by VVSG certifying "software dependent"
(read - paperless) voting systems reminded me of the fight we had
against that such systems in NC.

NC was not fortunate enough to ban DREs, even though
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri had initially convinced the lawmakers to do so.
http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/Rebecca_Mercuri_Jan_7_2005.pdf

Bob Cordle, one of our Democratic State Board of Election Members strongly opposed
voter verified paper ballots, here is his letter to the E-voting study committe:
http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/BobCordleOppose.pdf

Here Cordle cites the Election Center's crazy letter that says paper is
not as good as computers
http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/BobCordleThe_Elec.pdf

We tried to get Cordle off of the SBOE, but the Governor changed the election
law so that he could keep him on. We call that the "Bob Cordle Protection Act".

We even had Chuck Herrin present testimony on HCPB,
http://www.chuckherrin.com/ComputersVoteTabulation.pdf
and they still shoved that idea down the tubes.
At least we persuaded them to designate HCPB as a "certified" voting system
that counties may choose.

Here is testimony of a pro DRE, anti paper election director who traveled
often to the NC legislature to oppose us.
This is what activists are up against in states that have anti paper election officials
The lawmakers treated him as an expert since he is an election director:

August 11, 2005 (2 days before our law was passed)

George Gilbert: "I’m George Gilbert, and I am representing the Guilford County Board of Elections here today.

I’ve been Director of Elections in Guilford County for 17 years, and we’ve used DRE equipment for 17 years in Guilford County.

And I’m here basically not on a matter of policy but on a matter of practical applications.

I want you all to at least see one time what you’re looking at. (He holds up long tape.)

This is a voter verifiable paper tape produced from one of the vendors that is currently having their system certified.

Here’s a single ballot. This ballot over here contains 55 votes, and so a fairly good-sized roll of paper.

I’m not sure now we would handle it if we had to do a manual recount, but I’m sure we would find a way.

I would have 3,545 of those tapes that size if I had had this system in place in 2004 in Guilford County.

I did a recount a recount of our 194,000 ballot records.

That is the individual ballot records for each voter in our electronic backup system last year when we had our recounts.

It took me 14 seconds to do that recount.

You can think about what it would take to manually recount 200,000 pieces of paper.

Optical-scan ballots. Some are clear; some are very ambiguous.

You saw what Florida did in 2000, which is really why we’re here.

Florida now bans the manual counting paper ballots.
They learned their lesson.

The State of Washington last year went through this.
Finally certified their governor’s race.

It cost them not quite a million dollars to conduct that manual recount
of one statewide race.

Well we conducted a recount of two statewide races last year.

If we had to do that manually on paper, it would have run us
roughly $2.4 million to conduct that recount using the exact same cost
figures that they had in the State of Washington.

The final thing is that I don’t know if there’s anyone left that
honestly believes that North Carolina precinct officials
or public officials can manually count 3.5 million ballots on paper accurately.

They might be able to do it one time. They might not get it right the next time.

You would have literally thousands and thousands of people sitting
there looking these documents trying to coordinate what they’re doing—
trying to get it to add up properly.

There’s no way to test the accuracy of manual counting;
there is no way to verify the accuracy of manual counting.

All you can do is do it again, and you don’t know which errors
you made the first time or the second time.

I can test electronic tabulating. It tests in a lot of different ways,
and I’ve tested manual tabulations.

We did it for over a hundred years in this country, and we’ve spent
the last hundred years trying to find better systems to replace
manual tabulation of paper ballots.

We haven’t gotten it perfect.

Probably the most frequently used cliché in elections is
there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system.

The paper certainly is not it."

http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/HouseElectLawAug10Gilbert.doc


This is typical of what we were up against, and what we will be up against again.
We have had to rebut this guy time after time after time.

This election director bought the DREs with the flimsy paper trail, because he WANTED them to fail.
Gilbert also brought a VoteHERE device with him to this meeting and showed it to the lawmakers.


***We must take a look at the situation at hand and ask ourselves, do we really think
that the EAC and others are going to do the right thing?