Voting machines at UT Austin left out in public at night, unattended

[rainbow4321]

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2006/10/31/TopStories/Voting.Machines.Lack.AfterHours-2411583.shtml?norewrite200610311425&sourcedomain=www.dailytexanonline.co


Travis County has 20 electronic voting machines located in the lobby of the Flawn Academic Center, and according to UT police chief Robert Dahlstrom, it is possible that no one is watching them.

When the polls close, the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting machines are sealed and locked together with bar-coded, plastic ties, but remain in the unlocked lobby of the FAC and are attended by the lone guard who checks student IDs at night. The minimal supervision of voting machines allows a greater potential for those machines to be compromised. "The guard's job responsibility is not watching those machines," Dahlstrom said.

The FAC also has security cameras trained on the polling area where the machines are kept, but they would only be accessed and checked if an incident occurred, Dahlstrom said.

In September, a team at Princeton University accessed a Diebold AccuVote-Ts model electronic voting machine. "Basically, the software is storing votes in memory that is very similar to a digital camera," Alex Halderman, a computer science graduate student working on the project, told the Texan last week. "It's storing votes in a regular file, with regular flash memory that any software program could alter."

[Dora]

1. Well, crap. That's my early voting location, or it was until now. n/t

[Daphne08]

2. You have got to be kidding!

Unbelievable.

[bobbolink]

6. Believe IT.

Yes, this is what we've come to.

Hear all the OUTRAGE??

[Atman]

3. Believe it or not, I'll come to their defense

Not totally, though. They should know better. But remember, these are new machines. Unfortunately, they're treating the equipment the same as the old one's. In our precinct, the big old steel voting machines were delivered to the polling places up to a week in advance, and there they'd sit until election day. They were all locked and secure, so what was the harm. Remember, most poll workers are retirees and volunteers. They're just doing what they've always done. Look at all those machines...they aren't exactly SMALL. Not as big as the old steel machines, but you'd be hard pressed to fit all those in a broom closet. And if you look closely at the picture, midway up the extreme left side, you can see the lock and loop of the aircraft cable strung through all of them, and there appear to be red seal tags on each machine's case.

Could there be a better system? I suppose. But leaving them out like this is the least of our worries. There are other threads about poll workers taking them home...is that more preferable to a public building which very likely has a security system, maybe even cameras? The fraud takes place at the tabulator level or has already taken place inside the machines by the time they get to this point, believe me.

I'm calling "much ado about nothing." The very machines themselves are the security problem here, and it is too late to do anything about that.

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[elehhhhna]

4. Sorry, atman, but it's a big violation of TX election code, and

the Election Judges know it.

[Atman]

5. Okay, that's different

I am not aware of TX code. As I said, the old steel machines have always just been left out on the school gym floor, or the community center here. But those old behemoths aren't easily accessible.

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[elehhhhna]

8. That's exactly the problem...

the retirees who work the polls seem to be dedicated and serious. They want to conduct the process with integrity. They're not being propery trained, though. Mistrained, even? Perhaps. That's an idea worth examining, too. Who trains the poll Judges & poll workers?

Poll watchers are needed NOW to help monitor the process. Not to act like Kojak, or Dog & Beth, just to watch. It's easy -- the basics can be covered in 4 or 5 one-sided pages, tops.

[Atman]

9. Part is the problem is that they've made it so only retirees can do the job

Here, if you volunteer, you must report to the polls at 5:15 am, and are there until at least 8:00 pm, longer if the precinct head needs you. With elections held on Tuesdays, no one with a regular job can do it. When I first volunteered I thought I could just go in and help out for a few hours, but you can't...all day or nothing. Since I work for myself, I figured what the hell. But that is an insanely long day...it was tiring even for me, and was 20 year younger than virtually every other poll worker. It's just a crazy system!

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[rainbow4321]

10. Maybe so but...

Someone managed to drag/put them all clumped together in the corner there..if they can do that, surely they could have made their destination
somewhere more secure.
UT Austin is a city in itself (40,000+ students...and then there are the UT employees), including it's own police force/department, so I would hope they could have found someone with a little muscle to transport the machines and not leave it for an elderly person (assuming that the poll people there *are* elderly).

The students there are very politically active; national politicians make it a pit stop for a reason..so even getting someone from the huge student body to volunteer could have been an option.

My daughter goes there..I'll have to ask her how the overall turnout has been in the past week. I know in the 2004 election, there were reports that there were more students in line on a single early election day than there was in the entire 2000 election year.
Throw in the fact that this race involves our Gov race and that the campus is within spitting distance of the Capitol Building, and you're looking at a massive number of people who have/will use these unattended voting machines.

[Proud2BAmurkin]

7. such bullshit

nt