MAJOR NEW INVESTIGATION OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

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The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=36343&proj_key=76
Most broadly, the report found:
· All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.
· The most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied if proper countermeasures are implemented at the state and local level.
· Few jurisdictions have implemented any of the key countermeasures that could make the least difficult attacks against voting systems much more difficult to execute successfully.

The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Usability at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=36941
The Brennan Center report concluded that two of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems today are better at recording voter intentions than older systems like the punchcard system used in Florida in 2000. At the same time, the report faulted one electronic voting system under consideration in New York and in use in parts of New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. This system, the "full face DRE," continues to unduly hamper voters' ability to easily and accurately cast a ballot for their preferred candidate without undue burden, confusion and delay.

Among the report's key findings:
Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) and Scrolling Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems are more accurate at recording voter intention than older voting systems. In 2004, residual vote rates were less than 1% for both technologies.

Full-face DRE systems continue to be plagued with an unacceptably high residual vote rate. In 2000, 2002 and 2004, it exceeded that of either PCOS or scrolling DRE systems.

Residual vote rates among voters earning less then $25,000 are higher on full faced DRE's (2.8%), than on either PCOS (1.4%) or Scrolling DRE's (1.3%).

The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost at http://www.brennancenter.org/stack_detail.asp?key=97&subkey=38150
The report is the final product of the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of electronic voting systems in the United States. It comes after nearly two years of study with many of the nation's leading academics, election officials, economists, and security, usability and accessibility experts.

Up until this point, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of voting systems in the areas of security, accessibility, usability, and cost. The result is that jurisdictions make purchasing decisions and adopt laws and procedures that have little to do with their overall goals.

New Mexico also chose to discard their Danaher/Shouptronic machines due to undervotes ranging from 6 to 16 times the national average and in comparison to optical scan machines during the 2004 election.
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri's bio:
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, globally recognized as a leading authority on computer security and electronic vote tabulation and a member of the committee that advises the government on standards for electronic voting machines. She is president/CTO of Notable Software, Inc., www.notablesoftware.com.

A technology specialist, with degrees in computer science and engineering, Rebecca Mercuri happened to defend her doctoral dissertation "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances" at the University of Pennsylvania, just eleven days before the 2000 U.S. Presidential election.

Subsequently, her testimony and opinions were sought in Bush v. Gore, and by the House Science Committee, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Federal Election Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, the U.K. Cabinet, and numerous U.S. state legislatures. Many of Rebecca's views on electronic voting appear on her website at and she also authors the "Security Watch" column for the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

She has been frequently quoted in the New York Times, on National Public Radio, by the Associated Press, in the Congressional Record, and various other venues, including TV appearances on Fox News, NBC Nightline and a debate on Lou Dobbs.

Having spent the last two years as a fellow at Harvard University, Dr. Mercuri returned this fall to New Jersey's Notable Software, Inc., the consulting company she founded, to continue her work as a forensic computing expert on a wide range of civil, municipal and criminal cases.

Dr. Dan Lopresti's bio:
After completing his doctorate, Dr. Lopresti joined the Computer Science Department at Brown University. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory in Princeton, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. In 2003, he joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh University where he conducts research examining basic algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and computer security.

At Lehigh, Dr. Lopresti holds the Class of 1961 Chair and is co-director of the Pattern Recognition Research Lab. He has authored over 80 publications in journals and refereed conference proceedings on a wide range of topics and holds 21 U.S. Patents. He has served on dozens of conference program committees and as editor for six international conference proceedings, and is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition.

Coalition for Voting Integrity
Contact information:
Mary Ann Gould
email: votingintegrity@aol.com
(c) 215.588.8518
(h) 215.357.5206

Coalition for Voting Integrity

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