When Wharton County, Texas citizen Jim Welch voted last Tuesday, he watched in disbelief as the voting machine changed the vote he'd entered a few moments earlier.
The machine was an ES&S iVotronic touch-screen, the same model recently subjected to a blistering Dan Rather investigative report, but what Welch witnessed does not seem explainable as a manufacturing defect or screen calibration problem like those exposed in Rather's report.
The case has earmarks that may indicate election fraud.
"Vote-flipping" on touch-screens has been documented before. Manufacturers claim votes show up for a different choice than that chosen by the voter sometimes, explaining that this is due to miscalibration of the computer's touch-screen. Miscalibration somehow never seems to happen when you use the airport touchscreens, hopping to "2" bags when you press "1" bag, but according to voting machine vendors it is not uncommon when casting votes. A touch on one part of the machine can register on a different part of the machine due to screen miscalibrations, but this doesn't seem to explain what Welch saw.
What Welch witnessed was votes that registered CORRECTLY when he touched the screen, switching later to a different vote choice, when he was almost finished voting the full page.
Welch was stunned to see a correctly marked vote take on a life of its own, hopping over to a different spot while he voted on other items. He called an elections worker over to show him the problem. The elections worker helped him re-vote the ballot, and both men watched as the vote registered correctly, but later spontaneously altered to shift to another ballot choice.
What is especially interesting about this report is this: The iVotronic voting machines display sets of ballot questions on several different screens, called "pages." If a voting machine alters the vote after a voter has progressed to a later page, the voter won't witness the movement of the vote from one selection to another.
Even if voters take the extra time to page back through every ballot screen in the election, they may not catch the error - and even if they catch the error, both voters and poll workers may attribute it to voter error. Since the vote may be designed to change AFTER the page is turned, even paging back to "check" does not stop the vote from morphing back to an incorrect selection once the voter leaves the page.
What Welch saw was not a screen calibration problem because it registered on the screen correctly. It was not "voter error" because he literally watched the vote re-write itself to another selection, not once, but twice.
The election worker called the Wharton County elections office. Welch was astute enough to see that the suggested solution was not responsive to the real issue:
"You may continue on with this ballot if you like," said the elections worker after conferring with Wharton County elections personnel, "Or I can void this and you can start over."
This is a machine that had already demonstrated it can't be trusted. This is a machine that would fail the much-touted "Logic & Accuracy" testing purported to prove voting machines don't cheat. This is a machine that would not have passed certification tests had it performed this way for the test labs. This is a machine that has no business counting votes at all.
And because the iVotronic voting systems are centrally programmed, and the programming defines how the machine counts its votes, this is a machine that has single-handedly cast doubt on every other iVotronic voting machine in Wharton County.
Jim Welch spoke with Wharton County Clerk Judy Owens about the matter, and she provided answers that were even more unrelated to the problem:
"You can go back and check your vote before casting it," she pointed out, referring to the voter's ability to page back one by one to review each panel. But if the machine can alter a vote - especially if the timing is such that this happens after you have moved to a new page - what good will that do?
"We can print each vote out," she said, but Welch astutely questioned how and when votes can be printed, They aren't printed at the same time as the voter votes, and the printouts simply re-create what the computer program records, so what good is that?
The software most likely to steal elections is the BALLOT SOFTWARE loaded on optical ballot scan and DRE touch-screen voting machines in the county elections office warehouse before the machines are even sealed with security tape.
Ballot definition software is constructed for each voting precinct for each specific election and contains all the ballot details for that election. The DRE touch-screen and optical ballot scan machines use the ballot definitions to determine how selections on the touch-screen or paper ballot are interpreted and recorded in the vote database, and how election results are tallied.
"Ballot definition software" is most often written by temporary contract programmers and typically undergoes minimal testing and no independent audit by election officials. It is this software that is best able to steal elections!
Last November there were 1,142 counties using DRE voting machines and 1,752 counties using optical scanners. This tabulates to 2,894 counties and 161,111 voting precincts that depend on ballot definition software written in weeks and days just before the election last November. That adds up to a lot programmers writing a lot of "last minute" ballot software that election officials never visually audit or comprehensively test. (This is how 18,000 iVotronic machine votes can go missing as in Florida's 13th congressional district last November)
Some counties have hundreds of ballot styles, and each one must be programmed correctly since the number of votes cast on each errant ballot style magnifies human error at this point.
The process of creating the ballot definition and vote tallying software is so complex that many counties contract the work to voting machine vendors and local temporary contract programmers.
Voting machine vendors themselves do not maintain a staff of programmers large enough to write all the ballot definition software for all the voting precincts of all its county election administration customers across the U.S. Therefore, Voting machine vendors themselves must contract out the programming of ballot definition and vote tallying software for its customers.
Who checks the credentials of all these sub-contract programmers writing "last minute" ballot software? Who asks if contract programmers also work for a political party or candidate up for election or if they have criminal records or work for a Foreign government? Who performs detailed audits of the software they write? The frightening answer to all questions is - no one!
Whether voting machine vendors or local contract programmers write ballot definition and vote tallying software, typically, local contract programmers are temporarily hired to load the ballot definition software on to the voting machine memory cards of each and every voting machine.
Election officials appointed to safeguard election integrity, who have sworn an oath to safeguard election integrity, never see or even test the ballot definition and vote tallying software that is loaded onto their voting machines. Anonymous and un-sworn contract programmers who work in other counties, other states or even other countries such as India most often write the software. The software is then passed from sub-contractor to prime-contractor to local contractor who finally loads it onto each optical ballot scan and DRE touch-screen voting machines, unsupervised and unchecked, in the county elections office warehouse.
Once the temporary contractor has loaded the ballot software onto each voting machine, an elections office clerk then applies several layers of "security seal tape" on the voting machine and machine case to track chain-of-custody of the "election ready" voting machines. Prepared voting machine chain of custody security issues, critical as they are, may be like worrying about how securely the barn door is locked after the horses have already been stolen. There is no chain-of-custody log for the ballot definition software as it is passes from contractor to contractor and there is almost never a detailed audit or functional test of the software by election officials.
Local election officials are not computer scientists; They can neither adequately assess the competence and veracity of local temporary contractor programmers hired to work on voting machines nor review and assess new software destined to be installed on their eVoting machines. In actuality, local election officials cannot verify that a contractor programmer's work is bug free or that they did not nefariously write a few extra lines of software code that activates only on election day to flip votes or rig vote totals on a central tabulator and then self delete at the end of the election day.
DRE touch-screen and optical scan ballot counting machine "physical access security procedures" and "security seals" can never guard against incorrectly written ballot definition software. The frightening truth is ballot software is seldom tested by election office officials and can never be tested by polling place election judges and citizen observers to ensure that the ballot definition software is free of error, either inadvertent or malicious. The more that software is used in the administration of elections, the more we, as a nation, hand control of elections over to anonymous, unchecked and un-sworn contract programmers who may not even be American citizens living and working in the USA. One has to be a U.S. citizen to caste a vote, but anyone in the world can write the ballot software that controls our democracy.
It would be so easy for a political partisan to entice or plant a few willing temporary contractor programmers working with voting machine vendors or directly for key local election offices to stuff the software ballot box as they perform their legitimate programming duties. Even just a few motivated partisan programmers each working independently could easily throw an election into even deeper chaos than happen in Palm Beach County FL in November 2000 with rigged punch card ballots.
The software access and review language in the last version of H.R. 811 does not specifically address ballot definition software written directly by or for each county election office just before each election. Judges have already ruled that all voting machine software, even ballot definition software, is a "trade secret" of the voting machine vendors and election officials, the public and even candidates are barred from from inspecting it. Therefore, local county election officials can continue to refuse requests to review the exact ballot software running on each and every optical scan and DRE voting machine on election day. But, it is this software that is best able to steal elections!
by
Runner (9 articles, 34 quicklinks, 47 diaries, 33 comments)
on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 8:00:41 PM
As of 2006, a subcontractor called "DecisionOne" was doing the ballot programming for Texas iVotronic machines. This centralization of programming is the reason ALL the machines in Wharton County are suspect.
by
Bev Harris (73 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 21 comments)
on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 8:09:58 AM
DecisionOne ES&S partner in 1,700 jurisdictions in 34 states
DecisionOne Press Release - FRAZER, Pa. (December 14, 2004) – DecisionOne announced today its partnership with Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the world’s largest and most experienced provider of total election management solutions.
Under this partnership, DecisionOne will provide nationwide field support services for ES&S’ voting systems. DecisionOne will perform installations, upgrades, retrofits, repair, and preventive maintenance for customers in more than 1,700 jurisdictions in 34 states.
“ES&S is committed to offering our customers the highest possible level of service,” said Aldo Tesi, ES&S President and CEO. “This partnership will assist us in maintaining the high level of support we offer our customers to ensure that their elections are secure, accurate and reliable.”
According to George De Sola, Chairman and CEO at DecisionOne, “We are pleased to serve as ES&S’ field service provider and to provide scalable, nationwide support to ES&S’ customers.”
by
Runner (9 articles, 34 quicklinks, 47 diaries, 33 comments)
on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 7:23:59 PM
