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"iVotronic Audit Problems and Hand Counting"
VotersUnite! Alert #4. June 15, 2004. United Voters!
We have two important items of business today.
ES&S iVOTRONIC AUDIT PROBLEMS
Perhaps you are aware of the severe audit problems recently disclosed about the iVotronics in Miami-Dade County, Florida. If not, here's an excerpt that gives a quick summary.
In an October audit of the Homestead election, Suarez found that the event log failed to account for 162 votes that had been cast.
'I believe that there is/are a serious `bug' in the program(s) that generate these reports, making the reports unusable for the purpose that we were considering (audit an election, recount an election and, if necessary, use these reports to certify an election),'' Suarez wrote in a memo to Kaplan on June 6, 2003.
If your state uses ES&S iVotronic voting machines, it is extremely important for you to let your chief election official know about this problem. Doug Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa went to Miami to help figure out how they might deal with the problem. He said, "Quite frankly, I believe that the bugs that Miami has found are present in all iVotronic systems deployed nationwide." But we have discovered that many people outside Florida don't even know about the problem. The EAC didn't even know about it until John Gideon told them. Professor Jones has written a report of his recommendations, and your officials need to know about it. Please contact them and pass on this information. http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/miami.pdf
A CALL FOR PAPER BALLOTS, HAND COUNTED
We are preparing a press release announcing the groups who are calling for paper ballots and other essential election protection measures for the November 2004 election and beyond. If your group agrees with the statements below and would like to be included in the press release, please reply to this email with your endorsement. Please pass this email on so we can gain the endorsements of a large number of groups.
- Errors in both DRE and optical-scan voting machine software, firmware, and election-specific ballot programming have caused hundreds of election problems in recent years, including high levels of uncounted and unmarked ballots. It is unreasonable to believe that all such errors have been detected. - Manual recounts of optical-scan ballots have overturned initial, inaccurate machine results in many such cases. It is only reasonable to believe that the outcomes of many other elections (both DRE and optical scan) have been inaccurate, and the inaccuracies were not detected. - Computer-counting errors have a much greater potential impact than hand-counting errors. - The electronic voting systems used in the United States, both optical scan and DRE, have severe and unresolved security and accuracy flaws that are not being remedied by election procedures. - While we advocate the use of computers to assist people in marking their ballots, computers cannot count those ballots reliably. Therefore, in order to protect the accuracy of our election outcomes, we demand the following: - All ballots shall be paper ballots and hand counted, unless the voter voluntarily chooses to vote on a paperless electronic machines offered by the jurisdiction for accessibility and privacy. - Any use of electronic voting systems, whether DRE or optical scan, shall provide a paper ballot for every vote cast, at the time the ballot is cast, and that paper ballot shall be used for the original vote count, audit, and final record — except as noted above for accessibility and privacy. - Ballot counts shall be done by precinct with public oversight. - Ballot-count results shall be made public immediately at each precinct.
- Media outlets shall wait until all polling places close before reporting any election results or outcome predictions.
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