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Florida: ES&S Betrays Agreement with Ion Sancho
By Susan Pynchon, Florida Fair Elections Coalition
January 14, 2006
Election Systems and Software (ES&S) has reneged on its agreement to sell its optical scan voting system and the AutoMark ballot marker to Leon County, Florida. Leon County had planned to purchase the ES&S voting system following two successful, authorized hacks of the county's Diebold AccuVote optical scan voting system.
The tests of Leon County's Diebold voting system, conducted in May and December, 2005, were authorized by Leon County's courageous Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho. These tests showed that election results could be altered, without detection, with access only to one Diebold memory card. As a result of the successful hacks, plus Diebold's subsequent refusal to answer county officials' phone calls or to provide software required for upgrades to the Diebold system, the Leon County Council voted to authorize the purchase of the ES&S system. ES&S had first contacted Sancho in December, 2004 and again in June, 2005 to offer to sell its equipment to Leon County.
Everything appeared to be going as planned, when suddenly, in a voice-mail message received on December 29, 2005, Gary Crump, ES&S Chief Operating Officer, told Sancho that the company had decided to deal only with long-time customers due to equipment deadline considerations. (This statement is patently untrue, since ES&S went ahead and contracted with Volusia County, Florida after agreeing to sell to Leon County).
Because Crump's message was left on Sancho's cell phone, Sancho was able to release Crump's message verbatim to news media. The story is expected to be in tomorrow's Tallahassee Democrat. Sancho has also spoken with reporters from the Washington Post and the Miami Herald.
Leon County did not yet have a fully executed contract with ES&S, but the Leon County sale had been agreed to by two other top ES&S officials: Al Benek, Vice President of Operations and Dick Fox, Financial Officer, with handshakes all around, in the first week of December, 2005, and agreement had been reached on all contractual terms and conditions. However, ES&S President, Aldo Tesi, refused to sign the contract.
Since the reason given by ES&S for refusing to do business with Sancho is not valid, what could the real reason be? Is it retribution for exposing the vulnerabilities of the Diebold optical scan system. Is it collusion on the part of Diebold and ES&S? Or is ES&S simply afraid that Sancho might authorize similar "tests" on its equipment, exposing vulnerabilities in the ES&S voting system?
When Sancho explained to the Leon County Manager about the events that had transpired, the county manager responded that he is 100% supportive of Sancho's efforts to fight for paper-based verified voting systems, and urged Sancho not to succumb to intimidation by voting system vendors.
Now that Leon County has dumped Diebold, and ES&S has dumped Leon County, what are the county's choices for holding its next election? Florida has certified only three voting system vendors: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia. Furthermore, the state has approved only paperless DREs from these three companies to comply with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) for voters with disabilities.
Because Sancho boldly dared to conduct the security tests that should have been performed by the state and federal government, Leon County's state-certified options for voting systems appear to have gone from slim to grim. What choices does the county now have?
Sequoia, one of the three Florida-approved vendors, has only paperless DREs to offer disabled voters. Sancho, who is adamantly in favor of paper ballots, is determined that DREs, which have severe security problems of their own, will never be used in Leon County.
ES&S officials not only reneged on their agreement with Sancho, but did so at the last possible moment, just two days before the January 1 HAVA deadline for the purchase of accessible voting systems. Additionally, there is no proof that the ES&S system is any more secure than Diebold's.
That leaves Diebold itself, the company whose serious security vulnerabilities were exposed by Sancho. This latter choice, in fact, seems to be the option that Sancho currently favors. Despite the problems now known about the Diebold system, Sancho believes his past elections have been secure because, unlike other Florida elections supervisors, he has always conducted random manual audits of paper ballots following each and every election. Sancho believes, as do computer scientists and election reform activists across the country, that conducting manual audits of paper ballots is the only way to guarantee an accurate optical-scan election.
If Sancho pursues the Diebold option, it would prevent the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for a new voting system, and it is also a technology with which Sancho's staff is already familiar. As ironic as this choice might seem, it is not a bad option. Optical scan systems, despite their proven security vulnerabilities, remain a far better choice than DREs because of the ability to manually audit the paper ballots.
Sancho's fourth option would be to conduct Leon County elections with hand-counted paper ballots, in conjunction with the AutoMark or Vote-Pad for disabled voters. Conducting a hand-counted, paper ballot election in Florida would be considered a radical move in a state that has done everything possible to destroy verifiable elections. However, there are numerous jurisdictions around the United States where hand-counted paper ballots are still the norm, and other places that are considering returning to paper. This choice would relieve Sancho of having to deal with untrustworthy vendors. It would allow him to dismiss those who think they can intimidate him into submission. It would put voting machine companies on notice that their greed cannot control elections in this country. And it would send a message to the nation that our electoral process should not have to depend on unreliable, insecure, hackable voting systems that allow for the undetectable alteration of election results.
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