Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today was the day of congressional announcements. It’s funny how things all seem to happen on the same day. First, on the Senate side, it was announced that Feinstein’s democracy-busting S-1487 will be heard in the Senate Rules Committee on July 25. This bill is so dangerous that even many Holt bill supporters are speaking out against it. Also announced today is that Congressman and Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich has sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to ask Speaker Pelosi to stop the advancement of HR-811 so other voices can be heard regarding this legislation.

Those voting news stories, and all the others of note, all linked below...

Guess Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

Congressman and Presidential Candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), several weeks ago, had expressed his intention to drop support for Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) Election Reform Bill, HR 811. A week or so ago, he reiterated his lack of support for the bill, and his intention to drop off as co-sponsor.

Today, he has begun to circulate a "Dear Colleague" letter (posted in full below) to be sent to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi urging her to ensure the legislative process addresses the concerns of the many groups who have spoken out in opposition to HR-811.

"For these constituencies," the letter says, "H.R. 811 falls short of its intended goals to ensure votes are cast and counted as intended by the voters."

The Congressman is looking for others to step up and co-sign the letter, and asking Election Integrity advocates to contact their Congress Members to ask them to join the effort.

On a related note today the Senate Rules Committee announced that they would be holding a hearing on Sen. Diane Feinstein's (D-CA) democracy-busting S-1487 election reform legislation in the Senate. This is the bill that will turn over our elections to corporations and the incompetent, compromised U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The hearing is scheduled for July 25 at 10AM.

Below is a copy of an email that was sent out by Kucinich's office today, including the "Dear Colleague" letter now being circulated for signatures...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

My turn to rant: Over five months ago Florida State University put out their report on what they found when inspecting the Sarasota Co. voting system that had not recorded over 18,000 votes for congress. FSU researchers found a serious security vulnerability in the voting system. I took it upon myself to try to get people in positions of responsibility to do their jobs and to warn counties that their voting machines may be vulnerable and that there were mitigations that could be used. Numerous emails to the Election Assistance Commission resulted in nothing happening because, according to them, they did not qualify it for use so they couldn’t do anything about any problems. NASED qualified the system and after five months of also talking with them a response was received yesterday: “I can assure you that we are aware of the importance of your issue. NASED will be discussing this issue at our next meeting.” “Next meeting”? Five months of no action while counties, cities, towns, hold their elections on these machines without any idea that they are vulnerable to attack. Next meeting? What was wrong with sending an email to those who use those systems and include a copy of the report and ask them to read the damn report? And these people expect us to have confidence in the election system. Not hardly.

Links to today's other voting news stories of note are posted below, as usual...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The lion's share of the news is still about California. The tentative ruling by the judge in Alameda County, the report from the ‘Blue Ribbon” Committee in Riverside County, and the ruling from the state “Supremes” that they won’t hear the complaint regarding the Busby-Bilbray ruling from San Diego County....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

August 11 is the date for the Iowa GOP presidential "straw poll." In this "straw poll" Republican voters from all over Iowa will walk, drive, or share a bus to the campus of Iowa State University where they will be allowed to pay $35 each for the honor of casting a ballot for their choice for President.

This "poll" is semi-important within the world of Republican politics. Both McCain and Giuliani have decided to pass and will not participate. However, for the candidates who are lower down in the polls this "straw poll" may be all important. The supporters of Dr. Ron Paul, for instance, claim that he has thousands of supporters within the state and that they are going to do all they can to get them to Ames.

With all of that the supporters of Paul have got another gripe and concern that sounds much like the same concern many in the Election Integrity community have; the poll, which used to be done on paper ballots, hand-counted in public, will be conducted on Diebold Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines. The Ron Paul group is very concerned that the machines will be gamed in order to make their candidate's showing less than what it should be and in order to inflate the results for those whom the Republican National Committee (RNC) want to have a good showing.

The following email was sent by a member of Paul's support group to a large list of Election Integrity groups:

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Rebecca Mercuri, in an article on OpEdNews, reminds us that Avante International has a lawsuit against Sequoia, Diebold and ES&S for patent infringement:

She also reports, “In a one-two punch, Avante's key patent, #7036730 'Electronic Voting Aparatus, System and Method,' also includes claims that pertain to 'a Braille device,' 'an aural device,' and 'voice recognition apparatus.'"

That story, and today's other notable voting news, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In an excellent article posted at OpEdNews, Andi Novick has this to say

And from the PhillyBurbs blog comes the following:

Those stories, and today's other notable voting news items, all linked below as usual...

In Breaking News late this afternoon, we find yet another reason why Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems are incompatible with democracy: When an election held on them is contested, the machines themselves --- which are said to hold the ballots internally --- cannot be used in another election until the contest is settled.

Late news this afternoon, sent to The BRAD BLOG moments ago, reveals that a judge in an Alameda County, California election contest is set to rule that a contested ballot measure election from 2004 must now be reheld since the county destroyed data from the election when they sent the Diebold DRE voting systems back to the company in Plano, Texas.

All but 4% of election data, records and audit logs was overwritten in subsequent contests, according to the following release from Americans For Safe Access (ASA) who were the plaintiffs in the contest.

In 2004, Alameda was the same county where it was found that Diebold had installed uncertified hardware and software in the county's voting system. The illegal action by the company eventually led to the decertification of certain Diebold systems in California.

The judge's unprecedented decision to re-hold an election after plaintiffs were denied their right to a proper recount after the county's failure to preserve election records on the Diebold touch-screen systems could have reverberations around the country.

The ASA release explains the astounding details and background in this tale, along with the judge's tentative findings in full...

More from the press release, including background on this incredible story, the ballot measure, the long fought election contest, the overwriting of the data on the Diebold voting machines --- in violation of the law --- and the judge's tentative ruling itself, follows below...

Blogged by John Gideon, VotersUnite

In a just released letter [.pdf] dated July 5, the Election Assistance Commission's (EAC) Deputy General Counsel, Gavin Gilmour, wrote to Tova Wang's attorney and clarified prior communications. Tova has now been un-gagged by the EAC and is free to speak about her Voter Fraud report that was commissioned and then hidden by the commission when it found the opposite of what they had hoped to find. As it turns out, the massive epidemic of voter fraud the Republicans had been claiming, didn't actually exist. Who knew? (We did.)

Regular readers will recall that Tova Andrea Wang, a Democracy Fellow at the Century Foundation --- co-author of the report that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) attempted to bury --- had announced that the federal commission of Presidential appointees had refused to allow her to speak directly about her report and the action taken by the EAC to alter its findings and hide her original report from public view.

We reported on the following day that new EAC Commissioner, Rosemary Rodriguez, made a statement calling on her fellow commissioners to release Wang from the gag-order and allow her to talk about the report and the altering thereof.

Hopefully this long-overdue action by the EAC, releasing her to speak freely, will now lead to some revelations into why the EAC buried the Wang/Serebov report. Only time will tell. But we have a feeling there will be much more to come, now that Wang's shackles have been removed...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The use of the county’s new DRE voting machines means that this year’s municipal elections will cost Salt Lake Co Utah three times more than past elections. New technology has increased the amount of training and wages for election workers. Palm Beach and Sarasota Co’s have both made a decision to fund for new voting machines....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

An article at The BRAD BLOG reports the following:

The King Coounty, Washington, County Council voted on Monday that there can be no bar-code or other unique marks on paper ballots. In a press release one council member said, “The Washington State Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to cast a secret ballot,” said Councilmember Dow Constantine, prime sponsor of the motion. “We must protect this right by accurately tracking the return and signature verification of every voter’s sealed envelope, while ensuring that the ballot inside cannot later be connected with a particular voter.” One can only hope that now the state legislature will follow the county’s lead and make the same decision for the whole state.

Those stories, and the other voting news notables today, all linked below...

Blogged by John Gideon and Brad Friedman

The results of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's "top-to-bottom review" of electronic voting systems previously approved for use by her predecessor is still underway. But before any of the findings from her teams of security specialists, software analysts and voting systems experts have been made public, the unprecedented analysis has already revealed a disturbing anomaly which may have far-reaching implications for both state and federal voting systems laws across the country.

As The BRAD BLOG reported exclusively almost three weeks ago --- precisely zero media outlets bothered to file their own reports on this matter until last weekend --- all voting machine vendors certified in California had submitted their source code to Bowen for the review, except for ES&S, America's largest voting machine company.

After their refusal to submit the code as required for the test, Bowen demanded the source code used for the InkaVote Plus voting systems marketed by ES&S, and used exclusively in Los Angeles, be released to the state by the escrow firm which had been holding it as per state law.

Following Bowen's demand to the escrow company, Iron Mountain Intellectual Property Management, ES&S reluctantly agreed to give their own version of the source code to the state.

Oddly enough at the time, the voting machine company, in an arrogant letter to Bowen (posted here in full by The BRAD BLOG), demanded that she withdraw her request to receive the version of the source code already stored in escrow at Iron Mountain. The letter succeeded in keeping our already-raised eyebrows at full perk, as the demand that Bowen not review the code in escrow, but rather look only at the one ES&S was sending, raised several troubling questions. Among them, we wondered at the time if perhaps the version stored in escrow was not the version actually used on the county's voting systems during last year's election. If so, there could be enormous ramifications for the company, and for the idea of escrowed source code for voting systems in general.

Over the weekend, an article in the Los Angeles Daily News, the first organization to jump into this matter following our series of reports, filed a story on the matter which began to validate our suspicions. The paper reported that due to the late submission, the InkaVote Plus system would not be included in Bowen's "top-to-bottom review", presenting questions about which voting system would be allowed for use in 2008, in the country's most populous county. LA County is larger than many states in America.

It's as yet unclear whether Bowen will completely decertify the InkaVote Plus system for use, or whether she will take other steps.

Perhaps more disturbingly, however, the Daily News report includes comments from CA's Deputy SoS for Voting Systems, Lowell Finley, indicating that our concerns about differences in the submitted and escrowed source code may have been precisely on target.

We contacted Bowen's office for more details, and they shared with us the letter sent from Finley back to ES&S in response to the company's curious demands. The letter is posted in full at the end of this article. And if the issue Finley raises is indeed true, there may be a whole lotta trouble ahead...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Another election official has jumped into the revolving door and joined the vendors. In this case ex-Commissioner and Chairman of the EAC Paul DeGregorio has become COO of an Internet voting software company, Everyone Counts.

Also charging that Congressman Rush Holt's (D-NJ) Election Reform bill (HR 811) "does not address the concerns that Americans have, to do something about electronic voting," Ohio's Rep. Dennis Kucinich reiterated his withdrawal of support for the controversial legislation last Friday. In an interview on the Peter B. Collins show, the Democratic presidential candidate confirmed earlier reports that he intended to drop his co-sponsorship of the bill in favor of requiring paper ballots for American elections. HR 811, as currently written, fails to ban dangerous electronic touch-screen (DRE) voting systems.

Those voting news stories, and others from today, all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Two years ago, on July 7, our friend and fellow election integrity activist, Andy Stephenson, lost his fight against pancreatic cancer. Andy was an outspoken supporter of paper ballots and worked as hard as any of us for the integrity of our elections. Andy was so entrenched in the movement that he ran for Washington Secretary of State in the Democratic primary in 2004. Many of his supporters, in Washington and at his on-line hangout, Democratic Underground, are now leaders in the movement. Thank you, Andy, for your fight for better elections and for leaving us with a healthier and more intelligent community of activists.

ES&S may be taken to task in California for not providing the source code to their InkaVote Plus voting system on time, and apparently at all. In an article in the Los Angeles Daily News, California Deputy Secretary of State Lowell Finley is quoted, “There also are discrepancies between the software version number held by the escrow company, and the version that was certified by McPherson last year.”

That, and more voting news stories of note today all linked below...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In a move that could set a disastrous precedent, the Republican Governor and Democratic Secretary of State of Mississippi have come together to ask that a federal judge rule that the state legislature must enact a voter ID law.

Also, Florida activists are now looking into other counties beside Sarasota and they are finding plenty of questionable results:

The rest of today's notable voting news, all linked below as usual...

ADDENDUM FROM BRAD: Please note, in re: John's Mississippi item mentioned above. Mississippi's Democratic SoS is Eric Clark. We ran a video of Clark in a meeting last year with a Diebold lobbyists in which Clark says that Diebold's touch-screen machines are "the most secure thing outside of a Wells-Fargo truck." The man is clueless. Check out the exclusive --- and amusing --- video here...