Representative Doug Aagard Utah Legislative Joint Government Operations Cmte Chair
Dear Representative Doug Aagard,
On Thursday evening I had an opportunity to look at the Diebold touchscreen voting machine paper roll printouts in Summit county (Diebold did not provide a working version at the Mock Election). I found that I had been misinformed on the format of the Diebold paper roll ballot printouts.
The Good News:
The Diebold paper roll printouts do produce a ballot rather than a transaction record and the ballot is printed in a standard format, so while individual ballot records are not auditable (because Diebold does not generate humanly readable random numerical keys that tie paper to electronic records) - at least precinct and machine vote counts are practically auditable.
The Bad News:
Neither the state of Utah, nor any Utah counties have purchased any equipment (paper roll advancers) that are required to be able to practically hand-count Diebold paper rolls.
Therefore no recounts or audits are, for practical purposes, possible in Utah. I was told by a Diebold representative that they do not yet sell a paper roll advancer, but perhaps this equipment (paper roll advancers) can be purchased less expensively elsewhere.
It is incomprehensible that no thought was given by Diebold or by the Utah State Election Office or by Utah's Voting Equipment Selection Cmte, to the ability to perform audits to check the accuracy of electronic counts or do hand recounts of vote counts. (Perhaps it is because election officials gullibly believe that pre-election day logic and accuracy testing is a check of vote count accuracy.)
The 2002 HAVA law did not provide enough time for a normal technical development cycle and all currently available touchscreen electronic-ballot voting equipment use old outdated technology. The Diebold TSx's, by Diebold's own admission in its RFP response, do not even meet the old 2002 federal voluntary voting system guidelines as required by HAVA. (Diebold also claimed as "trade-secret" any of its responses to Utah's RFP which revealed the basic technical design flaws of its system.)
Audits must be a routine part of any voting & election system in order to have any assurance of the correctness of invisible electronic-ballot vote counts. Audits need to be conducted independently of any insiders within the system (election officials or voting machine vendor staff) in order to be considered valid. Here is a written proposal for an independent audit for Utah that tried to minimize the burden to Utah's election officials and taxpayers: http://electionarchive.org/ucvanalysis/us/paper-audits/votecountaudit-ut.pdf
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What computer laymen may not realize is that just because the written text on a touchscreen and the written text on the paper roll agree with a voter's choices, it does not follow that the invisible electronic ballot or the barcode agrees with a voter's choices, or that the votes are counted correctly.
It appears that Diebold has repaired (at least in Summit County) the plug sockets so that they no longer fall out and no longer pose an electrocution hazard (perhaps thanks to Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk's discovery.) http://utahcountvotes.org/bbv-diebold-images.php
The printers still lack sufficient paper guides to prevent paper jams.
