Paperless DREs already acquired shall be replaced or refitted with printers to print a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) by January 1, 2010 [21]. By July, 2009 states shall certify that they will replace or retrofit such systems[18].
Wrong!
Many activists for election integrity started by advocating VVPAT, but then we found out that VVPAT won't work:
b. Even if accurate verification was assured, DREs, with or without VVPAT, prevent appropriate citizen observation and understanding how votes are recorded, cast, stored, handled, and counted. It is appropriate for voters to observe the recording and casting of their own votes and ballot. It is appropriate for election observers to observe the storage, handling, and counting of the votes and ballots.
Meaningful observation is the basis of all election legitimacy. Historically, the only reason that elections have been conducted in a non-understandable or non-observable way has been to enable those who are running the election to commit fraud. http://www.wheresthepaper.org/ElectionFraud_DontWorryAboutPaperBallots.htm
c. Verification of a DRE screen or VVPAT is a placebo exercise, since neither is counted for initial tallies nor 98% of final tallies under this bill--instead, invisible electronic votes inside the DRE, which voters cannot verify and observers cannot safeguard, determine election outcomes.
d. DREs currently in use probably do not work because they have never gone through the lengthy, expensive software testing and correction process that other software-related products go through. Ellen Stone, a software expert, explained the process in her testimony of November 21, 2006, to the New York City Board of Elections. http://www.wheresthepaper.org/EllenStone061121.htm
There are two reasons why DREs have not gone through the process. First, DREs were originally designed without VVPAT or any other mechanism for independent verification of accurate function. When there is no way for anyone to find out whether a product works accurately or not, there is no market pressure on manufacturers to ensure that the product works accurately as long as it looks like it does.
Second, certification testing has been a secret and probably sham process. Again, there has been no market pressure for certification testing to ensure that DREs work as long as they appear to. In a January, 2004 interview with a small voting machine vendor, one executive says "The ITA (independent testing authority) has a limited scope in what they can test and check on the system. It is based on time and economics. For an independent test authority to absolutely, thoroughly test under all possible conditions that the device will operate properly they would have to spend, in my estimation, 10 times the amount of time and money as it took to develop it in the first place. And the technology changes so rapidly, by the time they get done testing it, it's obsolete. ... Absolutely nothing will you see in the FEC requirements that this (puts hand on DRE voting machine) has to work. It has to have these functions. But it doesn't have to work. ... The states basically look at the federal qualification testing as being kind of the ultimate testing ground.
http://www.wheresthepaper.org/iTeam01_20MicroVoteInterview.htm
Since the Ciber testing laboratory scandal in January, 2007, we know that the certification testing process for nearly 70% of the DREs in America involved minimal if any testing and was meaningless. http://www.wheresthepaper.org/news.html#jan07 See also testimony at the May 7, 2007, Field Hearing on "Certification and Testing of Electronic Voting Systems" held by the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives of the Committee on House Administration, U. S. House of Representatives, www.wheresthepaper.org/news.html#May7_07FieldHearing
There have been thousands of documented failures of certified electronic voting systems, but citizens have been prevented by vendors and election administrators from examining the systems to discover the specific reasons. However the "DRE Analysis of May 2006 Primary, Cuyahoga County, Ohio", published by ESI in August, 2006, compared a hand count of VVPAT to the DRE's printed tally reports, electronic tallies, and a manual inspection of memory cards. www.votersunite.org/info/ADeeperLook-ESI.pdf The results were:
16% of DRE tally reports did not match the hand count of votes on VVPAT
72% of DRE tally reports did not match the electronic tallies
26% of DRE electronic tallies did not match the memory cards
76% of DRE memory cards did not match the hand count of votes on VVPAT.
Solution:
Congress should ban the use of DREs, and not spend more taxpayers' money on these machines that undermine the legitimacy of our elections in these fatal ways. The benefit of accessibility for voters with disabilities, non-English languages, and illiteracy can be achieved without DREs--and even if it couldn't, accessibility to a placebo vote is not beneficial to either the individual voter or our country.
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