PC World Apr 10, 2008
U. S. Presidential Election Can Be Hacked
by Robert McMillan, IDG News Service

This year, the U. S. will pick a new president using electronic voting machines that can be hacked, security experts said Thursday at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

As the November election approaches, the question before officials is not how to fix known bugs in their e-voting systems, but rather, how best to check them for fraud, said David Wagner, an associate professor with the University of California, Berkeley's computer science department.

J. Horton | Cleveland | March 5

PD - At 5:14 a.m. Wednesday, a ballot out of Parma's Precinct 2E slid through an optical scanner at the Cuyahoga County Board of Election.

With that, Election Day came to a close in Cleveland.

Elections workers counted the 406,450th - and final - vote of the day nearly 10 hours after most of the county's polls closed. A nasty winter storm and a court ruling keeping 20 precincts open until 9 p.m. complicated the night.

Some ballots didn't reach the central counting site until after 1 a.m., when officials said three trucks still awaited unloading.

But overall, the count went smoothly - especially compared to recent elections in the county. More than 165 workers processed the ballots in efficient fashion. The first ballots arrived to cheers at 9:44 p.m. It took more than seven hours to complete the task.

For the second time in his presidency George Bush has had to provide an “economic stimulus” to the failing economy. When will these clowns get it? These short-term band-aids will not fix a broken economy. These rebate checks are just a way for the politicians in Washington to be able to accept their checks from the lobbyists without guilt. The truth is just like the last rebates they will do little to rescue an economy that has inherent flaws. Rather than do the hard work needed to create a working economy, the Washingtonians have opted for a symbolic gesture designed to appease the masses in time for the fall elections. It is a win/win for both parties and a loss for the American public.

Joe Guillen | Cleveland, Ohio | Nov 28

Cleveland Plain Dealer - A recount after next year's presidential election could mean disaster for Cuyahoga County based on problems discovered Tuesday with paper records produced by electronic voting machines.

More than 20 percent of the printouts from touch-screen voting machines were unreadable and had to be reprinted. Board of Elections workers found the damaged ballots when they conducted a recount Tuesday of two races, which involved only 17 of the county's 1,436 precincts.

The recount lasted more than 12 hours. Reprinting the damaged records and hand-counting them created an extra step that added hours.

more...

Letter from an Ohio Board of Elections (Holmes County) on missing 2004 ballots.

“Letters from the Edge” - Part 1

"Microsoft 811"

© 2004-06 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps
With Permission

Making the World Safe

For Voting Machine Vendors

Lolita C Baldor | Washington | August 24

AP - (I think, unlike Posse Commitatus, the law against the military diseminating propaganda in the US is still on the books - Ian.)

Shaping the Bush administration's message on the Iraq war has taken on new fervor, just as anticipation is building for the September progress report from top military advisers.

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad - serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

According to a memo circulated Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, is looking for personnel for what he called the high-priority effort to distribute Defense Department information on Iraq.

Election Unit Spins off from Corporate Parent, Becomes 'Premier Election Solutions' After Failure to Find Buyer for Failing Unit!
Is Full Bankruptcy Far Behind?

-- By Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO...
at Brad Blog

Diebold Elections Systems, Inc., is no more. At least in name.

After a year and a half of conversely trying to dump their failed voting unit and/or lying to customers about the reliability and security of their voting systems, corporate parent Diebold is giving up the ghost of its election business which, according to an analyst in a Reuters report, was "responsible for less than 10 percent of Diebold's revenue, and 100 percent of its bad publicity."

IAN URBINA | August 1

NYT - The state officials who run the nation’s elections — most with little oversight — are facing new efforts to limit what have been widely criticized as political and financial conflicts of interest.

Across the country, state voting officials routinely participate as candidates in races they are responsible for overseeing or act as leaders in their political parties. In the last presidential election, the secretaries of state in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, were chairmen of their states’ re-election campaigns for President Bush.

While federal ethics rules require lawmakers to wait a year after leaving office before they can take a job lobbying their former colleagues, no such rules exist for election officials, creating a revolving door between election administration and the voting machine industry. In recent years, top election officials in at least five states have moved from government posts directly into jobs as lobbyists for the voting machine industry, which itself grew immensely after Congress allocated billions of dollars to help states update equipment.

John Wildermuth | California | July 31

San Francisco Chronicle - State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested," said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.

Neither Bowen nor the investigators were willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information plus more time and better access to the voting machines than would-be vote thieves likely would have.

Steven Rosenfeld, | July 30

AlterNet - In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them -- it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen.

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

Christopher Drew | Davis, CA | July 28

NYT - Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

Henry K. Lee | July 14

SFGate - An Alameda County judge said Friday she may void election results for a failed 2004 Berkeley medical marijuana measure and order it returned to the ballot because county election officials failed to hand over data from voting machines.

Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith also indicated that she may force county officials to pay attorneys' fees and reimburse a medical marijuana group more than $22,000 for the costs it incurred during a disputed recount shortly after the November 2004 election.

This analysis / rant by Last Left Turn Before Hooterville is worth checking into. (hat tip Tina)

Brad Friedman | March 24

BradBlog - Terms of 'Independent' State Run Audit, Source Code Review Dictated by Voting Machine Company to Florida State Election Director Prior to Tests of Failed Touch-Screen Voting Systems from Contested Jennings/Buchanan Election!

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.

James F. McCarty | Cleveland OH | March 14

Cleveland Plain Dealer - The courtroom erupted Tuesday after a judge sentenced two Cuyahoga County Board of Elections workers to 18 months in prison for rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election.

A jury in January convicted Jacqueline Maiden, 60, the elections coordinator, and Kathleen Dreamer, 40, the ballot manager, of felony counts of negligent misconduct and misdemeanor counts of failing to perform their duties. The jury acquitted a third employee, Rosie Grier, of all charges, and absolved Maiden and Dreamer of five other crimes.

Special Prosecutor Kevin Baxter accused the defendants of secretly reviewing pre-selected ballots to assure they would match the results of a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004, and then lying to cover their trail. There was no evidence their actions affected the outcome of the election, Baxter said.

Susan Vinella | Cleveland, OH, USA | November 7

Cleveland Plain Dealer - More than 40 polling places in Cuyahoga County reported problems with some or all of their electronic voting machines this morning and had to revert to paper ballots to allow residents to vote, according to a spokesman from the county's Board of Elections.

Otherwise, there were no major problems at the 573 polling sites as they opened at 6:30 a.m., Alan Melamed said. He said a few polling places in Cuyahoga County reported trouble with machines early this morning but all were open and welcoming voters at or shortly after 6:30 a.m.

A new computer system allowed staff at the Board of Elections downtown to electronically monitor the opening of polls. Purple lights on computer screens indicated a critical situation, such as machines not working. Melamed said four purple lights showed problem spots in Parma and Cleveland, but they were soon using paper ballots for voting. Sometimes the problem was that no techician showed up to start the machines.

Ian Urbina | Washington DC | Nov 3

New York Times - A team of lawyers for the Democratic Party has been arguing with postal officials in Columbus, Ohio, trying to persuade them to process thousands of absentee ballots that have arrived with insufficient postage.

In Pennsylvania, the Republican Party has opened a “recount account” and set aside $500,000 to pay lawyers who will answer telephones on Election Day and monitor polls to see whether officials demand proper voters’ identification. In Maryland, lawyers representing candidates for senator and governor from both parties met recently and swapped cellphone numbers and e-mail addresses to smooth out the logistics of potential litigation.

Mark Rollenhagen | Columbus, Ohio, USA | November 2

Cleveland Plain Dealer - A weeklong battle over Ohio's new voter-identification rules ended Wednesday night in a Columbus courtroom.

The Ohio attorney general's office and lawyers for two groups that challenged the rules said an agreement was reached after 12 hours of negotiations.

All absentee ballots will be counted regardless of whether voters supplied identification when they were cast.

The agreement resolved other problems that cropped up amid the confusion. Some voters had mistakenly listed the wrong driver's license number when they returned their ballots.

"All of these ballots will be counted," said Caroline Gentry, a lawyer for the groups that challenged the rules.

The agreement applies only to Tuesday's elections.

Full article here. Agonist background here and here.

jose menendez, chris duel, brad friedman | San Antonio | October 30

bradblog.com - posted on Brad Friedman's BradBlog, but I thought it was worthy of cross-posting here because it concerns San Antonio:

The drumbeat of reports from around the country of touch-screen voting machines failing during Early Voting continues to grow. These aren't "glitches." These are failures.

So far, the reports have all involved Democratic (or Green) votes flipping to, or otherwise benefitting, Republican candidates. In South Florida, St. Louis County, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, Dallas, and now San Antonio, Texas.

While I was guesting this evening on the Chris Duel show on KTSA News-Talk 550 AM, we received a call from Democratic State Rep. Jose Menendez, who reported several incidents that have come to the attenion of his office during Early Voting, which is already under way in San Antonio. The reports concern votes flipping and candidates not showing up on the summary screens of Bexar County's paperless ES&S touch-screen systems.

Charles Rabin & Darran Simon | Broward County, FL | Oct 28

Miami Herald - Early voters are urged to cast their ballots with care following scattered reports of problems with heavily used machines.

He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. ... A poll worker then helped [him] but it took three tries to get it right

After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.

Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen -- the final voting step.

Baltimore | October 27

AP - Diebold Election Systems quietly replaced flawed components in several thousand Maryland voting machines in 2005 to fix a "screen-freeze" problem the company had discovered three years earlier, according to published reports Thursday.

State Board of Elections Chairman Gilles W. Burger said Diebold's failure to fully inform board members of the repairs at the time raises questions about whether the company violated its state contracts.

Jim Kuhnhenn | Washington | October 20

AP - The Republican Party will begin airing a hard-hitting ad this weekend that warns of more cataclysmic terror attacks against the U.S. homeland.

The ad portrays Osama bin Laden and quotes his threats against America dating to February 1998. ``These are the stakes,'' the ad concludes. ``Vote November 7.''
Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the ad would run on national cable beginning Sunday, but he declined to discuss specifics of the buy.

Katherine Bourzac | October 16

Technology Review - What Americans should be most worried about this November, say elections experts like Thad Hall, a political scientist at the University of Utah, is not that someone might hack the Diebold machine they're using to vote--but that their names might disappear from the rolls entirely. According to him, the greatest risks of fraud or disenfranchisement concern voter registration.

As Hall spells out in a report for the IBM Center for Business and Government, voter registration databases are difficult to maintain because there are no electronic standards for creating them. That makes it hard for elections officials to compare their databases with motor-vehicle registries and prison records--let alone other states' elections records.

Joan Mazzolini | Cleveland, Ohio | October 16

Cleveland Plain Dealer - The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is five months past one of its worst performances in its history, when new electronic voting technology got the better of the board and delayed results for a week.

So what's the plan for the general election next month?

To count the votes with technology so new that it has never been used in any election.

(Related: Another election challenge: large number of absentees)