Voting-machine company dictated terms of 'independent' state-run audit

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Submitted by lucidity on Mon, 03/26/2007 - 10:23am.

The Brad Blog:

The private voting machine company which manufactured the touch-screen hardware and software used during Sarasota, Florida's contested District 13 Congressional election between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan (R) sent a letter in December of 2006 to David Drury, the chief of the state's Bureau of Voting Systems Certification, dictating the terms of the state-run audit convened to investigate the causes for massive undervote rate which seems to have tipped the election.

The extraordinary 3-page letter [...] from Electronic Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) Vice President, Steven Pearson, is described as an "agreement" and instructs Drury on what may and may not be disclosed in the state's final audit report regarding the investigation. [...]

The long list of ES&S narrow dictates of what may or may not be discussed in the state report, which was finally released last month to much criticism from Jennings and others, includes (but is not limited to):

[...]

  • No statements rendering opinions on proper uses, improper use, or correctness of source code

  • No statements rendering opinions on security techniques employed or not employed
  • No statements discussing relevance of any discoveries made in this review to any elections or contests outside the 2006 Sarasota General Election, U.S. House of Representative District 13 race
  • No statements regarding conformance to source code standards of any type or kind

Would you buy a used election from ESS?

#530 On Tue, 03/27/2007 8:46pm UtahOwl said,

It is easy to infer, from what Mr. Pearson of ESS does NOT want disclosed, that ESS specifically

i. will not guarantee that their source code (the set of instructions
that display the ballot and tabulate the votes) is correct

ii. will not guarantee that their voting machines are tamper-proof

iii.knows that their source code could not meet adequate standards
for reliability, accuracy, and security against vote-tampering

I'm for "spreading democracy" to every corner of the U.S.A., before we make grandiose claims about doing so abroad. It's time that Congress was tasked with fixing the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to reflect the fact that electronic voting machines are not ready for prime time. Making voting easier is a great idea, but in its present form HAVA just reserves space at the public trough for a bunch of greedy and incompetent pigs named ESS, Diebold, Avante, et al.

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Duct tape on mouth would work

#531 On Wed, 03/28/2007 4:04pm Larry Bergan said,

Next they're going to tell us we can't throw these worthless pieces of crap in the Boston Harbor. At least the tea had some value.

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