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Why I am worried about E-Voting

Sad Mac IconTonight I am going to mail the following links to articles on the dangers of the current three e-voting systems to the Washington State Secretary of State's office as a follow up to my letter of concerned with the plan to use Diebold voting systems in Washington State. I also plan to share this with my next Dean Meetup and encourage them to become educated on this issuse and ask our State Secretary of State to not use the current generation of unsecure voting machines in the November 2004 election.

Dean on Diebold Election Fraud
Howard Dean: The chairman of Diebold has sent a letter saying that he will do everything he can to get Bush reelected. This does not engender confidence in the American electoral system. If I become the Democratic nominee we will have teams, particularly in jurisdictions like Florida, who will be conducting poll watching activities to prevent the kind of Republican abuses that took place in the last election. We will do more work on the voting machine issue as the campaign moves along.

Vote count marred by computer woes
Boone County officials are searching for an answer to the computer glitch that spewed out impossible numbers and interrupted an otherwise uneventful election process Tuesday.

Diebold Confirms U.S. Vote Count Vulnerabilities

All the President's votes?

Ghosts and goblins and voting machines

Can Voting Machines Be Trusted?

On Edge Over E-Voting

Calif. Touch-Screen Fraud Feared

Electronic Vote Security Uncertain

Calif. Halts E-Vote Certification
Uncertified software may have been installed on electronic voting machines used in one California county, according to the secretary of state's office. Marc Carrel, assistant secretary of state for policy and planning, told attendees Thursday at a panel on voting systems that California was halting the certification process for new voting machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems.

E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum
Swarthmore College students embroiled in a legal battle against voting-machine maker Diebold Election Systems have received a groundswell of support from universities and colleges nationwide. Students at Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley and at least 10 other campuses have joined the fight for public access to internal memos obtained from a Diebold server in March.

E-Vote Firm's Bill Comes Due
Citing concerns that Diebold Election Systems installed uncertified software on some electronic voting systems in California without the state's knowledge, the state is forcing the company to pay for an audit of all its voting machines used in the November election in order to win certification for a new model.

Suspect Code Used in State Votes
An investigation by California's secretary of state has revealed that Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software on electronic voting machines in a California county. Voters in Alameda County, a densely populated region in the San Francisco Bay Area that includes the cities of Berkeley and Oakland, used a Diebold touch-screen-voting system utilizing uncertified software in Tuesday's election and in last month's gubernatorial recall election.

Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting
While critics in the United States grow more concerned each day about the insecurity of electronic voting machines, Australians designed a system two years ago that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They chose to make the software running their system completely open to public scrutiny.

E-Vote Software Leaked Online
Software used by an electronic voting system manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems has been left unprotected on a publicly available server, raising concerns about the possibility of vote tampering in future elections.

Time to Recall E-Vote Machines?
As Californians head to the polls on Tuesday, voters in at least one county will cast their ballots electronically on machines that have been shown to be flawed.

Did E-Vote Firm Patch Election?
Diebold Election Systems has had a tumultuous year, and it doesn't look like it's getting any better. Last January the electronic voting machine maker faced public embarrassment when voting activists revealed the company's insecure FTP server was making its software source code available for everyone to see.

E-Voting Blunder Creates a Stir
A strange case of an election tally that appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines.

Voting Software Firm Gets Sued
In a case calling into question the thoroughness of the certification process for touch-screen voting systems, a former engineer for an election software company has filed a lawsuit against his ex-employer, claiming executives ignored his warnings of potential defects.

E-Voting Audit Ready for Public
A security audit ordered by Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich on Diebold Election Systems' touch-screen voting machines is complete, and a version of it is ready for public consumption.

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Comments

JTLYK, there's a report on Slashdot today ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/12/1320208&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=126&tid=99 ), where it was reported that an election using e-voting returned 144000 votes, when there are only 19000 registered voters. They also later found that the real number of votes cast was only 5352.
This is yet another mark against e-voting.

Posted by: Fortissimo at November 12, 2003 7:15 AM

Ok, there are not going to be any screw ups with e voting, because it would be so noticeable if the systems were rigged. If you think otherwise, then you need to get your facts strait, and realize that people in general arnt as oblivious as you may beleive.

Posted by: Pat at June 1, 2004 5:41 PM

Pat you are being naive. Without accountability and auditability voting tampering can be so minute that we would never notice it. You are basically outsourcing the very action of democracy to a corporation to run the election. That is so fundamentally wrong I don't know where to begin.

Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at June 1, 2004 7:04 PM

Ok, modern voting has relied heavily on machines to do the voting, eg, punchcards. If a corporation is going to try to steal an election, they could have done it years ago. If you are going out and saying that E voting is going to be tamperd, why not go back, and prove that all the other elections that have been help were not tamperd? If you are this concerned about tamperd voting, perhaps all americans should "for the good of democracy" go back to hand votes, or yea and nays.

Posted by: Pat at June 2, 2004 9:12 PM

There is a verifyable paper trail with punch card and paper voting. There can be no democracy without accountability and auditability in elections. This election is to damn important to trust Diabold.

Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at June 2, 2004 9:40 PM

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