Arizona may join fight over touch-screen voting machines

[Desertdog]

Arizona may join fight over touch-screen voting machines
http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=4661086

A federal law requires every precinct in the nation to have at least one machine allowing citizens with disabilities, including the blind, to vote without assistance by the Sept. 12 primary election.


But meeting that requirement could become complicated in Arizona.

The state soon could join a growing list of states fighting over touch-screen voting machines.

Voter Action, a nonprofit advocacy group, recently sued New Mexico and prodded it into spending $25 million on an all-paper ballot system.

Now, Voter Action is ready to pick a legal fight with Arizona over some of the more than 2,100 touch-screen machines the state is ordering to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act.

Voter Action asserts that two of the most popular models of touch-screens, both of which are expected to come to Arizona, are unreliable and vulnerable to tampering.

The group also distrusts the machines because they do not produce a marked paper ballot.

Activists claim paper ballots read by optical scanners are less subject to technical manipulation or fraud and easily can be recounted or audited in the case of a contested election.

Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer in 2003 moved Arizona entirely to paper ballots counted by optical scanners.

The exception will be touch-screens for the disabled. Roughly 95 percent of Arizona's voters will continue to use traditional paper ballots.

Brewer dismissed Voter Action's concerns about touch screens, concluding after reviews here and in other states that the machines are reliable.

Three brands of touch-screen machines are on order by Arizona to comply with the vote act: Diebold Election Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Election Systems and Software. Each county chose one of those brands based on its compatibility with their existing elections software.

Though each touch-screen brand is different, all models generally allow those who are visually impaired or physically limited to vote in privacy without help. Screens flash ballot items that can be magnified and touched to cast a vote. Some screens reverse images to overcome certain kinds of vision impairments.

The tab to comply with the vote act in Arizona will reach $12 million to $15 million, Deputy Secretary of State Kevin Tyne said. The federal government will foot most of the bill.

Maricopa County alone must order about 1,100 Sequoia machines, county elections director Karen Osborne said. Graham and Cochise counties will use ES and S's AutoMARK system. The rest of the counties will use Diebold.

 

[sumpnz]

Why do they resist so hard having the touch screen machines spit out a paper record of the vote cast so that the voter can visually (unless blind) confirm their choice was correctly entered, and have that record saved in the event of a recount/audit/etc.

 

[Igloodude]

I've always wondered about that as well. What's wrong with having fault-tolerance, and/or more public trust in the process?

 

[Soybomb]

Voter Action asserts that two of the most popular models of touch-screens, both of which are expected to come to Arizona, are unreliable and vulnerable to tampering.

If its electronic, it can be tampered with.

 

[Jim March]

Once pressed, the major vendors added printers as an afterthought...often in truly poor-performing ways.

Here's a close-up of a Diebold printer jamming:



Much more pics and descriptions of the Diebold printer are at:

http://www.bradblog.com/Images/DieboldTSx_UT_PrinterJamCloseUp.jpg

I personally took these pics in Emery County UT where elections supervisor Bruce Funk invited Black Box Voting to come in and examine his machines.

More on Diebold's printer issues at:

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002576.htm

Put simply, once pressed into making "paper trails" Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S all did "paper trails" that were as bad as they could possibly be made. Among other issues is the "take up reel" that preserves the sequential order of the vote. If cross-references with the pollbook and voter registration data, the privacy of the vote could be cracked. That in turn got this form of "voter verified paper trail" banned in Pennsylvania, Florida and other states.

Another piece of info we've released so far: Diebold can't even make their power connections stay put and are an electrocution hazard; see this link for close-ups of power cords popping loose:

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/19673.html

 

[Nitrogen]

As soybomb said, anything electronic can be tampered with.

Let me explain how bad some of these voting machines really are.

You'd expect voting machines to use hardware and software that is of the utmost security. You'd expect that these machines would be configured to use the security features of the software.

Often, this doesn't happen.

Changing the outcome of an election is as simple as:
1) gaining access to the tabulator computer. This should be difficult, but people don't rely on physical security of computers the way they should

2) gaining access to a data file, and changing the entries in it. This can usually be done with software that comes with your operating system. There's a video on just how easy this is.

Still other electronic voting machines count votes on little cards, not unlike the cards in digital cameras. you can remove those cards and tamper with the vote. You'd expect the data on them to be encrypted, but this, still isn't he case.

Knowledge on how to do these things securly has been around since computers themselves have been. The fact that this hasn't been done can either be attributed to laziness, or worse, it was premeditated.



Great thread on this very forum explaining more here:
http://thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=111724&pp=999

 

[Crosshair]

I love optically scanned paper ballots

Where I live we use optically scanned paper ballots. You go and fill out the bubble ballot as usual. You then take it to a machine that looks like a paper shredder. You put your ballot in and the computer scans the ballot and records the votes. The ballot then falls into a locked bin and a mechanical counter records the ballot being added to the bin. If the ballot is invalid it makes a loud beep and spits the ballot back out along with an error message on the screen telling what part of the ballot is invalid. The voter is then allowed to correct the mistake and enter the ballot again.

I don't know why more places don't use them. You have an instant count, you only need one machine at each polling place, you have a paper trail if a recount is needed, and multiple checks to ensure no ballots where removed. (Computer count = mechanial counter = # of ballots actualy in the locked box)