Thursday, June 08, 2006

The Elections Center leads industry attack on computer scientists
Promotes insecure DRE machines at public’s expense

Summary by Sandra Spangler

• It has come to light that Diebold, through Jack Abramoff’s firm Greenberg Traurig, paid $275,000 to Robert Ney, Republican Chair of the House Administration Committee who has not allowed Rep. Rush Holt’s HAVA reform bill HR 550 that would require manual audits and voter verified paper records to be voted out of committee. Ney stepped down from the chairmanship and is the subject of a widening investigation that is bringing him closer to indictment.

• A powerful tightly knit closed private network operates secretly to influence Secretaries of State and Election officials in every state to enforce discipline that keeps officials accountable to vendors, not to the public. Election Directors who tell the truth like Ion Sancho, Election Director in Leon County FL and Bruce Funk, County Clerk of Emery County Utah have been demonized and threatened with loss of their jobs and pensions.

• This private network is coordinated by The Election Center that initiated a PR campaign in cooperation with an industry trade group, the Election Techology Council (ETC) within the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) funded by $100,000 contributions from each vendor member to malign the reputations of computer professionals who point out flaws and security risks of electronic voting.

• Attacks on the credibility of computer scientists continue as Diebold tries to defend itself against revelations of massive security holes that Harri Hursti in a Black Box Voting report shows were engineered into the Diebold TSx by design. Michael Shamos, PhD, a Pennsylvania computer scientist who examines and certifies machines in that state who generally has supported paperless touch screen voting, acknowledges the severity of the the national security risk. Avi Rubin, PhD a computer scientist from from Johns Hopkins who worked as an elections worker in Maryland in 2004 knows that insufficient control of chain of custody of voting machines and their smart card ballot boxes leaves these machines open to tampering. Rubin says he almost had a heart attack when he learned of the newest revelations that showed the security holes engineered into the Diebold TSx.

• The Elections Center is run by R. Doug Lewis, a political operative who reports no special expertise in voting systems security, management or risk in a skimpy biography.

• Lewis, through the Elections Center coordinates professional organizations of Elections Directors and Secretaries of State that have power over the federal and state certification of voting machines. Vendors are ex-officio members of these organizations and ply their wares through face time purchased through the corporate affiliate program.

• According to the American Prospect article Don’t Count On it “The Election Center’s members include approximately 1,000 dues-paying state and local election-administration officials, as well some voting-machine vendors. The center provides a host of services for its members, informing them of new developments in election law, sponsoring professional development conferences, and offering training workshops for new election officials. In advance of the last election, the [Elections] center also performed a quasi-oversight role over the machine-testing process.”

• The National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) was commissioned by the Federal Election Commission over a decade ago with the authority to select which private labs would test new voting-machine technologies.

• The vendors pay so-called Independent Testing Authorities to test their hardware/firmware and software. Two labs, Wyle and Ciber did not report any of these security flaws discovered by Harri Hursti and validated by the Callifornia Voting System Board. Lab directors, Shawn Southworth and Jim Dearman have served on the NASED Voting Systems Board.

• The NASED with the involvement of the Elections Center federally certifies voting systems. Most states, including Arizona, have a closed non-transparent system that rubber stamps federal certification with no performance or security tests. Only California, and perhaps Pennsylvania, have rigorous procedures to independently examine voting systems. Ironically, the Arizona SoS tested the AutoMark in an actual primary election, but did not publicly demonstrate or test the Diebold TSx

• HAVA authors mandated that the Elections Assistance Center (EAC) pass a new set of recommendations for state guidelines by 2006. The EAC passed on the responsibility for standards to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). According to Rebecca Mercuri, PhD from Harvard University, the IEEE voting standards working group has been “hijacked” by industry representatives who place profit above security. A long-time ES&S employee, Herb Deutch chairs this working group.

• The Elections Assistance Commission chartered the National Institute of Standards (NIST) to form a committee, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) to establish standards by which voting machines would be tested. The charter requires by law that there be no conflict of interest in the decision makers.

• According to a Report from VoteTrust USA TGDC committee members Dr. Brit Williams and Paul Craft who have ties to the Election Center and vendors, intervened when vendors objected and wielded their power to compel the TGDC to delete new standards requiring voter verified paper audit trails in order to allow existing voting systems to comply with standards.

• A “revolving door” between former regulators and industry reinforces vendor influence over state certification of voting machines. A report by TrueVote Maryland calls attention to a “Whitewash in the Making.” “Maryland State Elections Director Linda Lamone, current NASED President hired a firm closely linked to vendors, the Craft Freeman & McGregor Group Inc., to “independently test” Diebold voting machines after massive security holes were reported. GOP Maryland Governor, Bob Ehrlich has repudiated the DRE machines. Paul Craft, formerly head of the Florida Bureau of Voting Systems Certification who has no credentials to evaluate voting machine security formed a partnership with former state voting machine certifiers Steve Freeman and Kate McGregor. Craft has been linked to purges of voter rolls in Florida.

• As industry has acquired power and influence by establishing a professional network coordinated by the Elections Center, the American election system has become increasingly privatized, undemocratic and unaccountable to public oversight.
• Blackboxvoting.org has posted a list of organizations that organize and maneuver U.S. Elections. BBV points out that these organizations share a:

o Privatization ethic

o Pay to play (swap contributions for face time)

o The Elections Center plays a major role in training (propagandizing).

o These organizations (NASS) (NASED) etc. consider themselves to be private entities, not public, and may claim that they are not subject to public records laws. They sometimes claim that their meetings are not subject to public meetings laws. In other words, these organizations provide a way to conduct The People's business in private.

Posted by Protect Democracy :: 6/08/2006 10:45:00 PM :: ---------------oOo---------------

Saturday, February 25, 2006

RESOLUTION- Feb. 2006

RESOLUTION

STATE COMMITTEE MEETING

Phoenix, AZ Saturday, Saturday, February 25, 2006

Submitted by:

Gerry Straatemeier, State Committee Member

District 26 – Pima County

Authored by; Sandra Spangler, PC LD 26 and

John R Brakey, PC LD 27 also both members of AUDIT-AZ

AMERICANS UNITED for DEMOCRACY, INTEGRITY, and TRANSPARENCY in Elections

Resolution to Recommend that the Democratic National Committee Establish a National Election Integrity Clearinghouse

WHEREAS, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) reportⁱ released October 21, 2005, and endorsed by the Chairs and Ranking Members of three House Committees found that "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." Some of these machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected" and,

WHEREAS, two vendors provided electronic voting machines that counted 80% of the national vote; flawed voting systems were certified by a federal vendor-financed testing authority; states do not routinely perform their own independent inspections of voting systems before certifying voting equipment; prohibited interpreted code was found in the removable memory cards capable of changing vote data in Diebold optical-scan systems by two independent computer experts retained by nonpartisan Black Box Voting at the request of Leon County FL Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho. The experts easily penetrated the county’s election system and were able to flip votes in a mock election. All Diebold op-scans and touch screen machines have subsequently been found to contain prohibited code and,

WHEREAS a troubling pattern of lost votes on both optical scan and touch screen voting systems validates the GAO findings. Iowa State University computer expert Dr. Douglas Jonesⁱⁱ who examined optical scan machines used in a disputed LD 20 Maricopa County, AZ primary election, found that if voters followed the ballot marking instructions, there was a 1 in 12 chance that their votes would not be counted. In New Mexico Sequoia Edge touch screen machines recorded up to a 37% undervote in some Hispanic and Native American precincts; ⁱⁱⁱand,

WHEREAS machines equipped with voter verifiable paper audit trails (VVPAT) that store votes invisibly on hidden memory cards and print out paper records on continuous rolls of thermal paper that cannot be recounted, are neither reliable or accurate. The significance of what has come to be known as the “Harri Hursti Hack” reported in the Washington Post^iv is that valid verification through random manual audits based on statistically significant norms that trigger automatic manual recounts of legal voter-marked paper ballots to reconstruct elections are the only effective checks upon computerized voting that will restore public confidence in elections, and

WHEREAS the Arizona Democratic Party is the first state party in the nation to respond to the demonstrated security vulnerability of electronic voting and the specific problems identified by the GAO report by forming an Election Integrity Committee composed of citizen experts to restore public oversight and accountability to elections. The Committee has set up seven Mini-Task Forces to monitor, investigate, identify problems, propose solutions and hold election officials accountable for: Equipment Certification, Tabulation, Voter Registration, Absentee/Early Voting in Polling Places, Election Administration, and Law, Legislation and Initiatives and,

WHEREAS: without national regulation private vendors are allowed to wield enormous financial power to apply unequal and unfair standards when they negotiate contracts with counties and states and often collaborate to enforce proprietary rights. Ability to undermine the authority of state and county election officials to administer fair elections by arbitrarily restricting choice by threatening lawsuits for patent infringement, reserving the right to whom they will sell, willfully canceling contracts in some states while honoring the same terms in others must be restrained ^vand,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED Arizona Democratic Party recommends that the Democratic National Committee establish an Election Integrity Information Clearinghouse and database within the DNC to coordinate and mobilize a national action network to defeat the erosion of public oversight of elections caused by private vendor control. The Arizona Democratic Party recommends that states set up Election Integrity Committees based on the Arizona model to:

• Collect and analyze data to identify patterns common to more than one state to share that information quickly through the network.

• Quickly detect changing tactics and technological exploits that threaten election integrity/security and abuse voting rights

• Hold regional or targeted problem area summits that assemble the best legal, technical and government professionals to educate citizen experts on how to improve skills to evaluate election systems.
  

i “ELECTIONS:Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are UnderWay, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed http://www.BradBlog.com/Docs/GAOReport_ElectionSecurity_102105.pdf

ii STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS W. JONES Regarding the Optical Mark-Sense Vote Tabulators in Maricopa County http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/ArizonaDist20.pdf

“Ballot Box Breakdowns” by John Dougherty, Phoenix New Times http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=750&Itemid=113

iii New Mexico Overview http://www.voteraction.org/index.php/static/About_Voter_Action/2006-01-15 09:22

ivAs Elections Near, Officials Challenge Balloting Security In Controlled Test, Results Are Manipulated in Florida System http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012101051_pf.html

v ES&S reneges on Leon County...http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17106.html?1137199250

Posted by Protect Democracy :: 2/25/2006 10:15:00 AM :: ---------------oOo---------------