Banned lab certified E-voting machines used by 68.5% of nation's registered voters in 06 elections

January 13, 2007 at 08:38:50
Permission granted to reprint

Banned test lab certified electronic voting machines used by 68.5% of nation's registered voters in 2006 elections

by Michael Richardson


Last week Christopher Drew of the New York Times informed a shocked nation that the leading "independent testing authority" of electronic voting machines, Ciber, Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colorado had not been following its own quality-control procedures and could not document that it completed required tests for reliability and security.

The federal Election Assistance Commission, which accredited the Ciber testing lab, secretly pulled its interim accreditation last year, without informing the public or election officials relying on Ciber's results. Independent testing centers, including Ciber, are not really independent at all and are funded by voting machine vendors to whom they issue their testing reports and only recently have come under federal scrutiny.

The EAC has yet to explain why it withheld the accreditation of Ciber from the voting public and the omission has entangled the controversial election oversight panel in the growing national distrust of electronic voting machines and may threaten its continued existence.

How many voting machines might be affected by the lax security inspections of Ciber?

Respected electronic voting machine authority and self-described "politechnologist" Joseph Hall did some digging. "The answer was not something I would have predicted...I knew Ciber did a good deal of software ITA testing, but it looks like, in terms of voting system deployment, that Ciber qualified the voting systems used by 68.5% of the registered voters (67.9% of precincts) in the 2006 election."

Hall explained the difficulty he encountered to acquire his data. "Since the test reports are not public, it is difficult to find information about who tested what when."

Undeterred by the veil of secrecy surrounding the testing of electronic voting machines, Hall used old testing identifiers, called NASED numbers, to track the deployment of voting machines around the nation. Ciber tested any machine that had a NASED number beginning with the digit "1".

"With this key piece of information, we can use published lists of qualified voting systems to determine which models were qualified by Ciber." explains Hall. Discovering that Ciber tested the vast majority of machines in the country Hall says, "In fact, it is much more simple to list which systems were not qualified by Ciber."

Hall concludes, "I suppose it would have been completely impractical to decertify all these systems. Even decertifying those systems in which the qualification testing Ciber performed was specifically lacking would likely be a significant double-digit percentage of voting systems used by registered voters."

One thing the ITA laboratories, or any other testing agency, cannot determine is if an electronic voting machine has been rigged with malicious self-deleting software code. All voting machines and optical scan vote-counters are subject to being hacked with self-deleting code that cannot be detected with any test. Self-deleting software code does its dirty deeds, including flipping or erasing votes, and then deletes itself erasing any sign of tampering.

A growing number of election integrity advocates are realizing that software technology has no place in the election systems of our country because of the inability to even detect mischief. The solution that is emerging is both simple and obvious, a return to time-tested hand-counting of paper ballots.

Permission granted to reprint

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070113_banned__test_lab_cer.htm

in the theft of our elections.

It is neither an accident, nor a "glitch", in the true meaning of the words.

K&R.

Absolutely. Just look at what our need to know asap has done to us in the 2000 and 2004...probably the 2006 elections. (I still think they manipulated the machines in 2006, but underestimated how many flips they needed to win....thus, the deer in the headlights look from Wonder Boy and Rove the next day.)

If our voting system can't be secured and guaranteed to be beyond manipulation, ever again, we need our heads examined.

There are many heads that need to be examined in the whole country. Not just a few DU'ers.

Was telling some good ol' boys today that the elections in 2004 were stolen and they were like: "WHAT?" Well, the press never covered the fact: heck, the press doesn't think our votes should be counted, so how would most people know?

The good ol' boys initial disbelief soon evaporated when they were reminded of Florida's 18,000 missing votes in that Jennings race. The press was forced to cover that, eh?

Thanks!