Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Bergen Co. NJ has reported that their Sequoia DRE voting machines required $44,000 worth of electricity for their monthly battery charge last year. The county is now spending $42,000 to install air conditioning in the warehouse where their 1,200 machines are stored. “Red-Team” security checks are underway in California where teams of “hackers” are testing the security of all voting systems used in the state....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

This will probably be a very slow week. Depending on the amount of news I may only send out the DVN every two days rather than every day. For those who will be traveling over the holiday, please drive careful. Enjoy the holiday. We need you all if we are going to ensure we have a democracy into the future and that our voices are heard and not just the voices of vendors and partisan appointees....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today brings us a few articles and opinion pieces. We have opinion pieces from Nancy Tobi, Bev Harris and Howard Stanislevic. There isn’t much to pass on that is real news. Maybe that’s a good thing because most of what is reported by the Main Stream Media (MSM) is only reported when there is a real election problem and many of those are ignored. Why, for instance, has the MSM totally ignored the ES&S source code escrow issue and their arrogant letter to the California Secretary of State’s office? Not one word has been printed by the MSM on this issue that could bring into question whether many state’s election laws are being followed by the vendors....

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Yesterday I mentioned that Maryland chief election official, Linda Lamone, had been caught with her picture on a Diebold brochure touting the company’s electronic poll book product. I asked, “What are the odds that Diebold will pull back the brochures to help Lamone out of a fix?” Well, the odds turned out to be 100 percent. Lamone asked Diebold to stop distributing the brochure and Diebold says they will comply. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

The inside Maryland media has finally discovered what was reported outside of Maryland earlier this week; the state’s election director may have a conflict of interest issue and there is no doubt that she suffers from poor decision making. Linda Lamone, Maryland’s top election official allowed her picture, and a statement of questionable quality, to be used in a brochure that Diebold is using to promote their electronic poll book product. While Lamone discusses how great the product is, she conveniently forgets that the system failed miserably when used in the state primary last September. She claims that she sees nothing wrong with allowing Diebold to use this promotion, after all she is a lawyer and she reviewed the brochure before it was printed. The Governor and some state legislators from both parties seem to disagree with Lamone. What are the odds that Diebold will pull back the brochures to help Lamone out of a fix? ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

As The BRAD BLOG reported yesterday, voting machine company ES&S has finally relented and agreed to join all of the other companies operating in the state by cooperating with the Secretary of State Debra Bowen's "Top-to-Bottom Review" of all electronic voting systems previously certified by her predecessor Bruce McPherson. After previously refusing to supply the state with source code for the company's InkaVote Plus system used exclusively in Los Angeles County, Bowen had demanded the release of the source code from escrow where it was stored by state law, as we also reported previously.

But has ES&S really relented? Or is something else up?

We asked yesterday why ES&S decided to send their source code, instead of allowing Bowen to pull it from the escrow facility at Iron Mountain, as she had previously demanded. And now, based on a letter from the company which The BRAD BLOG was able to obtain from one of our sources, as sent to Bowen's office when they agreed to supply the source code Monday, the smell of something fishy continues to permeate. The complete ES&S letter is posted in full at the bottom of this article.

On Monday, June 25, ES&S sent the letter to Lowell Finley, California's Deputy Sec. of State in charge of Voting Systems Technology and Policy, agreeing to supply the source code for InkaVote Plus is an amazing example of the company's arrogance even as it continues to beg a myriad of unanswered questions.

ES&S opens the letter repeating their desire for changes to the previously agreed upon Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) they have with the state. AS well, they believe the cost of Bowen's "top-to-bottom review" is too high, and they have concerns with some of the researchers who are doing the review. Nonetheless, they agree to cooperate.

Yet, after informing Finley that they intend to finally send the required source code, they instruct him that they expect him to send a letter to Iron Mountain Intellectual Property Management Inc. to release the firm from the state's request for the escrowed source code. Now why would they need to do that?

"As ES&S is providing the InkaVote Plus voting system source code directly to your office, ES&S requests that you send a letter to Iron Mountain retracting your request for the InkaVote Plus voting system source code," writes ES&S' Steven M. Pearson in the letter.

"This will provide the required notification to Iron Mountain that you are no longer in need of the requested source code and allow Iron Mountain to close your request. In addition, this will avoid ES&S from having to issue contrary instructions to Iron Mountain to prohibit the release of the InkaVote Plus voting system source code."

So what the heck is that all about?...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

ES&S seems to have complied with the demand from the California SoS’s office that they provide their source code as part of the state’s “Top-to-Bottom Review” of all voting systems used in the state. I say “seems to” because ES&S delivered source code but would not let the state have the code that is sitting in escrow, per state law, for exactly the purpose of a review of their voting system. This is a growing story with a lot of unanswered questions. Also, is it not enough that we have given a few corporations too much involvement in our voting process (with more to come if S-1487 is signed into law)? Now Salt Lake Co. Utah is actually discussing allowing companies to advertise at the polls in exchange for providing a minimum of five uniform dressed “volunteers” as poll workers. I can see it now, a banner running across the DRE screen announcing, “Today’s election is brought to you by WalMart”...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

HR-811 update: Contact was finally made with someone on the staff of the House Admin. Committee who knows the status of HR-811. The question asked concerned a deletion of language that was put into the bill during committee deliberation but was removed after the bill was voted out of committee. The specific language was the “Capuano Amendment” and concerned emergency paper ballots. The staff member reports that the language was removed from the bill due to some discussion by members of the committee. The language, or some facsimile, that “captures the intent of Mr. Holt and Mr. Capuano” will be reinserted into the bill by a manager’s amendment prior to the bill going to the floor. So, the bill voted on by members of the House of Representatives and passed out of committee is not the existing bill and no one knows what the real bill looks like at this time and no one knows what HR-811 will look like when it is finally sent to the floor for a vote. And Congress wonders why their popularity is less than that of the President; or do they care?...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.Org

The BRAD BLOG has learned this evening that source code and a check were sent to the state of California by ES&S. Readers may recall that as of last Thursday ES&S had not complied with Sec. of State Debra Bowen's demand for a copy of the source code used exclusively in Los Angeles County.

According to a Secretary of State spokesperson, they received a copy of the source code and a check to cover the expense for the state's "top-to-bottom" review. ES&S finally relented, and sent the code only after Bowen had demanded it be released from escrow as per state law.

Questions still remain and your intrepid correspondent will be following-up with the state.

Why did the code come from ES&S and not from Iron Mountain, Inc., the escrow agent? Is there something in the escrowed code that ES&S does not wish the state to see? How does the state know that the code they got from ES&S is the same code used to build the software running on the machines used in LA County?

Today Wired News' Kim Zetter reported on their "Threat Level" blog that Maryland Election Director, and long-time Diebold apologist, Linda Lamone has allowed her statements and picture to be used in new advertising brochures Diebold has produced to promote their Express Poll 5000 electronic poll books.

Zetter quotes Lamone:

Note Lamone's mention of being pleased during the general election.

As Zetter points out in her article, the machines that Lamone is speaking for failed spectacularly in Maryland during last September's Maryland primary election. The machines also failed in Georgia last July. It appears that Diebold was doing what seems to have become a common practice among the voting machine vendors, "Beta Testing" in a real election. While Diebold claimed that they fixed all of the problems found during the primaries, at least one official told Zetter that machines in at least one precinct crashed when a last name beginning with "Cur" was typed in.

And what about the conflict of interest of Lamone shilling for a company that the state is doing business with? Zetter goes on to report...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today finds what amounts to three days worth of opinions, columns and editorials. Some voters in Georgia are using their state mandated voter ID cards for more than just voting. It seems that it has become a free piece of identification for cashing checks and some voters have more than one of the cards. Over half of the counties in Utah have passed resolutions against HR-811. They incorrectly state that the bill will cost the counties millions. In response to this at least one local activist incorrectly states that passage of HR-811 will save the county money by it’s use of a paper-based voting system. Nothing in the bill will force the county to use anything but voting machines with a different voter verified paper record printer. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Remember Arthur Anderson, the man who ran for Palm Beach Co, Florida, Election Supervisor on a promise that he would give the voters a voter verified paper trail? He is also the man who ran from that promise just as soon as he was elected and took office. In fact he has gone so far to protect the county's paperless Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines that his office lied in an estimate of how much it would cost for elections if the county went to a paper ballot-based optical-scan system. In the estimate to the county, Anderson tripled the cost of printing each paper ballot to $1.25 from the actual $.40 per ballot. The difference in the estimate? $2.2 million. And in California the SoS has announced that ES&S is not cooperating in her “top-to-bottom” review of the state’s voting systems. It seems that ES&S has refused to turn over their source code for review. ...

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In the New York state legislature it is coming down to crunch time for legislation to be finalized and passed. It is also a period of great concern for New York’s election integrity community. As the New York Times reports this morning:

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

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

In his “S.1487: A Deconstruction” Robert Bancroft points out;

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

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Today gives us more of what was reported yesterday about the appellate court’s decision to not let Christine Jennings look at the ES&S software. Other than that it was a pretty slow day today....