Governor’s Operations Committee Meeting – Voting Machines

Today Tom and I attended the Governor’s Operations Committee Meeting at the Utah State Capitol Building. We attended because they had on their agenda to discuss the voting machine issue.

Kathy Dopp of Utah Counts Votes was there with Bruce Funk, Elections Director of Emery County (btw, I was supposed to go to Emery County yesterday to attend the biweekly commissioner’s meeting, but was later warned against doing that since it was determined that “outsiders” might hurt the cause, so I didn’t go.). The public was not permitted to give comment at this meeting, but Kathy was permitted to give her document “What Utah Lt. Governor’s Office is Not Telling You” (see below) to committee members.

Michael Cragun, Director of Elections for Utah, gave a briefing on HAVA (Help America Vote Act, and the new voting system in Utah, bascially saying how wonderful the system is going to be. He answered a few logisitical questions of committee members and then continued to give them symbolic pats on the back for all the hard work and passing HB 348 which was what helped move the Diebold Voting Machine Acquisition forward. He also really played up Diebold and how much support they are giving Utah.

That part of the meeting lasted about 15 minutes. Since there was no public comment, Tom and left (we rode our bicycles from West Jordan, using TRAX, to attend this.). Kathy reports that she was interviewed by KCPW radio and the Salt Lake Tribune.
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PDF version of “What Utah Lt. Governor’s Office is Not Telling You”

Electronic Ballots are Not Verifiable by Voters.

Just because visible text on a touch-screen and the visible text on
voter-verifiable paper roll are correct, it does not follow that the
invisible electronic ballot and the proprietary (secret) bar-code on
the paper rolls have recorded votes correctly; or that votes are
counted correctly.

Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, in a March 1, 2006 letter to
all State Election Directors, wrote:

“As anyone who uses one can attest, computers break down, get
viruses, lose information, and corrupt data. We know this to be the
case, and so we back-up our files to ensure nothing important is lost.
Paper ballots serve as the ultimate back-up for our elections,
providing secure and permanent verification of the will of the
people.”

Yet Utah has purchased no paper-roll advancers that are needed to
count our voter-verifiable paper ballots!

Diebold will secretly cast and count our e-votes with proprietary
software and systems.

Yet Diebold:

1.sold Utah a mixture of new and used voting machines which were
rejected in other states, as if they were all new, well-functioning
voting machines;1

2.told Utah that it had “about 20” office locations in Utah,
advertising 16 phony office locations in Utah white pages that never
existed;2

3.sold Utah voting machines which posed an 110 volt electrocution
hazard to voters and poll workers;

4.sold Utah voting machines with a nonstandard printer design that
lacks adequate paper guides and has a tendency to have paper jams
during elections;

5.charged Emery County $40,000 to re-examine two voting machines
claiming that world-renowned security experts may have rigged them to
fail3; and

6.was sued for fraud by BlackBoxVoting with the state of California
and settled for $2.6 million;

7.is being sued for fraud currently by its own stockholders; and

8.its sales persons were caught giving $10,000 bribes to county
election officials in Ohio; and

9.it has had its voting systems decertified or rejected in other
states such as California and Maryland.

Utah’s Lt. Governor’s office helped Diebold cover up the evidence of
its sale of used, rejected voting machines to Utah by giving Diebold
access to warehouses where voting machines are stored; and urged Emery
Commissioners to fire 23 year veteran Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk
because he discovered the truth about Utah’s Diebold voting machines.
Bruce Funk is the first Utah election official to ask independent
computer security experts to evaluate Utah’s voting machines. A
scientific report about Utah’s Diebold TSx voting machines will be
released soon by world-renowned security experts Hari Hursti and
Security Innovation. Until this report is received and publicly
scrutinized, Diebold voting systems should not be used.

Design Flaws of Diebold – (“trust Diebold” is not a valid security method)

Diebold voting machine security flaws have been widely reported since
early 2003. There are known ways for insiders (Diebold or county
staff) to undetectably rig Utah elections:

1.manipulate vote counts on the central server

2.manipulate vote counts on touch-screens using code on the same
memory cards that record votes

3.cast extra votes using multiple voter cards

4.plant “Easter Egg” programs in the touch-screens which only miscount
during elections

5.plant backdoors in the touch-screen or central server which give
access during elections

Diebold voting machines do not employ modern technology:

1. Diebolds do not use write-once-only media to create unalterable logs and

2. Diebolds do not generate random numbers to match electronic and
paper ballots that would make its electronic ballot records
individually auditable.

Highly improbable and impossible vote counts have been recorded by
Diebold voting machines, including a recent election which caused New
Hampshire’s Attorney General to impound Diebold voting machines.

Irrefutable high-resolution photographic evidence of Emery County,
Utah Diebold voting machines flaws is available at
http://utahcountvotes.org/BBV-Diebold-images.php. A report will be
released soon regarding the security and design of Utah’s Emery County
voting machines by Hari Hursti and professional(s) at Security
Innovation.

Un-audited systems allow insiders unfettered access to rig elections.

We independently audit banks, churches, and businesses to prevent
insider embezzlement. Allowing insiders to undetectably alter vote
counts leaves elections open to malfeasance. Utah election officials
did not purchase the necessary equipment to hand-count the paper roll
record of ballots!

Utah’s election officials are wrong.

No amount of guarding the voting machines or pre-election testing can
prevent or detect malfeasance and vote rigging. The only way to
ensure that e-ballots record and count votes correctly is to
independently audit vote counts in every election. The “security by
obscurity” system is known by all computer scientists to give insiders
unfettered access to tamper. See

Click to access sos-opposition-letter418.pdf

Diebold hid information concerning its flaws behind “Trade Secret and
Confidential”. It did not publicly answer the following questions in
its RFP response!

1. Explain how “The voting solution shall control logic and data
processing methods to detect errors and provide correction method.”

2. “How does the proposed system manage recounts and verify that the
ballots counted accurately reflect the votes cast?

3. “If the voting solution includes a voter verifiable paper ballot,
or if the offeror has a DRE that is adaptable, please describe in
detail how this function works.”

4. “If there is a voter verifiable option (including but not limited
to printing), what is the poll worker’s duty in this operation?”

5. “What measures have been taken to identify device tampering and
monitoring?”

Utah Reports Election Results in a way that Hides Evidence of Vote
Tampering by adding together detailed vote counts prior to publicly
reporting them. In other words, Utah’s election results reporting
practices permit insiders to pad votes for one candidate in one
vote-type while simultaneously subtracting votes for a different
candidate in a different vote type.

The following Utah computer scientists recommended against purchasing
electronic-ballot voting machines. This written statement was made to
Utah Election Officials on October 20, 2006 and a copy was handed in
January, 2005 to Utah Lt. Governor Herbert:

“The current generation of electronic (DRE) voting machines are not
secure, do not provide voters with a way to know that their votes are
being tabulated correctly, and do not provide a mechanism for
effective recounts when errors arise. As such, they represent an
unacceptable technical risk, regardless of how people feel about
them.”4

Erik Brunvand, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Utah
John Carter, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Utah
Samuel H. Drake, Research Associate Professor, School of Computing and
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah
Ganesh C Gopalakrishnan, Professor of Computer Science, Universi ty of Utah
Michael Jones, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Brigham Young University
David Hanscom, Professor, Clinical, School of Computing, University of Utah
Arthur Lee, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Utah
John Regehr, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Utah
Kent Seamons, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Brigham Young
University and Director, Internet Security Research Lab
Peter Shirley, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Utah
Phillip Windley, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Brigham
Young University and Former Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the
State of Utah

Touch-screens are the most costly voting system.

Republican Governor Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. of Maryland February 15,
2006 wrote that Diebold touch-screens caused “an almost 78 % increase
from the original cost estimate. However, this misjudgment pales in
comparison to the 1000% increase for estimates of the annual
maintenance costs for this system.”

A cost study of all Florida’s counties5 shows that buying
touch-screens causes an increase in annual expenditures of about
57.3%. Owning optical scanners can increase annual costs about 16.7%.
(a 40% difference)

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS for UTAH:

1.Utah can defer the requirement to meet HAVA for two years by making
a request to the Justice Department like Connecticut did. A two-year
deferment would be awarded if Lt. Governor Herbert would ask. Utah
could save money by locking the machines up and temporarily
re-certifying Utah’s old voting systems. Diebold did not operate in
good faith with the State during the bid and review process in Utah.
Diebold should complete certification of their system to conform to
the 2002 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines and provide software
updates to their system at no cost and prior to the first usage of
their system. Failure to do so should be considered a default
condition for Diebold and the contract should be terminated; Diebold
should reimburse the State all costs associated with the Diebold
contract.

2.Require Utah County Clerks to release detailed vote counts broken
out by precinct and by precinct by vote type (absentee, Election Day,
early, early-provisional, Election-Day-provisional, overseas, mail-in,
military) including total ballots cast, total counted, and total
number of voters. Utah should monitor its own election results to
detect probable vote count errors.

3.Perform Routine Mandatory Independent Audits of Vote Counts in all
Utah elections. A vote count audit proposal can minimize the burden to
election officials and taxpayers. See
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudit-UT.pdf.
Independent audits would require purchasing paper roll advancers in
order to practically be able to hand-count Diebold’s paper roll ballot
records.

4.Wait for the public release of the scientific study of Utah’s
Diebold TSx voting machines by world-renowned security firm Security
Innovation6 and Hari Hursti before making decisions.

I respectfully request that Utah citizens be permitted to give public
input at the upcoming May 2006 Government Operations Committee
hearing.

PDF version of “What Utah Lt. Governor’s Office is Not Telling You”

Click to access UtahLtGovNotTellingYou.pdf

—-
Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
http://utahcountvotes.org
http://kathydopp.com