VoteTrustUSA: Key Component of Voting System Undergoes No Review

Please read this and post questions if you don't understand something.

As Bill Bored said, this is "How to STEAL an Election -- for real!"

Key Component of Voting System Undergoes No Review

By VotersUnite.org
June 18, 2006

http://www.votersunite.org/info/BallotProgramming.pdf">Detailed reference information about ballot programming (.pdf)

Every voting system includes a key component, called the ballot definition file (BDF), that is never subjected to an outside review. Given that BDFs determine the way votes are recorded and counted, the lack of independent oversight of these files is a major security vulnerability. If BDFs are incorrectly prepared, the wrong candidate could be elected. Furthermore, while BDFs may be primarily data, they also include logic and perhaps even other software that could change the outcome of an election.

BDFs are unique for each election and define all the races and candidates for each precinct. BDFs tell the voting machine software how to interpret a voter's touches on a screen or marks on an optical scan ballot (including absentee ballots), how to record those selections as votes, and how to combine them into the final tally.

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Some election districts lack the technical expertise to prepare BDFs, and instead depend on the vendor or outside programmers for the preparation. Others prepare the BDFs themselves. In both cases, however, BDFs undergo very little testing and no independent audit before being used to determine the results of an election. Little wonder that many serious election disruptions have been caused by ballot definition errors. Other BDF errors have probably gone unnoticed, and some may have affected election outcomes.

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Since DREs (electronic voting machines) without an accurate voter-verified paper record provide no way to conduct an independent audit of the results, BDF errors on DREs are virtually undetectable. Given the known problems with BDFs on optical scan voting systems, it is reasonable to assume that similar but undetected errors have also occurred with DREs.

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The extreme complexity of election definition data, the complete lack of security procedures used to create them, the hopelessly inadequate testing: these problems raise serious questions about the accuracy of electronic vote counting — on both DREs and optical scanners.

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http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1401&Itemid=26

Paper + Pen = accurate elections. At least more accurate than machines. I program industrial computers all day and I would NEVER use them for voting.