The Clint Curtis story is intriguing but...he's a little light in the "proof department". I'm not to say anything one way or another on that.
Everything else?
Yeah, it's that bad. Devvy Kidd actually doesn't go far enough.
I was personally involved in pouring through the Palm Beach documents. Trust me, it's ugly: timestamps incorrect, documents missing (despite this being material we had to win a public records suit to get), poll tapes (end-of-day precinct records) unsigned by pollworkers, and on and on. It's a massive pile of material and most people haven't paid much attention but it stands as one of the best condemnations of the Sequoia systems available.
There are also references by Kidd to what we at Black Box Voting tend to call the "Hursti I" and "Hursti II" reports. In these, we went into the field where honest elections officials allowed us to test their voting machines without an actual election being under way. Leon County FL elections supervisor Ion Sancho allowed us to test his Diebold optical scan system (Hursti I) and elections supervisor Bruce Funk in Emery County UT allowed us to check out his Diebold "TSx" latest-generation touchscreen (Hursti II). Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti was involved in both; Dr. Herbert Thomson was involved in Leon County and Security Innovation Inc. assisted in Emery.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf
Both tests showed serious security flaws and both have been validated by outside organizations and/or security experts. This latest with the TSx is being considered so serious that we've mildly redacted the report to remove things like exactly which filename triggers a complete code overwrite.
The latest report is also getting mainstream media coverage, this weekend alone from Newsweek and NPR:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5419884 (5 minute audio segment)
Now let's look at the bigger picture.
Voting machines are "certified" at the Federal level. The voting system vendors are allowed to choose any of three approved testing labs which produce "certification compliance reports" which are then reviewed and approved by government agents...formerly a bunch called "NASED" (National Association of State Elections Directors) and more recently the "EAC" (Election Assistance Commission). Most states require Federal certification (a "NASED number") before the state will consider a given voting machine.
The question is, are the labs doing their jobs?
On 3-29-06 the California Senate Elections Committee tried to answer that question. They invited the vendors and labs to come in to testify. All the vendors chickened out and one of the three labs (Ciber) was also a no-show. But two of the labs (Wyle and Systest) did voluntarily come in to be questioned and committee chair Sen. Debra Bowen did an overall fantastic job of grilling them.
What resulted was almost four hours of testimony.
We have a copy of that testimony online interspersed with our comments showing just where the labs either stretched the truth to it's limits and beyond, tried to obfuscate or ended up making admissions as to how poorly they're doing their jobs.
It's 154 double-spaced pages - well worth it if you REALLY want to know what's going on:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/itahearing.pdf
If you can't pour over that much material, we've got a six-page "ultra condensed set of excerpts" available at:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/2197/27598.html
...titled "Showdown In California".
This hearing is the first solid proof of what we've known for years: the test labs (also known as "ITAs" for Independent Testing Authorities) have acted as the Arthur Andersons to Diebold's Enron...and they're the ones that have approved all the other voting system vendors.
THAT is the big story here.
