BradBlog: Ellen Theisen and John Gideon Hot on the Trail of Sequoia and ES&S

Wilms

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Tue May-27-08 11:30 PM
Original message

BradBlog: Ellen Theisen and John Gideon Hot on the Trail of Sequoia and ES&S

Up the Rabbit Hole: A Day of Transparent, Participatory Democracy in Washington State

After Failures Discovered During Testing of New E-Voting Systems Made by Sequoia, Election Officials Actually Listen, Respond to Citizen Concerns

Guest blogged by Ellen Theisen, VotersUnite.org

5/27/2008

snip

In other words, the Sequoia system checked one set of electronic ballot records and reported an �empty ballot box,� but then used a different set of ballot records to tabulate the votes. This is exactly like checking one ballot box to ensure that it�s empty before opening the polls, and then using a different, unchecked ballot box for the voted ballots to be tallied at the end of the day. But the unchecked box hadn�t been empty.

John and I both wrote up testimony, which we immediately sent to Patty Murphy. As you can imagine, we objected to having a system certified when, in testing, it reported that there were "zero votes" to start, but actually had 56 votes already in its secret, unobservable "ballot box"!

snip

Steve Pearson, a representative on-hand from ES&S, said that SysTest, one of the Voting System Test Labs certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), had tested the compatibility and would be issuing a report within a week. He pointed out that the EAC certification process takes so long that they decided to have SysTest do the testing and provide a report outside the regular EAC certification process.

John and I gasped! ES&S was attempting to do an end-run around the EAC certification process!

snip/ :wow:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6023#more-6023

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kster

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Wed May-28-08 12:36 AM
Response to Original message

1. Hand Count all the optical scanned paper ballots at the polling place along with risk-based audits

at the close of the election for accuracy, and we would be able to catch the election machine problems on election night.

Right? :)

K and R

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electropop

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Wed May-28-08 08:52 AM
Response to Reply #1

2. Paper not Vapor! Paper not Vapor! Public transparent hand-counts!

This is pretty straightforward. If our "leaders" wanted us to have democracy, that's how it would be done. We have to force them to make it so.

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tbyg52

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Wed May-28-08 06:59 PM
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3. The voting machine companies don't care what they do,

even when not actively cheating, as long as they get their money and don't get caught.

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Mnemosyne

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Wed May-28-08 09:34 PM
Response to Original message

4. KnR for more visibility.

:hi:

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