More E-Voting Problems Reported
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Some voters say machines indicated they had voted for a different candidate.
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Six U.S. states participating in Super Tuesday primary elections are at high risk for voting-machine malfunction or tampering because they don&#39;t have paper backups, according to a report released by the Verified Voting Foundation and Common Cause.Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton University, added visuals to the report&#39;s findings when he published a picture on his blog showing him standing next to unattended e-voting machines in New Jersey Sunday evening. The picture, and a second photo from Monday evening of unattended e-voting machines, was a repeat performance for Felten, who also published a picture of unattended machines during the 2006 election.&quot;It&#39;s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election,&quot; Felten, an e-voting critic, wrote on his blog Tuesday. &quot;Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that this isn&#39;t a problem because the machines are well guarded so that no would-be attacker can get to them. Which would be mildly reassuring -- if it were true.&quot;New Jersey was one of the states most at risk with the others being New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Delaware, and Arkansas, said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report. All of those states, except New York, use electronic voting machines without paper ballots in all or part of the state. New York has passed a paper record law but has not yet replaced lever machines used across most of the state, the groups said. Lever machines can malfunction and are subject to tampering, the groups said.But e-voting advocates said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report exaggerates potential problems with electronic voting machines.&quot;In the history of the United States, there has never been a case of tampering with electronic voting equipment in an actual live election environment with all of the associated procedures and election personnel, either with voter verifiable paper trails or without,&quot; said Michelle Shafer, vice president of communications and external affairs at e-voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems. &quot;Election administration is about the people, procedures and the technology, not just the technology itself.&quot;In many cases, states maintain individual electronic files of all votes cast, added David Beirne, executive director of trade group, the Election Technology Council. Many states also require logic and accuracy testing both before and after an election, and many e-voting machines have redundant memory mechanisms, he added.&quot;No voting system represents a high risk for the states that are using them,&quot; he said. &quot;The main objection from Verified Voting ... is that the voter is not verifying a paper document in addition to the electronic record. The voter does verify the electronic record, and the election can be verified for its integrity through the use of the appropriate security procedures by local election officials.&quot;The report &quot;reflects a series of perceptions which are not grounded in fact,&quot; Beirne added.But the high-risk states have no choice but to trust the information that the electronic machines spit out, said Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation. &quot;The vote is what it is, or what the machine says it is,&quot; she said. &quot;There&#39;s no way to do a recount.&quot;In addition, another five states -- Alabama, Arizona, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oklahoma -- use paper ballots along with their e-voting machines, but don&#39;t require regular audits to check the electronic results, the groups said. Four states with primaries on Tuesday use voting machines but also require regular audits, and were listed as low-risk in the report. Those states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Missouri.Twenty-four states hold presidential primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, but just 15 of them use electronic voting machines.
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of developments over the weekend:
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I spent much of this afternoon in a mandatory (for poll workers) four hour training class on the Hart InterCivic eSlate voting system, soon to be in use in elections in my home county. (Hart InterCivic is a privately held firm out of Houston, specializing in election equipment and in software products for county records offices). Contrary to my previous impression, the machines are not touch screen machines, although they share some similarities.  I went into the class skeptical; I have been a critic of what I percieve as an unseemly rush to adopt insecure electronic voting systems. I emerged guardedly optimistic; the systems appear, from what I can tell, to be reasonably secure against vote manipulation by people who are not part of the election staff, and they appear to provide approximately the same level of security against election office malfeasance that paper ballots do. At the end of the day, if the election staff wants to tamper, they can; but that was true with paper ballots as well. That risk can be mitigated by election office procedures intended to mitigate it; in San Mateo County's case, those procedures have in some important regards not yet been established, as I will discuss below.
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Although they're glad the state of Ohio is looking for ways to improve and secure its e-voting systems, e-voting advocates said today that moving too fast to implement changes could make things worse.
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Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch is installed.
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(InfoWorld) - A coalition of voting rights groups on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would require electronic voting machines to have printers attached as a way to audit the touch-screen results. But the lack of a paper trail for many e-voting machines was only one problem among many during the 2006 U.S. elections, said speakers at the Elections: Looking Forward conference, sponsored by Common Cause, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and other groups. Many of the problems attributed to e-voting machines were caused by a lack of training for poll workers or administrative mistakes, said Efrain Escobedo, director of voter engagement at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Poll workers observed by his group didn't know how to change the paper in machines with paper trails or didn't know how to reboot machines, he said. Participants in the event also described several other problems not related to e-voting: poll workers demanding photo identification when it wasn't required by law, polling places lacking voting materials in languages other than English, polling places inaccessible to disabled people, and long lines. But several speakers called on Congress to pass the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which would require paper trail printouts with touch-screen e-voting machines. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced the bill Feb. 5, after a similar piece of legislation failed to pass during the 2005-06 congressional session. The Holt bill has 183 cosponsors, close to half of the House of Representatives. Congress needs to act in the next six to eight months for the legislation to affect the 2008 elections, said Ralph Neas, president and chief executive officer of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group. Neas pointed to the 2006 vote in Sarasota Country, Florida, where e-voting machines did not record a vote from more than 18,000 people in a congressional race decided by less than 400 votes. "Sarasota was a disgrace," Neas said. "Eighteen thousand votes ... inexplicably disappeared into cyberspace. But it's a teachable moment. We've got 18,000 faces now that we can put on the problem." Not all speakers agreed that Congress should move ahead immediately with paper trails. Many visually impaired voters were able to vote without assistance on touch-screen machines for the first time in 2006, said Christina Galindo-Walsh, senior staff attorney with the National Disability Rights Network. Paper trail printouts would again create a two-tier voting system in which some disabled people don't have access to the same information as other voters, she said. Galindo-Walsh and Jim Dickson, vice president for government affairs at the American Association of People with Disabilities, also said it was too late for Congress to mandate paper trail ballots by the 2008 presidential election. E-voting machine vendors wouldn't be able to produce enough printers by 2008, Galindo-Walsh said. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed in 2002, mandated standards for voting machines, and those standards are just being completed now, Dickson added. Those standards still need to be tested, and new machines meeting those standards need to be built, he said. "Either you lower the standards for the election equipment, or you live with the timeline that looks like 2010," he said. "You cannot have it both ways." But many voters now question e-voting systems, added Melanie Campbell, executive director and CEO of the Coalition for Black Civic Participation. "The reality is voters are losing confidence in the system," she said.
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Are poll results really that reliable?  There are plenty of flaws in the system
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Ohio's e-voting systems are unreliable and insecure and should be changed, according to a new report done at the request of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
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So-called "paper audit trails" are unlikely to solve accuracy problems associated with electronic voting and would in fact introduce another potential problem to the mix, according to a report issued Tuesday. But even some critics of current e-voting tech are discounting the ITIF's take on the matter.
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A May trial run for the U.K.'s e-voting and e-counting systems resulted in crashed machines, confused tech-support staff, and raised concerns about security and reliability, according to a report released by a watchdog group.
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BOSTON - Tens of millions of people will cast their votes Nov. 2 in one of the most hotly contested presidential elections in recent U.S. history. But voters across the U.S. will encounter different voting technologies and procedures, with many counties nationwide clinging to punchcard, lever machine and even paper ballots, and the transition to electronic voting moving slowly in many states.
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Voters worried that an electronic voting machine might accidentally eat their vote on Nov. 2 would be better off pointing the finger of blame at clueless poll workers than at shiny new touchscreen machines, according to information released by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA).ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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By The Roanoke Times, Va.  Feb. 6--It seems like only yesterday Virginia and the rest of the nation overhauled election technology after Florida's contested 2000 results. Electronic, touch-screen devices were supposed to solve the problems and restore electoral faith.   They failed.
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The record use of electronic voting machines on Nov. 2 led to hundreds of voting irregularities and shows the need for higher standards, a voting rights group said Thursday.
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Six days before Election Day, Florida is again struggling with questions about potential voting irregularities.
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Problems loom for the presidential election including voting equipment changes that could delay the outcome past Nov. 2, a group of international observers said Tuesday in a report.