[Note: This item comes from reader Randall. DLH]
From: Randall Webmail <rvh40@insightbb.com>
Date: August 25, 2008 5:03:01 PM PDT
To: dewayne@warpspeed.com, johnmacsgroup@yahoogroups.com, dave@farber.net
Subject: FINALLY, the MSM wakes up (a bit) to the disaster that is our outsourced election systems …
[[The introduction/summary is from John Gideon, at votersunite.org. This story leads today's "Daily Voting News", a free subscription to which can be had by signing up athttp://www.votersunite.org.]]
“Today’s featured article is a warning from Greg Gordon of McClatchy News
in which he points to the fact that the recent disclosure of flawed
software in Premier/Diebold machines points directly to a system of
testing and certifying voting systems that was broken. Gordon points
out, “NASED watched over the issuance of “qualified” reports from
Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the
testing. The vendors secretly negotiated payments with the labs, helped
design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared the codes
driving their software with three NASED technical experts who signed
non-disclosure agreements.”
All it took was a disclosure by Premier/Diebold that all of their voting
systems of the past ten years have potentially lost votes and the media
has woken up to the issue. Of course, some election officials are just
too wedded to their vendors. Officials in South Carolina and West
Virginia proudly proclaim that while states around them are doing the
right thing by changing from DRE voting to paper based systems they are
going to stand firm behind their paperless voting systems, ignoring the
facts in doing so.”
——————
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/greg_gordon/story/50485.html>
Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure
By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON
— Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot
totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial
laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws
in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.
Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least
1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are
needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19
of its models dating back a decade.
Voting experts reacted skeptically to the company’s assertion that election
workers’ routine crosschecks of ballot totals would have spotted any
instances where its servers failed to register some precinct vote
totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards.
Like nearly all of the nation’s modern voting equipment, Premier’s products
were declared “qualified” under a voluntary testing process overseen
from the mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of State
Election Directors.
Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups allege that the NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment makers to help design the tests.
The federal Election Assistance Administration, created in 2002, took over the testing responsibility in 2005, but has yet to certify a single voting machine.
As a result, charged Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog group
Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the race
between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are “scandalously
flawed”‘ and “the integrity of this election is in question.”
David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council, which
represents the leading makers of voting machines, said there’s no
reason for concern. Without mentioning NASED, he said that members’
products “have all been certified” as meeting 2002 voluntary federal
standards.
NASED officials took on the testing in the mid 1990s, after the Federal Election Commission adopted voluntary federal standards for voting machines but Congress failed to create a testing agency. The industry was frustrated, too, by being governed by a
hodge-podge of state standards.
“We had two choices: To try to do something or to do nothing,” said Thomas Wilkey, who headed NASED’s volunteer Voting Systems Committee for several years while executive
director of New York’s elections board. “We had a set of standards. It was a crime to let them sit on a shelf.”
NASED watched over the issuance of “qualified” reports from Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the testing. The vendors secretly
negotiated payments with the labs, helped design the tests, got to see
the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with
three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements.
NASED officials posted only “qualified” ratings on the group’s Web site.
The lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in
equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed by
a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Wilkey says the labs’ approval was never a “certification.” But EAC members
have referred publicly to NASED’s “certification” of voting machines,
and numerous states enacted laws barring purchases of equipment unless
it passed the NASED-sponsored tests.
Questions about NASED’s testing grew in intensity over the last couple of years, after
independent tests for the states of California, New York, Ohio, Florida and Connecticut found performance defects and security gaps in both systems that will serve most voters this fall: touch-screens and optical scanners.
The concerns prompted New York’s elections board to scrap a $60 million contract to buy new touch screens to replace its decades-old lever voting machines. Vice Chair Douglas
Kellner said it’s now clear that a “qualified” rating from NASED is “meaningless …a piece of toilet paper.”
David Jefferson, a voting machine security expert who works at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, said NASED’s tests were “of no value if your concern is security against insider threats,” such as tampering by election officials.
[SNIP]