Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
The glitch caused initially inaccurate results in several contests, including two high-profile council races, and created a chaotic scene at Board of Elections and Ethics headquarters Tuesday night. Even with an extremely low turnout, there was no clarity well after midnight, when 50 people, among them candidates and their attorneys, crowded into the election board lobby and demanded answers from officials.
These are voting machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems, whose systems have failed in many recent elections. Their Edge touch-screen system, with its Verivote paper-trail printer, was featured in a video released this week by the UC Santa Barbra Computer Security Group. The video from the scientists at UCSB offers step-by-step instructions on how a single person can hack such a voting system, in about two-seconds, resulting in a county-wide flipped election that even a full post-election hand count of the systems paper trails would not reveal.
It has been pointed out on one of my mailing lists that this same issue may have taken place in Alameda Co, CA, in Feb. 2008.
UPDATE: As expected Sequoia Voting Systems has now made a statement that their investigation shows that the problem was user error or — in a fresh new excuse for the company — possibly even “static discharge”. The Washington Post reports:
Instead, the company pointed to possible static discharge or other scenarios, including the possibility of human error. The conclusion was based on Sequoia’s examination of the District’s election database, according to a company statement yesterday, and the company essentially rejected D.C. election officials’ assertion that “one defective cartridge” was at fault. The glitch led to a chaotic scene Tuesday night as 50 people, including several candidates and their lawyers, showed up demanding answers about the voting tallies.
One thing that Sequoia can be counted on doing is always putting the blame on the voters or the poll workers/election officials. “Static discharge” is something new that we can probably expect to hear more of in the future.
Why is it that Democrats can’t even grab the low hanging fruit? Nancy Pelosi should introduce a Privileged Motion to ban all electronic voting in the 2008 election. Printed paper and ink pens only, just like it was done for decades. Don’t entertain any supplements, don’t back down, make the Republicans filibuster. Run on insuring that we have a one citizen, one verifiable vote democracy. Fight for it in the House and Senate right up to election day. If a miracle occurs and it gets through the Congress make the President veto it or make the Supreme Court strike it down. Unmask the beast.
I am so unhappy with the Democrats.
UUUUAAAAAuuuuuuuu
Great blog. Good post. Comming back…
I´m TC and my fans call me TC
kisses
TC
http://amerikasucks.blogspot.com
Go Brad! Thank you so much for staying on this issue for all this time. It’s time for people to sit up and take notice again.
US CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: This blogger deserves a Medal of Honour, along with many others, once the Republic is restored.
Static? That’s old school. Right out of the ’80s. When that excuse gets old and tired, I’m sure they will roll out the much improved “soft error”. From wikipedia:
“A soft error is also a signal or datum which is wrong, but is not assumed to imply such a mistake or breakage. After observing a soft error, there is no implication that the system is any less reliable than before.”
Maybe you can sell “static discharge” to people who don’t know anything about hardware and software, but anyone with any technical knowledge will be able to see through this as being a transparent lie.
The thing is that a static discharge would produce a random effect on the values on a memory card. It would be astronomically unlikely to affect just a single value–more likely to just scrmbabel (scramble) the whole card, or a lot of values on the card. And the kind of errors it would produce would not be subtle, but the kind of thing where instead of values like, say, “2446” versus “1785”, you’d get “-173489234” versus “97833234321”. In other words, values that are clearly, undeniably, erroneous. Static discharge just CANNOT explain something like a few thousand extra votes for one candidate. And any company that tries to argue that is just lying.
It would be like someone trying to argue that a car has broken down because the fan belt has gotten caught in the rear wheels.
Preposterous.
i saw the movie “uncounted” this week, and i have never felt so sick while watching a film.
http://www.uncountedthemovie.com
we are in CRISIS mode. it’s almost like it doesn’t matter who votes – electronic voting machines are going to decide this election for us.
THEREFORE – DO NOT VOTE ON AN ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE IN 2008.
not only do we need to change who’s in the white house, we also need to change the electronic voting machine scam.
vote on paper in 2008, let’s get barack in, and then let’s work at removing all the corruption in the electronic voting machines.
Or blaming the car breaking down because the driver opened and closed the door too much/hard/liberally
Do you mean someone is actually stealing elections with e-machines?
I’m new to all this… hold on while I wipe the cheese from my fingers.