Do we have time to get paper trails on electronic voting machines before November?

[Oy]

The last line suggests that the votes were stored in the internal database, but not reported properly. That’s actually good news, if there is any in this whole bleak picture. The downside, though, is that it would require an employee of the vendor or someone trained appropriately by that company to get at the actual totals.

What the hell is the objection to attaching a printer to each machine? It sounds like most of these machines must have had some kind of paper trail, since they were in fact able to do recounts.

[BrainGlutton]

@Oy!

What the hell is the objection to attaching a printer to each machine?

Good question, and not easy to answer. From Ronnie Dugger’s article (linked in the OP):

Not surprisingly, the starkest resistance to the voter-verified paper trail comes from Florida, where more than half the citizens will have to vote on touch-screen systems in November. The President’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush, and Jeb’s Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, express unqualified confidence in the trustworthiness of the DRE systems and militantly oppose providing a paper-ballot trail for them. Hood has denied that the electronic voting machines can be tampered with in the software, saying: “The touch-screen machines are not computers. You’d have to go machine by machine, all over the state.” A spokeswoman for her says flatly that “a manual recount is unnecessary.”

<snip>

’It’s Really a Matter of Trust’

Confident, friendly, but officious, Jesse Durazo, the registrar of voters of Santa Clara County in the heart of the Silicon Valley, is typical of hundreds of local election officials who berate “the academics.” This past spring, despite dire warnings from Professors Neumann of SRI and Dill of Stanford, Durazo led his county into buying 5,500 of the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs at $3,000 each ($20 million, figuring in everything). The anteroom of his county election headquarters is festooned with cheery signs such as one saying Voting Just Got Easier. He is delighted that DREs will facilitate voting by those who speak a foreign language (including Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese).

Durazo said that the AVC had first been approved by the federal government (which is not correct) and then certified by the California secretary of state. He said that providing a voter-verified ballot would open the way to “unlimited error,” while computer error, in contrast, can be “quantified.” As for Trojan horses smuggling in corrupt instructions, he said in a confident tone, “I don’t have those fears.” Stealing votes in the computers is next to impossible, he insisted, because local ballots are set up at the last minute, there are a large number of races and ballot initiatives in any one election, and the order of the candidates’ positions on the ballots is rotated in different precincts.

The three sets of all the votes, kept in the computer, provide the recount, he said. Are those not just copies of each other, automatically made? Durazo exclaimed in high dudgeon: “It’s a redundant perfection!.. It starts with the premise that the information in the system is correct.”

Alfred Gonzales, Durazo’s Filipino outreach specialist for voters who speak Tagalog, demonstrated the AVC, a sign on the top of which said Try It Out Today. No More Punchcards! I voted on it and asked Gonzales how I knew for sure that my vote would be counted. “Because it will be registered in the machine, saved in the hard drive, and put on a cartridge,” he said. “At the end of the day it will be in the printout of the total.” How did he know the machine would do that? “Because it has been federally certified!” he said. “There is fool-proof security.” Well, one more thing, I asked. There’s no ballot–what if you need a recount? “It’s really a matter of trusting the machine,” Gonzales said. Patting the AVC gently, he intoned with pride, “It’s really a matter of trust.”

That’s all I can find. In sum, nobody seems to be objecting to a paper trail on the grounds that it is a bad thing in itself, or too expensive, or impractical. All they’re saying is that a paper trail is not necessary because the machines are reliable and unhackable. Which I don’t believe.

[rjung]

@BrainGlutton

Good question, and not easy to answer.

Nah. It’s very easy to answer.

A paper trail would defeat the true purpose of these machines, which is to make elections easier to steal.

[BrainGlutton]

Time’s running out, but the good fight is still being fought! Here’s an update from today’s (September 28, 2004) Tampa Tribune – :

TALLAHASSEE - A federal appeals court in Atlanta on Monday revived a lawsuit by a Democratic congressman calling for a paper trail of Florida’s touch-screen votes.

The Florida secretary of state’s office, meanwhile, reiterated in a separate case that paper receipts ``will not be part of the solution’’ to manually recounting electronic votes in the Nov. 2 election.

In April, Secretary of State Glenda Hood prohibited manual recounts of undervotes and overvotes on touch-screen systems, saying the machines are incapable of misinterpreting voter intent. The ruling was challenged by a coalition of voters’ rights advocates.

In August, an administrative law judge said Hood lacked the authority to prohibit manual recounts. Hood decided Monday against appealing that case.

Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman in the secretary of state’s office, said new orders to county elections supervisors would be ready by Nov. 2.

We will take into consideration the guidance the judge gave us,'' Nash said. No voting machine vendor has submitted for certification a system that can provide voter-verifiable receipts, she said, so that will not be part of the solution.’’

Ben Wilcox, head of Common Cause Florida, said the secretary of state’s stance ``baffles me.’’

``I don’t understand how they think they can comply with the ruling without requiring some sort of paper ballot that could be recounted,’’ Wilcox said.

Meanwhile, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta revived a lawsuit filed by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, calling for printed records of touch-screen machines. The suit claims touch- screen voters would be denied due process should a recount be necessary.

A South Florida judge threw out Wexler’s suit on procedural grounds, but on Monday the appeals court ordered the Florida judge to take up the case.

And from the same edition – http://tampatrib.com/News/MGB7GWHKNZD.html:

TAMPA - Hillsborough County’s touch-screen voting system could be vulnerable to fraud because it relies on common software that security experts warn can be used to manipulate vote totals without leaving a trace.
The risk was discovered last week during a demonstration of the $13 million voting system conducted for The Tampa Tribune.

Computers used by Hillsborough elections officials to retrieve vote totals registered in the touch-screen machines are equipped with the popular Microsoft Office Suite software package, which includes the Excel spreadsheet and Access database programs. Office Suite uses the same format as the touch-screen system’s tabulation software, according to security experts, and could allow vote totals to be altered without producing an electronic entry on the system’s activity log.

Security Procedures Vary

The patchwork of resulting procedures for protecting the integrity of touch-screen systems is evident in the three counties using the touch- screen system in the Tampa Bay area:

Pasco County, aware of the software warnings, operates its computers without the standard-issue Microsoft Office package; Pinellas County uses the Microsoft software but has a mechanism to prevent the information from being altered by it; Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson said he was unaware of the concern.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, whose office is responsible for certifying the security of voting systems before they are used, said the ``local supervisors then have the responsibility to make the decisions on how their systems are configured.’’

The spokeswoman, Jenny Nash, said proprietary agreements with voting machine makers prevent her from discussing whether state-certified systems contain Microsoft Office Suite.

Hillsborough County’s touch-screen machines were built by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems. A company spokeswoman said it advises its customers to make sure only the software that comes with the voting machines is used to tabulate results. The manufacturer of the other type of touch-screen machines being used in Florida, Omaha-based Election Systems and Software Inc., provides the same advice to its customers.

**No Way To Track Fraud** University of Iowa computer science Professor Douglas W. Jones, who advised Miami- Dade and is a national expert on touch-screen voting security issues, said he recommends counties use a video projector to provide a live display of the computer screens the night of the election so tabulation can be more closely monitored.

``Watching people at computers doing computer things is not always informative. We should see what they are doing up close. We should ask them for explanations for what they are doing,’’ Jones said.

Jones said Hillsborough’s use of Microsoft Office Suite is especially troublesome because, unlike other opportunities for fraud, it leaves no entry on the Sequoia vote tabulation software’s activity log.

``As long as you are using the Sequoia management system, it contains a nice log of who has done what, when, but if you shut it down and use one of those database tools, there won’t be a record in the change log,’’ Jones said.

``In the event of a recount, in the event of an audit, there will be no record of 20 funny votes being added to Candidate X’s tally, if that’s what happens.’’

Additionally, it is unlikely the standard audit procedures in Hillsborough County would trigger closer inspection because votes could be swapped from one candidate to another without a trace. The audit compares signature logs from the polling place to determine that the total number of votes counted matches the total number of voters casting electronic ballots.

[Gaudere]

[Moderator Hat ON]

BrainGlutton, this post is a duplicate of your post in the OTHER voting thread here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=278130&page=1&pp=50 You’re essentially spamming the boards plus bumping your old thread without adding any new info. Do NOT do this. I am locking this thread.

[Moderator Hat OFF]