E-voting vendor blocks security audit with legal threats

New Jersey election officials have scrapped plans for an independent audit of Union County voting machines because the vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, says that unauthorized third-party security reviews would violate the county’s license agreement. Sequoia threatened the county with legal action when it learned that election officials were planning to send the machines to a respected Princeton University computer scientist for analysis.

California to recertify insecure voting machines
Sequoia voting machines used in five counties in New Jersey during the recent primaries exhibited unusual errors and emitted electronic tallies that were inconsistent with the total counts from the paper trail. Sequoia claims that the contradicting numbers are the result of operator error rather than a technical flaw. Election officials viewed Sequoia’s explanation with skepticism and decided that the irregularity justified an independent review of the machines.  Read more 

Voting on the old dinosaur machines in Pennsylvania and other places had its flaws, but there was one part they made helpfully stupid-proof. After you pulled the little levers to register your vote in each race, you pulled a BIG lever that opened the curtain and allowed you out of the booth. That lever was what officially “cast” your votes into the little counters inside the machine. Very 1930s-ish technology but (unless the damn machine threw a shoe, or tossed a wire off a pulley which they were prone to do, trapping you inside and causing a hysterical call for a repairman) it worked.  Read more 

And for a change, it’s not all bad! It even made a mainstream paper:

his Guest Editorial was published in The Iowa City Press-Citizen. It is reposted with permission of the author.

The June 6 primary election has come and gone, but it should not be forgotten. A problem that has marred elections across the United States came to Pottawattamie County and offered our state an unforgettable lesson in the need for verifiable and auditable elections.

On election night, as county election workers watched absentee ballots tabulate, they noticed odd results in the race for Pottawattamie County recorder. John Sciortino, the popular incumbent of 23 years, was losing to a 19-year-old college student named Oscar Duran. Auditor Marilyn Jo Drake quickly suspected something amiss, and ordered a manual check of the paper ballots. Her suspicion proved correct: The ballot scanners had not been programmed to recognize that in different precincts the paper ballots rotated the candidates’ positions. Ballot rotation is a measure commonly used to reduce the chance of voter fraud.  Read more