And other troubling items from the Granite State, from the great Bruce O'Dell:
It's disturbing but hardly surprising to hear that LHS, the vendor that runs New Hampshire elections, took custody of the Diebold optical scan memory cards after the 2008 primary election.
In New Hampshire, LHS uses the notorious GEMS central tabulator software to program individual memory cards for each optical scan device that will be counting votes in each voting location. The memory cards contain ballot definition files that are used by the optical scan software to interpret which marks on the ballot correspond to which candidates on the ballot at that location. The memory card also contains software, but of course, we know that software is perfectly benign... if you believe the vendor, because of course no one is allowed to independently examine those cards before or after the election. Oh, yes, the memory cards also store the "results" of the election.
After the election, each optical scan machine prints out a "poll tape"which reports the vote totals by race and candidate for that machine at that location. The poll tapes are signed by local election officials and couriered to the Secretary of State by NH state troopers. Unlike most jurisdictions, New Hampshire does not use GEMS to tabulate the vote; elsewhere, in most places that use Diebold optical scan voting equipment, the memory cards are couriered to the county election office and plugged back into the county's GEMS server for upload and "automatic" tabulation. In New Hampshire, the poll tapes are manually tabulated by an individual using Excel.
So it's not surprising LHS retains custody of the memory cards, since the New Hampshire Secrtary of State doesn't use memory cards to tabulate the vote. But several years ago Harri Hursti and Black Box Voting publicly demonstrated just one means of altering the contents of a Diebold memory card in such a way as to both alter the outcome of the election and also produce a matching, fraudulent poll tape report.
What is astonishing to me is that New Hampshire continues to use precisely the same Diebold Optical Scan model - 1.94w - on which Hursti first demonstrated his insider attack.
What compounds my astonishment is that last autumn, Hursti presented the details of that exploit in person to the New Hampshire State House Subcommittee on Election Equipment - and yet the state still decided to keep running its elections on precisely that model of Diebold equipment!
Finally, although I did my best to convince New Hampshire legislators in my own testimony there last September, they also decided not to pioneer the UBS mandatory in-precinct election-night hand-count audit of a random 10% sample of all ballots.
This is a remarkable situation, so again let me recap: first, Hursti personally explained to New Hampshire officials how their specific election equipment could be manipulated by insiders (oh, say - just hypothetically - at LHS)in such as way as to change the outcome of an election, while at the same time producing fraudulent poll tapes that confirm the mistabulation. The only way to detect Hursti's exploit would of course be to hand-count the ballots.
Second, New Hampshire also chose to not hand-count a statistically valid sub-sample of ballots in-precinct on election night - a technique that can detect accidental or deliberate mistabulation of 1% or more, of both hand-counted and optical scan ballots, with greater than 99% confidence. UBS could easily have confirmed - or discounted - allegations that the unexpected ten point shift from final pre-election polls to election results in the Democratic primary did not truly reflect the will of the people of New Hampshire.
Had New Hampshire simply chosen to count a 10% sample of their ballots in precinct on election night, they could almost certainly have avoided the need to recount all the Republican and more than half of the Democratic primary ballots by hand - a week later, in adversarial circumstances, and under a cloud of suspicion about chain of custody and the legitimacy of secret vote counting.
Instead New Hampshire chose to continue to rely on secret vote counting by machine, while at the same time relying completely on the integrity of the chain of custody of ballots stored out of sight for almost a week before they were brought back into public view in a different location.
In the absence of citizen-verified chain of custody in the week after the ballots were cast, the accuracy of the 2008 "recount" in New Hampshire will - to anyone familiar with even basic auditing principles - remain forever in doubt.
What I regret is that it did not have to be this way. I bet the good people I met on the New Hampshire State Subcommittee on Election Equipment last fall might very well feel the same way.
And it could still be different in November - not just in New Hampshire, but in Minnesota where I live, and across the country. But will we demand citizen oversight of secret vote counting in time to make a difference?
Bruce O'Dell is a self-employed information technology consultant with more than twenty five years experience who applies his broad technical expertise to his work as an election integrity activist.
His current consulting practice centers on e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients. He recently spent a year as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top twenty public companies in America, led a multiple client projects for compliance with new credit card data security standards, and has designed secure "virtual cash" e-commerce protocols. In 2007 he was invited to testify on computer voting security issues to the Texas and New Hampshire legislatures.
He lives just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, and shares a love of good books with his wife - and her beautiful garden, with their talkative cat.
"Had New Hampshire simply chosen to count a 10% sample of their ballots in precinct on election night, they could almost certainly have avoided the need to recount all the Republican and more than half of the Democratic primary ballots by hand - a week later, in adversarial circumstances, and under a cloud of suspicion about chain of custody and the legitimacy of secret vote counting."
New Hampshire had no "need" to perform a recount in the recent primary were it not for the hand counting “Cast of Corbies” that goaded Congressman Kucinich into contesting the results in which he was a clear looser and had no apparent need for a recount.
And why was the good Congressman prompted to act in such fashion?A hot shot blogger by the name of Brad took out his “handy-dandy Blues Clues notebook” and posted a misleading analysis of the New Hampshire vote results between hand counted and optical scanned localities.This faulty analysis was embraced by the hand counters as if it were the Second Coming of the Messiah - even though it was rejected by those sympathetic to their cause overall - click here !
Now that the Democratic ballot recount for Hillsborough County in New Hampshire has essentially confirmed the initially primary vote - click here , these same people refuse to say, "Oops, our bad." Instead, these primarily out-of-state wonks are smearing New Hampshire state election officials; questioning the minutia of the depth of containers' slits, adhesion properties of seals, and driving abilities of ballot collectors; and impugning the integrity of the people in the only remaining state to refuse the adoption of a state-wide income tax (interest and dividends excluded) and state or local sales tax, whose adoption displays wisdom well-beyond that of the hand counting naysayers - click here !
And still not realizing that their image has beaten like a whack-a-mole at the county faire, the hand counting crowd has the audacity to reiterate their "doom and gloom" statements yet again in New Hampshire! AND they chide New Hampshirites that we could have avoided "a cloud of suspicion" that THEY alone created!
The response of the majority of New Hampshirites to such petulance is a clear "BEAT IT, BUZZARDS!"
Eat your humble pie and excuse yourselves from New Hampshire’s table lest you confirm further a previously made prophecy:
“Whatever the recount's results, Gardner has opened the process to observers so there can be no question about the integrity of the count. Doubters on both sides should let this settle the issue. If they question Gardner's integrity, then we'll know for sure not to trust anything else they have to say,” - Union Leader .
by
Tom Murphy (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 1339 comments)
on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 10:59:40 AM
