ES&S To Buy Diebold, Blackbox Voting To Sue

Diebold/Premier Election Systems is being purchased by Election Systems & Software (ES&S). According to a Black Box Voting source within the companies, there will be a conference call among key people at the companies within the next couple hours. An ES&S/Diebold-Premier acquisition would consolidate most US voting under one privately held manufacturer.

Can we get serious about election integrity already?

Circuit court judge, county clerk, and election officials among eight indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, 2006

FURTHER UPDATE: Having now reviewed the indictment, as linked above, here are some additional details on the alleged conspiracy which included election fraud though the buying and selling of votes to be cast in a certain way, with the aid of one of the defendants who served as a poll worker during the Early Voting period. Also, at the polling place on Election Day with aid of poll workers, drafted as both Democratic and Republican judges, to elect a slate of candidates --- some of them bribed --- the conspirators would manipulate the votes of "qualified voters" at the voting machines themselves.

Ballot Machine Malfunctions, Fairfax Race Left in Limbo

A voting machine broke down last night as Fairfax County elections officials were tallying the results of a hotly contested special election to fill a vacant seat on the board of supervisors, leaving the outcome too close to call.

Do you live in Virginia? Do you want to do something about this? Check out Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia. The rest of us should look at Verified Voting.

Documents reveal how Ohio routed 2004 voting data through company that hosted external Bush Administration email accounts

In an affidavit filed in September, Spoonamore asserted that "any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible… that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose. ... In the case of Ohio 2004, the only purpose I can conceive for sending all county vote tabulations to a GOP managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Sec. of State, would be to hack the vote at the MIM."

How bad? 'I thought I was going to throw up,' Jennifer Brunner recalls

This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow "paper or plastic" came in the wake of Brunner's landmark 2007 "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which "critical security failures" were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.

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.

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.

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.