It appears that Florida is going to join the growing list of states that are thinking about using Internet voting for their military and overseas voters. This is a terrible idea that will end-up costing the tax payers of the state millions of dollars to stand-up the scheme and then millions more each year for licensing. One vendor’s proposal of the scheme would cost WA State’s 39 counties up to $570 per affected voter per year. So, any state falling for these con-jobs will end up paying millions of tax payer dollars for an insecure means of getting ballots back from UOCAVA voters. There are low-tech solutions that should be investigated before we go high-tech....

What is it about Sequoia’s spokesperson that she sits in court in New Jersey and then writes blog items about her opinion of what happened in court and those opinions are far from what really happened? Perhaps it is alright for her to spin the truth into something else in order to try to save the company from well deserved embarrassment? You always know when the disingenuous have no defense for the facts because they do all they can to attack the person who has the facts on their sides. Yesterday Sequoia posted another false blog item on their website and today, in our ‘Featured’ article, Professor Andrew Appel responds with the facts. ...

Was the 2006 RTA election in Pima Co. Arizona hacked? Did someone in local government actually get into the machines and change the vote totals? We may never know but the local Democratic and Republican Parties have joined forces in court along with some Election Integrity groups. They want to know the answer. The ballots have now been turned over to the state Attorney General’s office. The parties want a recount of those ballots. Will the AG do that? ...

EAC Commissioner Rosemary Rodriguez has tendered her resignation and will return to Colorado to be the State Director for Senator Michael Bennet. Commissioner Rodriguez joins ex-Commissioners Soaries and Martinez who resigned before their term was up and not, like ex-Commissioner Hunter, to take another job in DC.

Lawmakers in New Jersey have taken the state backwards as the State Senate agreed with the House that the state should scrap plans to provide any verifiability in their elections. A requirement signed into law a few years ago should have required a "Voter-verifiable Paper Audit Trail" [VVPAT] on all of the state’s Direct Recording Electronic [DRE] voting machines over a year ago. Instead the deadline has been a moving target and will now, with signature of the Governor, go away...

Tonight’s “Featured” article begins: “The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) works for the People. They don't work for special interests. They don't work for the voting system vendors. The EAC has an obligation, spelled out in their past advisories, public statements and, most importantly, in federal law, to carry out oversight of the voting systems we, the People, use in our federal elections. It does not matter that the EAC commissioners are not elected to their positions. They are still servants of the People.” ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

"It is through the Constitution that we control the reins of government and insure that it remains the protector of individual, unalienable Rights - i.e., the servant of the People.

"Therefore, it behooves the People to show the Government that the People know what their Rights are and what Government's obligations are, that the People are watching Government as it exercises its delegated powers and that the People are prepared to act if the Government steps outside the boundaries drawn around its power by the Constitution." --- We The People Foundation

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) works for the People. It doesn't work for special interests. It doesn't work for the voting system vendors. The EAC has an obligation, spelled out in its past advisories, public statements and, most importantly, in federal law, to carry out oversight of the voting systems we, the People, use in our federal elections. It does not matter that the EAC commissioners are not elected to their positions. They are still servants of the People.

Not long after being created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, the EAC published, on June 8, 2004, "Chairman Soaries' Remarks about Electronic Voting Security Strategy for the November 2004 Presidential Election." The comments, by then EAC Chairman DeForest "Buster" Soaries included recommendations "to insure election integrity and promote voter confidence in the administration of the 2004 federal election," and stated, in part: "[The] EAC should solicit information about suspicious electronic voting system activity including software programming and should request aggressive investigative and prosecutorial responses from the U.S. Department of Justice Elections Crimes Branch in the Criminal Division."

The above was restated in a July 13, 2004 "Commission Advisory Letter" [PDF].

It's clear that if there is to be any federal body to recommend investigation and/or prosecution to the DoJ, in regards criminal violation of federal law concerning voting systems, it is to be the EAC, the body charged with testing, certifying, and performing as the "national clearinghouse...with respect to the administration of federal elections" (42 U.S.C. § 15322) and the electronic voting systems employed across the country.

And yet, the EAC has continued to utterly fail in those duties, as a particularly maddening chain of inquiries and emails --- back-and-forth and round-and-round --- that we'd sent to the EAC commissioners and their spokesperson over the past three months illustrates all too well. All we were trying to do was get a simple answer to a very simple question...

The Arizona Attorney General’s office has now stepped in and “informally” asked the court to allow the disputed ballots from the ’06 Pima County Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) election to be released to them. The state’s Treasurer presently has authority over the ballots but she is not sure whether to destroy them or keep them in storage. The hope is that they be released to the AG and then the AG count the ballots in an investigation to see if, in fact, there was fraud committed in that election. ...

Again a majority of the election news is coming from Minnesota. Both the Franken and Coleman camps are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in court and the tax payers are surely footing the bill for a large part of the cost. Eventually the tax payers are going to get tired of this circus and demand it stop. My guess is that this will now happen sooner rather than later. But, that’s just my thought. I may be wrong....

Here we are again opening our elections system to a vendor and software that has not been tested by any test lab or certified to be used on any voting system. Aspen Colorado is going to hold a mock election using two different modes of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). In order to do this with the voting machines they will be using the city has hired “True Ballot” to write the software to count the ballots on the optical scan machines in use by the city. Yes this is a mock election. But who expects that once a decision on which IRV system will be used the new software will be removed from the machines and never used until it has been certified for use on those machines....

Lots of news today. Ex-New Mexico SoS Rebecca Vigil-Giron has some questions to answer regarding use of funds for elections when she was in office. Colorado is talking more about going to all-paper voting in the future. Utah legislators seem to have a fear of a deluge of aliens coming into the state just to vote in their elections so they are trying to require proof of citizenship. And now the Coleman camp in Minnesota is declaring the ongoing trial as a “legal quagmire”. It doesn’t get any better than this....

Today we have three “Featured” articles. Regular readers will note that we have been warning about the recent call for Internet voting and the fact that the Internet is not secure for elections use. The first two articles clearly bring this concern to the forefront. If the Internet was secure, the New York Times wonders, why would scientists be designing a newer, better Internet?

The second “Featured” article says, “Reported cyber attacks on U.S. government computer networks climbed 40% last year, federal records show, and more infiltrators are trying to plant malicious software they could use to control or steal sensitive data.”

If the Internet is so insecure why in the world would any responsible election official even suggest using the it to transmit completed ballots? One has to wonder what is really behind this new Internet voting push. That brings us to the third of our “Featured” articles...

A slow news day today. We hope you had a good President’s Day weekend....

“Replacing trusted people with computers doesn't make the problem go away; it just moves it around and makes it even more complex. The computer, software, and network designers, implementers, coders, installers, maintainers, etc. are all trusted people. See any analysis of the security of electronic voting machines, or some of the frauds perpetrated against computerized gambling machines, for some graphic examples of the risks inherent in replacing people with computers.” Bruce Schneier in the first of our ‘Featured’ articles. Bruce is one of the foremost experts on network security in the world.

In our second ‘Featured’ article we have an editorial from The Olympian of Olympia Washington that discusses the newest threat to Washington State and national elections; Internet voting. The staff of the Olympian correctly warns the state legislature and the Secretary of State to take a deep breath and actually consider how to ensure the security of whatever scheme they decide to use. They recommend that actual experts, and not vendors, be brought in to review and comment on the security of any Internet voting scheme....

For all of you paraskevidekatriaphobiacs or triskaidekaphobiacs this may not have been a very good day. For all the rest, hope you had a Happy Friday the 13th.

The chances of Norm Coleman taking back his lead over Al Franken in the Minnesota Senatorial race have taken a long step back today with a ruling from the recount trial judge that lowers the number of rejected absentee ballots that can be recounted. ...

VoterID has been accepted by the Mississippi state House. No surprise for a ‘Red-State’. Meanwhile a House legislative committee in Minnesota has voted against a VoterID bill. Once that decision was made, the sponsor of the bill made accusations of voter fraud in the Senate race. He needs to speak with the Coleman lead attorney who has clearly said, "There hasn't been a whiff here, of any fraud."...