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.
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