NY -- Breaking News -- ES&S to Submit PB/OS and Automark for State Cert.

Manhattan, NY, Nov. 21, 2005

At a NYC Council Government Operations Committee hearing today at City Hall, representatives from ES&S publicly demonstrated a paper ballot/optical scan (PB/OS) voting system, including the Automark ballot marking device used to assist voters with special needs in marking their paper ballots independently in compliance with HAVA.

Amid a loud chorus of pro-paper-ballot activists in the audience, some of whom also testified publicly under oath, representatives for the company said that they would in fact be submitting both DREs AND PB/OS/Automark to the NY State Board of Elections for certification.

Previously, there had been speculation and quotes from ES&S that some believed indicated they considered NY to be a "DRE state" and would therefore not even be submitting any PB/OS systems for state certification.

Councilmember Bill Perkins, the Chair of the committee, quizzed the vendor on what steps could be taken to avoid privatization of public elections in NY. They responded by saying that there were many jurisdictions that perform their own election management including ballot definition programming, tabulation, etc. using ES&S products.

After testimony which included representatives of The NY League of Women Voters, public interest groups, disabled rights activists, and election reform/verified voting activists, none of whom expressed any preference for DREs, the Chair asked if there was anyone in the audience who held a different view regarding a choice of voting systems for the City of New York (other than PB/OS). The council chamber was silent.

It would appear that for the moment, at least in the Big Apple, DRE voting systems are a uniter -- not a divider.

A follow-up hearing is being planned for sometime in December.

It sounds good but how do we prevent fraud? Can we have random
checks before the voting begins while the machines are in place at
the actual polling place. I hear a great deal about the machine
voted Republican because of vibrations in the truck during transit.

I'd like to post it at VoteTrustUSA if possible. If it's yours, PM me with the credit info, please. It's great news!

for every election using electronic voting machines. If you have that and have exact totals from each precinct, you can catch any error it seems to me. You see your vote print-out, the totals of randomly selected precincts can be squared (or not) with the alleged vote.

That's about the best that can be done at the moment.

But I also think that if there is ANY discrepancy between the electronic vote count and the hand audit, there should be immediate revocation of all contracts and somebody SHOULD GO TO JAIL!!!!

in ANY contract!

percentage of randomly selected precincts.

:kick:

It may seem trivial in comparison to the auditing problem, but paper ballots marked by the voters can not be changed by the machine logic (although with Automark perhaps they can be). This can be crucial.

See this thread:
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x401378>

Once we rid the world of DRE's we can focus on how bad the OpScam can be.

Lot's of auditing needed for a start.

Baby steps...

Optiscan has secret source codes, modems linking systems to the internet, malicious memory cards and central tabulators with back doors, not to mention MALFUNCTIONS! Look at what happened in Ohio last August with Diebold optiscan -- HUMIDITY shut the damn things down...allegedly...and suddenly Jean Schmidt surged ahead in Democratic precincts. Surprise, surprise --

As long as you've gone this far, DO NOT SETTLE FOR OPTISCAN.

KILL THE MACHINES!!! EVERY DAMN ONE OF THE THEM!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's just my best recollection of what happened at the hearing.

The good part is that if ES&S is not going to hold back on a paper ballot system, than other vendors may follow. (Not to mention the fact that this should all be part of a RFP to make these vendors jump through OUR hoops and not the other way around.) But we are only talking about State certification now. The RFP may not even happen this year. As you may have noticed, we have not exactly been rushing our HAVA implementation here in NY!

Automark is HAVA compliant. Its paper ballots can be hand counted or scanned. I don't see a problem with it. If there are competing systems, bring 'em on, as long as they use paper ballots.

That said, elections are NOT about trust. The paper ballots will be audited randomly by hand in NY starting with 3% of the scanners according to law. BoE regulations are being developed that will say what to do after that. IMO, this is the next battle in the war no matter what voting system is used. And it could get screwed up very easily.

There could still be some counties in the state that will choose DREs with VVPATs, but at least they will be randomly audited.

Trust me, the paper ballots are a false sense of security. Obtaining a recount due to fishy results is virtually impossible, requiring a court order from a partisan judge who is going to base his/her decision on the margins.

The scanning software can be programmed so that results fall outside the margins. Of course, the source codes of that software remain secret.

We've been trying to obtain documentation for months and it looks like we'll be going to court. Meanwhile, we're living with the fishy results for over a year.

As long as you have all those folks rallying together, NOW is the time for the public is declare that HAVA is flawed. The technology and certification simply aren't ready. Hold up a GAO Report and leave it with the board at the next meeting.

HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS!!!

Through incorrect Ballot Definition Programming, you can change any count you want. You don't have to mis-calibrate the Scanner OR the Touch Screen. That kind of stuff is for pikers! Screwdriver-and-pliers guys! Amateurs! And it only screws up ONE machine at a time, doesn't it? If not, it needs to be more widely publicized and so does this:

The way to steal an election would be to corrupt the Ballot Definition Files so that the DREs or Scanners either print the wrong names on the ballots, or count individual candidate (or referendum) votes as straight party votes, or straight party votes for the WRONG candidate, or straight party votes as undervotes (which Diebold calls "blank votes"), etc. It's as easy as point and click and it's done before the election and it affects every machine in the jurisdiction and the precinct totals will ALWAYS match the tabulator totals. And in the case of DREs, the "ballot" itself is actually rewritten, and unless it's a full-face ballot DRE, the voter may not see it. So DRE recounts would simply recount corrupted ballots!

In the case of paper ballots, this won't work. You can recount the original ballots marked by the voters with THEIR intent -- not the machine's interpretation.

Now if you live in a state where there is no auditing or recounting of Op Scan ballots, that IS a problem! But you can try to get the judge to let you see the ballot definition programming, which will at least show whether the machines were programmed correctly. And don't let anyone tell you that this is "proprietary" or "trade secret" because it's not. It IS the ELECTION and it's NOT source code! It's in the public domain. The Board of Elections has it and certainly a court should be able to get hold of it.

See this post (damn it!):
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=401378&mesg_id=401378>
In PA, a hand recount of a central count Op Scan ballots repaired this broken election in a few hours. This would have been impossible with DREs because the vote switching would have occurred on the DRE "ballots" themselves and even the VVPATs.

Bill Bored is getting tired of the lack of understanding of this issue on the part of many verified voting activists -- Bored even!

BTW, if the bubbles were offset on the ballots so that the scanner wouldn't count them correctly, as I think you're suggesting, it could tested in about 5 mins. by running a test deck of actual ballots through the scanner before the election. This is another reason why this hack is hard to do with Op Scan.

Do a recount and look at the Ballot Definition Files, including the Ballot Reject settings to see if undervotes are not being flagged so the voters can correct them (esp. if it's precinct count Op Scan). That's also crucial.

...if you do an initial random manual audit of few percent of your scanners, you CAN go by the margins after that!

See this paper by Kathy Dopp which I think I may have sent you already:

<http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/Paper_Audits.pdf>

If the judge will not order a full hand count, get him/her to order a truly RANDOM audit of 3% of machines. Depending on the results of that, you can tell if you've missed enough corrupted scanners to affect the outcome of the election.

Never give up!

it does not look good at this point. We had Bo Lipari give a presentation to the CT Registrar of Voters group and he made an excellent case for ballot marking devices and opscan. In CT we passed a new law that requires audits of paper records. Bo made the point that the opscan ballots made of hard stock paper will be much easier to handle and count than the rolled up scraps of paper that the DREs will produce. This seems like a minor point but to the poll workers who have to perform the audits it is a big deal.

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=401378&mesg_id=401378>

DRE ballots can be changed by the machine. Paper ballots can't.
If you want a reference, quote Shamos's report that decertified Unilect in PA:

“Straight party voting on DREs that do not display a full-face ballot, causes changes to be made on ballot pages that are not currently being viewed by the voter. In fact, it may cause the entire ballot to be changed.” Source: UniLect Corporation PATRIOT Voting System Evaluation. Prepared for The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by Michael Ian Shamos, Ph.D., J.D. April 2005

I know you don't have straight party voting in CT, but the point is that the DREs can be programmed to do this!

PRIORITY NUMBER ONE matter!

We've got problems in California. The Dem leadership permitted the destruction of our good Sec of State, Kevin Shelley (who had sued Diebold's ass). Now we have a Schwarzenegger appointee for Sec of State, Bruce McPherson, a Diebold shill, who is pulling all kinds of secret shenanigans to get DREs certified. See
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5410364


Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

it really shouldn't matter that much who's running things. But that said, all election officials should be at least bi-partisan and no one party or appointee should have the final say on anything that has to do with election administration. I think this is where a number of states are falling down on the job.

I hope that through your allegedly Democratic state legislature, you can get some laws on the books to CONTROL these SOSs or better yet, have 2 or 4 of them running your elections, evenly divided between the 2 major parties. We have that in NY too, but I need to look up those details as they were recently enacted.

I think we're on the right track here, but there are always loopholes!