H.R. 811 would provide over a billion dollars to add paper trails to existing electronic voting machines, and to buy new electronic voting machines. Does this make sense given the ease of attack?
Other developments -
An independent report on the 2006 primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio showed that 10% of the paper trails were either missing or unusable (The Coming Paper-Trail Debacle?). It also found "one in six electronic voter tallies did not match the election's paper trail" (Report on Diebold Voting Machine Fiasco Triggers Dem Outrage).
Dan Rather Reports on HD.net showed Sequoia intentionally sabotaged the paper ballots sent to Palm Beach County in 2000 (and only to Palm Beach County). This explains the hanging chads. The program also reported on how ES&S has for years ignored the fact that the touch screens in their iVotronic voting machines often don't work properly. These are the machines used in Sarasota County, where there were 18,000 missing votes in a Congressional race. See Dan Rather Reports, Episode 227, " The Trouble with Touch Screens" or, for an indexed transcript of the one hour program, click here.
New Jersey passed a law in July, 2005 requiring paper trails on electronic voting machines. In July, 2007, New Jersey tested three paper trail systems submitted by vendors, and found they did not meet the specification in the law! (New Jersey Tests Find Flaws in Printer Performance, Could Jeopardize Election Accuracy).
H.R. 811's destructive amendments
H.R. 811 originally mandated public disclosure of all the source code used in programming the election system with the vendors retaining proprietary rights. Due to heavy lobbying by Microsoft and others, the public's right was removed. Instead, only "qualified experts" would be able to see it after signing non-disclosure agreements. This would, for the first time, codify in law that our votes may be counted by secret code, code which we can not examine. As Teresa Hommel of WheresThePaper says:
"These paragraphs explicitly sell out American democracy to corporate commercial interests. The EAC and vendors, without other stakeholders such as states, parties, and citizens, will develop a process to protect private interests from public knowledge of how our elections are conducted."
The May 16 amendments also weakened the voter's right to request a paper ballot, if she didn't want to use an electronic voting machine.
The July 27 amendments move the dates back. Many of the other benefits which were to be in force for the 2008 election will only take effect in 2010 or 2012. With the amendments, a jurisdiction with paperless electronic voting machines will be able to buy paper trail printers for their electronic voting machines and use them until 2012.
It also removes the requirement that the paper used in the paper trail be "durable". This will allow flimsy paper which is unsuitable for recounts and audits.
It adds a requirement that voters not be required to handle a paper ballot.
There are no existing systems, either electronic or not, that meet the stated requirements for 2012. The one billion dollars appropriated in this bill may be spent on systems which must be replaced by 2012.
The bill assigns to the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) a host of new powers and responsibilities. This is an agency which has been rocked by scandals this year:
- The EAC changed the text and conclusions of their consultant's report on voter fraud (voting twice, voting for dead people, etc.), and would not allow the authors to comment on the changes for months (A Rigged Report on U.S. Voting?).
- The EAC suppressed their consultant's report on the effect of voter ID laws, until forced to reveal it.
- The EAC refused to accredit Ciber Inc. to continue testing election systems due to lack of proof they did the required tests. However, the EAC did not tell reveal this, so that elections officials continued saying their systems were proven safe due to thorough testing by Ciber, which has certified systems used by about 70-80% of the voters nationally. The problem was revealed six months later in a New York Times article.
- The EAC guidelines, against which systems are tested, contains a huge loophole that allows testers to pass a system even if it doesn't meet the EAC guidelines! (See section B.5 of Volume 2 of the Guidelines).
