April 14, 2006 at 23:00:00

Open letter about Utah's utter inability to do audit or recount of any sort

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By Kathy Dopp, UtahCountVotes.org, Posted by Joan Brunwasser (about the submitter) Page 2 of 2 page(s)

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The printers still lack sufficient paper guides to prevent paper jams.

The primary concern of all mainstream, reputable computer scientists
(including all those in Utah) is that:

Unless the electronic counts are audited, any electronic-ballot system
is wide-open to undetectable election tampering and innocent errors
both at the ballot casting and ballot counting stages. Unfortunately
U.S. election officials have memorized the names of all 4 or 5 rogue
U.S. computer scientists who support unaudited electronic-ballot
voting machines, and one of those rogue scientists is even a technical
advisor for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission whose topsy-turvy
idea of an "independent" audit is to have one electronic record verify
a second electronic record - both programmed by the same inside
programmer. This Britt Williams entirely ignored the advice of all
the scientists of the National Science Foundation funded voting system
project ACCURATE.

Utah's Diebold voting system must be audited, particularly after
Diebold has committed fraud against us - but even if it had not - to
detect innocent errors as well as vote count tampering.

Let us keep in mind that, so far, computer science experts have
discovered four separate ways to undetectably rig vote counts using
Diebold voting systems. By undetectable, I mean that even the most
skilled computer scientist would not be able to detect any evidence of
the tampering after an election, and that no amount of guarding the
voting systems from outsiders or pre-election day logic and accuracy
testing would detect or prevent election tampering.

We should thank Emery County's Bruce Funk profusely for his careful
work, and read carefully the upcoming study by the word-renowned
security experts on Utah's Diebold voting machines when it becomes
available.

Utah election officials have still not hired even one mainstream
computer scientist who is a voting system expert to help it devise
procedures for instructing poll workers on what to do in all the
situations which could result during elections! For instance at
Thursday's demonstration in Summit County, all the opaque doors were
covering and hiding the paper rolls from sight. These opaque printer
covers should be removed during elections, and the many situations and
problems that might occur such as paper jams, and voters reporting
when paper roll text does not match, if ballots do not permit voters
to vote for all races they are entitled to vote for, and many more
possibilities - and what poll workers should do - needs to be planned
in advance. I remain flabberghasted that Utah's election officials
have yet to hire any computer scientist who is an independent voting
system expert, to assist them - chosing to rely instead on a voting
system vendor with a long history of questionable behavior to tell
them what to do.

If Utah is going to use this costly, insecure Diebold touchscreen
electronic-ballot voting system (rather than more wisely lock them up
and apply for a 2 year HAVA deferrment), then the responsible action
is for Utah to purchase the necessary equipment (paper roll
advancers) for hand counting the paper rolls and implement routine
procedures to independently audit vote count accuracy.

Regards,

----
Kathy Dopp
http://utahcountvotes.org
http://kathydopp.com
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections

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Book Recommendations for "2006 Elections Voting"

Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2006
by Thom File

$23.37

Number of pages:
Publisher: Commerce Dept., Econ and Stats Administration, Census Bureau