For two years, TrueMajority members have been leading the fight for honest, accountable ballot technology in American elections. The "Computer Ate My Vote" campaign has generated hundreds of thousands of messages, letters to the editor, and news stories. Now, the tide is turning toward victory.

Twenty-seven states now require voter-verified paper trails to ensure an accurate recount if there is a question about the outcome of an election. In Congress, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced legislation (HR 550 — The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act) that has the bipartisan support of more than one-third of the House of Representatives and has been called the "gold standard" by good-government groups across the country.

To sign the petition to make sure your representatives support HR 550 and voter-verified paper ballots, click here:



http://action.truemajority.org/campaign/supportHR550

Rep. Holt’s bill was stalled in committee for two years by Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), chairman of the Committee on House Administration. Mr. Ney resigned as chairman in January after being subpoenaed in the Jack Abramoff case.

Now that hearings will be held on HR 550, Congress needs to hear from you that Americans want clean elections we can depend on. The sooner our representatives hear from you, the more likely they will be to act quickly and the better chance we will have of there being verified votes across America for the midterm elections in November.

If you're a TrueMajority member, click "Reply" and "Send" to take action. If you're not a member, click the link below to sign the petition:

http://action.truemajority.org/campaign/supportHR550

With an important mid-term election approaching, it's vital that we bring more people into the verified voting movement. Please forward this to anyone you know who cares about honest elections.

Thanks for your dedication to fair elections,

Please spread across the web!

This is something we can all get behind!

Read HR 550
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.00550:

Sorry about the double post. I didn't see this one.

It all good, can't be posted enough!

Post it everywhere!

I guess I'm a bit confused as to why this bill is a good idea. Were there problems where people's votes were being counted incorrectly? Were people's votes being changed by Internet connections to voting machines? What exactly is hand-counted audits going to solve?

HR-550 seems more bred out of a fear of technology than anything else: if we can't trust technology, we've got to do by-hand audits and rely on paper records. But I think we should do the reverse: we should use technology to allow voters to verify their own votes.

If someone wanted to tamper with the votes, they could find ways to do it even with that by-hand audit and trustworthy voting machines. But we're not living in the 18th century anymore. Why not have voting machines immediately upload votes to the Internet? Give each voter a paper copy of his vote, and let him verify that this vote is correct over the Internet.

Then so long as the same database used to populate this website is used to determine the winner of the election, we'll have more verification than any hand-count could ever provide. Every voter will be able to verify his own vote.

I also see no reason that people shouldn't be able to use the Internet to watch votes being tallied on each voting machine. Voting machines could upload statistics to the Internet as voting progresses through the day. If this happened, it would be much more difficult to tamper with those votes, for masses of people have already seen the results.

The code used in each voting machine should also be open source.

Technology shouldn't be shunned, and people shouldn't be afraid of it. Instead, we should use it to provide so much information about the elections to so many people that fraud is impossible. It's far cheaper and far more secure than relying on hand-counting paper vote sheets.

Maybe this will clear things up!

Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University. He "accidently" got his hands on a copy of the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs their e-voting machines.
Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up this software. One line in partictular stood out over all the rest:

#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key..The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/10/1172/9052

http://www.impeachbush.org/site/PageServer

Dear Friend,

Thank you for signing the petition in support of HR 550 that was delivered to the Committee on House Administration last Friday during the HR 550 "I Count" Lobby Days in Washington, D.C. (See the article below.) The petition was signed by over 50,000 concerned citizens representing every Congressional District in every State. During the Lobby Days over 200 citizens from 30 states came to Washington D.C. at their own expense to make their voices heard in the halls of Congress. During the lobby days, ten new co-sponsors signed on to HR 550 - 4 Republicans and 6 Democrats. The bill now has 178 co-sponsors, a remarkably high number that reflects the overwhelming call for basic safeguards to ensure the accuracy and transparency of our elections.

VoteTrustUSA was one of the national groups, along with Verified Voting, Electronic Frontier Foundation, True Majority, VotersUnite.org, Working Assets, and Common Cause, that organized the Lobby Day effort. We are a national network of state and local election integrity gorups working to safeguard elections in their communities. Attached below is the current issue of VoteTrustUSA's free weekly e-newsletter Election Integrity News. We hope you will find it a valuable resource for election news from across the country. We invite you to subscribe by signing up on this page or by writing to contact@votetrustusa.org and requesting to sign up to receive this free newsletter. To find out more about VoteTrustUSA please visit this page.

Thank you for your concern about the integrity of our elections!

VoteTrustUSA




Election Integrity News - April 11, 2006

This Week's Quote: "One of the most alarming trends in our country is the continual erosion of voter confidence in the accuracy of our tabulated results." Election Assistance Commisioner Ray Martinez


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Actions to Take Now

All U.S. Citizens: Demand Fair Elections in Florida!

Nationwide: Support Emery County UT Clerk Bruce Funk

National: Pass HR 550 As Written!

National: Say No to Prohibited Software in Voting Machines!

Iowa - Support SF 351

Pennsylvania: Support HB 2000 and S 977



In this issue ...

National Stories

EAC Commissioner Martinez Resigns

HR 550 Collects Ten New Co-Sponsors As Citizens Come To DC To Demand Verifiable Elections

VerifiedVoting.org Urges Support HR550 for Voter-Verified Paper Records - Still The "Gold Standard"

Keep Electronic Voting Honest

Former Voting Machine Vendor CEO Speaks Out Against The Industry

Supreme Court Denies Standing & Allows Costs Against Voting Rights Activist

News From Around the States

My Rationale For Filing An ADA Complaint Against the State of Florida

Illinois: Much Ado...

Indiana ES&S Breaks State Law -- Again!

Maryland: Senate Democrats Defeat Verifiable Elections

More ES&S Memory Card Problems Reported In Ohio

___________________________
Click Here for Previous Issues

Subscribe to Election Integrity News!

Put the Election Integrity News on your Website or Computer with our RSS Newsfeed
E-VOTING 2006: The Approaching Train Wreck by John Gideon, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.

Our Elections are Now Officially 'A National Disaster in the Making'

Normally this space is taken with my ideas of what are the "Top 5" voting news stories for the week. Today I am going to use this space to talk about what I see as the beginning of a disaster in the making with our elections. This isn't the election fraud that some point to when they talk about the vendors and some elections officials. It's not about recounts or audits. This is a real, get your hands around it, happening problem that will disrupt our election process if we do not do something about it now. While we have been involved in all of our issues about Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or "touch-screen") voting machines or paper ballots the electronic voting machine vendors have been wreaking complete havoc across the country.

So far this year two states have conducted primary elections. In Texas there is at least one candidate who has stepped forward and has challenged the election because of anomalies in vote counts and known voting machine failures. One county's machines counted some votes up to 6 times which resulted in approximately 100,000 more votes being counted than were cast. Though the vendor, Hart Intercivic, initially blamed the problem on human error, they finally had to admit that it was a programming error and not poll workers or voters who had erred. In Illinois some county officials are threatening to withhold final payment of funds on contracts with Sequoia Voting Systems because of failures with their machines that ended with results in the primary not being known for over a week after the voters went to the polls. In both states the involved vendors were very successful in the media with deflecting the blame from their machines to "human errors" or "glitches". However, when you listen to people who were there and who saw and worked through the problems you get a very different picture.

As these primaries were being conducted Summit County Ohio announced that over 70% of the memory cards for their precinct based optical-scan machines would not work. The vendor, ES&S, announced that their memory card contractor had made mistakes on some cards and they would be replaced. Memory cards for electronic voting machines store vote tabulations amongst other things.

Apparently ES&S does not consider 'Quality Control' to be a worthwhile corporate value because they never bothered to check those cards. They replaced the bad cards and 20% of those cards failed. Now, this week, the newest batch of cards were delivered after being tested twice by ES&S. They were tested by the county who found that 4% of those cards failed. In the meantime all 1000 memory cards delivered to the state of North Carolina were replaced because of a large percentage of failures. There is no report, yet, of how many of the 1000 memory cards are bad and will need replacement except that local counties still have not received their cards.

Meanwhile early voting began in Indiana and Nebraska. 69 of the 93 counties in Nebraska have no paper ballots from their vendor, ES&S, and no ballot programming for their voting machines. 11 counties in Indiana have the same problems and they are threatening lawsuits. Prebel County Ohio reported they had not gotten their paper ballots. On March 29 the Texas Secretary of State sent an urgent memorandum to all county clerks, elections administrators and county chairs noting that many officials had not received electronic programming or paper ballots for primary runoff elections to be held on April 11.

"We recognize that this kind of service from our certified voting systems vendors is completely unacceptable and disturbing," the memo states. "We will be pursuing all appropriate remedies from a state level that are available to us."
(continued below)



In Pennsylvania ES&S has become the main provider of voting systems and they are not able to deliver all machines that they are contracted to deliver to the counties in time for the primary. They are asking counties to accept a small percentage of the machines they need to conduct elections. In some instances counties may be left with fewer machines than they need to satisfy the accessibility mandates of HAVA and they will have to find another means of meeting that requirement.

Why don't the states or counties speak out? Just this week Marion County Indiana held a county council meeting and demanded that the local ES&S representative attend. Marion County's ballots for a school board position were received with no instructions printed for the voters. Instead ES&S sent an attorney with orders not to say anything except that the representative was involved in a conference call that began 15 minutes before the council meeting and that he would not be able to attend.

Johnson County Clerk, Jill Jackson had this to say about their experience with ES&S:

"I guess what bothered us the most is that it's like it's no big deal that they missed a statutory deadline," Jackson said of ES&S. "They're a big company and it's like they don't care, that they'll get (the ballots) to us when they get them done, and that's not acceptable. I'm extremely disappointed in the vendor."
What is reported above is only what has been in the media. We now have reports from Nevada County, California that ES&S has missed its deadline for delivery of paper ballots to the county. They were due to be delivered on April 6. On April 7 the county registrar received Democratic ballots only and those were filled with errors and will need to be returned to ES&S. The county also has not had their ballot programming done, as promised.

In Wake County, North Carolina they have 218, just tested, ES&S M-100 precinct based optical-scan machines. ES&S acceptance tested the 218 machines to their standards and failed 11 of those machines. The remaining 207 machines were delivered to a county contractor, InfoSentry, who tested those machines and failed 5. ES&S then delivered 11 machines to replace the machines they had failed and InfoSentry failed 2 of those. This represents a 7.8% failure rate or 18 failures out of 229 machines received. Where is the quality control?

Why is this happening? It is very apparent that some of the voting machine vendors over-extended their ability to meet their contracts for machines and for ancillary services like paper ballot printing. These companies saw an opportunity to make a lot of money at the expense of the tax payers and they saw a deadline of 1 January 2006 that fit right in with their plans to get as much money as possible this year. The vendors are raking in the money through deceptive practices and shoddy workmanship.

Dennis Vadura is the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine vendor that has filed for bankruptcy. He has this to say about the industry (emphasis added):
"I am not happy about the outcome, or the state of the industry. I think that something needs to be done. I'm not sure what it is, it probably doesn't include AccuPoll at this point, but I do not feel that any of the vendors has a system that voters can trust. I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting a VVPAT [Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail] system requirement. They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it."
Yesterday I heard a speech from my county auditor who is the head election official in my county in Washington state. She said that those who are raising concerns about voting and elections are just undermining the confidence of the voting public. What a naïve statement to make. We all need to be aware of what is happening to our elections. We all need to talk to our counties, states, and federal officials and let them know that we are headed for a disaster nationally. Maybe your county is in good shape but this is a national issue and a national disaster in the making.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 should have been changed to extend the dead-line for another year. Many of us argued for this but our arguments fell on deaf ears. Now our local elections officials are being held-up by vendors who know they have them over a barrel and that the counties must do something right now or face penalties from the Department of Justice.

This issue has nothing to do with security of voting machines or accuracy or voter verified paper ballots or some vendor CEO having ties to a political party. It is just about contractors who are out to grab every dollar they can get and they don't seem to care that our elections are going to suffer for their actions or inactions. And imagine, this is only the first year. Counties have HAVA funds to spend this year. What happens next year when those counties get the bills for technical assistance, ballot printing, maintenance, ballot programming, and machine storage? ES&S certainly doesn't care about that. They show that every day.

I often get asked, "What can I do?" Well, the time for action is now. Pass this article on to your local, state and federal elected officials and ask them to do a little reading of the media reports included in this article. They are far from being the only articles on this subject. Ask them how they are going to handle these problems when it comes time for their primaries. Don't let them tell you it won't happen there because it very easily can happen there or here or the next state over. We, you and I, need to take action on this now for the sake of our elections. We are headed for a train wreck.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
National Stories
EAC Commissioner Martinez Resigns
by Warren Stewart, VoteTrustUSA - April 10, 2006




Commissioner Met With Election Activists On Saturday

Commissioner Martinez' Letter of Resignation

The current vice chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Ray Martinez submitted his resignation to President George W. Bush this morning. Mr. Martinez' resignation will become effective June 30, 2006. He cited family considerations as his primary reason for stepping down and lauded his colleagues at the EAC and the agency's staff for their continued work on behalf of the nation.Martinez had been recommended for nomination by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) in 2003.

On April 8, Martinez had met with election integrity activists participating in a VoteTrustUSA leadership workshop. The Commissioner graciously and diplomatically fielded a barrage of questions from leading election refom advocates from across the country for well over and hour. The questions were challenging and well informed and reflected the growing crisis facing our democracy.

The day before he spoke at the VoteTrustUSA workshop, Martinez had presented a paper at a colloquium in Princeton, NJ. The paper presented four solutions to what he called the"alarming erosion" of American voter confidence following the last two presidential elections.

As reported on NJ.com:

"One of the most alarming trends in our country is the continual erosion of voter confidence in the accuracy of our tabulated results," Martinez said.

"The 2000 presidential election has adversely affected the opinion of the average American on our electoral process. "Since then, voter confidence has continued to trend in the wrong direction," Martinez added, "and it's unlikely to fade any time soon." At the top of his list was the idea that every state perform a regular election audit to determine that the administration of elections is fair, impartial and consistent with voter intent. The results of these audits should be widely dispersed.
Read the Entire Article

HR 550 Collects Ten New Co-Sponsors As Citizens Come To DC To Demand Verifiable Elections
by Warren Stewart, VoteTrustUSA - April 7, 2006




Ion Sancho Issues Statement Supporting HR 550


Over the past two days, hundreds of citizens from across the country participated in a the I Count Lobbys Days in support of Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 550). Meetings has been arrranged in 117 Congressional offices on Thursday afternoon and during the day Friday but already by mid -afternoon Thursday, Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) agreed with activists representing Iowans for Voting Integrity that the nation needs the election safeguards that HR 550 would provide.

By the time Rep. Holt (D-NJ), and HR 550 co-sponsors Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), and Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) spoke at a press conference on Friday morning, the number of new co-sponsors had risen to eight. New endorsements came from Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Rep. Tim Holden (D-PA), Rep. Steven Lynch (D-MA), and Rep. Ben Chandler (D-KY). As the final meeting was concluding at the end of Friday afternoon, the call came from Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had brought the total co-sponsorship of HR 550 to 177. On Monday, Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-PA) signed on as a co-sponsor.

After the press conference, a petition signed by over 50,000 voters form each of the 50 states was delivered to the both the majority and minority offices of the Committee on House Administration. The petition was received by Rep. Vernon Ehlers aide in the Committee Will Plaster (pictured at right with receiving the petition signatures from VoteTrustUSA executive director Joan Krawitz, VotePA's Marybeth Kuznik, Susan Pynchon and AJ Devies of Florida Fair Election Coalition, and other Lobby Days participants).

The I Count Lobby Days were organized by a coalition of national organizations dedicated to transparent and verifiable elections: Electronic Frontier Froundation, True Majority, Verified Voting, VotersUnite.org, VoteTrustUSA,Common Cause, and Working Assets. The I Count Coalition wishes to express their gratitude to the remarkable activists who came to Washington DC at their own expense to voice their support for voter verified paper records, random mandatory hand counted audits, and the prohibition of undisclosed software and wireless ocmmunication devices in voting systems.

Everyone involved in this exhilirating experience of democracy in action is also grateful to Michael Stipe of the band R.E.M. who paid for the printing of materials provided to activists and for the packets left behind for members of Congress.

Read the Entire Article


VerifiedVoting.org Urges Support HR550 for Voter-Verified Paper Records - Still The "Gold Standard"
by Pamela Smith, Nationwide Coordinator, VerifiedVoting - April 4, 2006




This article was posted on VerifiedVoting. It is reposted here with permission of the author.

Recently allegations of shortcomings in the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" -- HR550, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey -- have been circulated, moments before citizens concerned about verifiable elections nationwide converge on Washington DC to lobby for this particular bill.

The concerns about the legislation are generally unfounded. HR550 remains the "gold standard" of voter-verified paper record (VVPR) legislation, the only one with bi-partisan support and the only one to require mandatory random manual audits that would check for accuracy in every state. The organizations that support it, which run the gamut from partisan at both extremes to non-partisan election reform organizations, do so because it is clear that this legislation would go the furthest to improve election integrity nationwide. Despite the fact that 27 states have passed requirements in one form or another for voter-verified paper records, and another handful have purchased 100% voter-verifiable equipment statewide even without passing a requirement, the sad fact remains that much of our country still lacks a voter-verified paper record and fully three-quarters of the states lack any requirement to audit their elections for accuracy!

In short, HR550 is the best VVPR legislation and has earned the support of those who are concerned about election integrity nationwide. Read the Entire Article Keep Electronic Voting Honest
by The Times of Trenton - April 4, 2006


This editorial was published in the The Times of Trenton on April 4th, 2006.

Members of Congress of both political parties and experts on elections across the country have declared their support for laws to ensure the integrity of the nation's electronic voting systems. The campaign received a strong endorsement last summer by the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, which urged that a voter-verified paper ballot be required for every vote cast and that routine random audits be held to check the accuracy of electronic voting.

Unfortunately, the report also recommended allowing the states to determine the status of the voter-verified paper ballot rather than mandating it as the ballot of record nationwide. This means that any state could decide to disregard the only record that the voter has confirmed in favor of the record inside the electronic machine. Such a decision would make the voter-verified paper ballot in that state nothing more than a meaningless feel-good device. The commission also suggested that pre-election machine "audits" might also be acceptable.

The ideal proposal is HR 550, sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt, D-Hopewell Township, which would require all computerized voting machines to produce an individual permanent paper record for each ballot cast that the voter could verify and that could be counted manually to resolve disputes over the outcome. The bill has bipartisan endorsement from one-third of the members of the House of Representatives, and has been endorsed by good-government groups as the "gold standard" in verifiability legislation. It would benefit all political parties and independents equally, in that anyone's election-day candidacy or cause can be the victim of computer malfunction or partisan sabotage. Therefore, it's hard to understand why the leaders of the Republican congressional majority have refused to push it, and why it was stalled in the House Administration Committee for two years by its chairman, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. Rep. Ney stepped down from that post in January after being subpoenaed in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, but so far the new chairman, Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, R-Mich., has shown no inclination to move the bill. Read the Entire Article


Former Voting Machine Vendor CEO Speaks Out Against The Industry
by John Gideon, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA- April 11, 2006

Warns That 'None of the Vendors Have a System That Voters Can Trust'

ALSO: Paper Ballot Printing Problems Stop Early Voting In Several States

On April 6, our friends at OpEdNews.Com featured an article that includes an interview with the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine vendor that recently went bankrupt. In the article by Sean Greene of electionline.org the CEO, Dennis Vadura is quoted as saying:

"I am not happy about the outcome, or the state of the industry. I think that something needs to be done. I'm not sure what it is, it probably doesn't include AccuPoll at this point, but I do not feel that any of the vendors has a system that voters can trust. I think that vendors outright misrepresent the robustness, stability, and security of their systems. You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances. I also wonder why the other vendors were so adamant in fighting a VVPAT system requirement. They spent much more in fighting it than in implementing it."
Now, finally, an industry insider and 'mover-and-shaker' has stepped forward to echo what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years. The remaining vendors are doing all they can to prove that Mr. Vadura is right. That fact is borne out by the following two stories:


Read the Entire Article

Supreme Court Denies Standing & Allows Costs Against Voting Rights Activist
by EcoTalk Press Release - April 4, 2006


Copy of Supreme Court Ruling

In an alarming wake-up call to voting rights activists accross the country, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand last week a decision by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court ruled (Landes v Tartaglione, et al) that Philadelphia journalist and voting rights activist, Lynn Landes (pictured at right), had no standing to challenge the constitutionality of election laws which Landes claimed deny direct access to a tangible ballot and meaningful transparency to the election process.

Specifically, Landes challenged the use of voting machines and absentee voting in elections for public office. The defendants in the lawsuit were Margaret Tartaglione, Chair of the City Commissioners of Philadelphia; Pedro A. Cortes, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; and Alberto Gonzales, Attorney General of the United States.

Landes says that the court's decision does not mean that the use of obstructive and non-transparent voting processes or technologies is constitutional. But, it doesn't send a good signal, either.

"Since I represented myself without the support of a voting rights organization, this decision may be a matter of the Court not taking me seriously, rather than any reflection on the case itself," says Landes. She points out that the Third Circuit based its dubious decision on three cases that had nothing to do with elections, voting rights, or challenges to the constitutionality of state and/or federal law.

Landes encourages activists to continue to pursue legal action, but adds a strong note of caution. "The Court is now packed with extremely conservative judges who are taking extraordinary steps to discourage civil rights litigants," she warns. Read the Entire Article

From Around the States

My Rationale For Filing An ADA Complaint Against the State of Florida
by A. J. Devies, President, (Handicapped Adults of Volusia County) - April 4, 2006