Electronic Voting & Fair Vote Counts: 15 Expert Reports

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Annotated Bibliography of 15 Expert Reports
on Voting Systems and Fair Vote Counts

Summarized by Rady Ananda
On behalf of J30 Coalition
Columbus, Ohio
January 18, 2007

In response to the numerous failings of electronic voting systems, as summarized below, the majority of these experts offer electronic audit solutions, enhanced security protocols, greater enforcement of existing laws, and proposals for new law, election procedures, and backup systems, at additional exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

The well-financed and most visible portion of the election integrity movement agrees with these solutions.

None of these solutions, however, meet the Fair Vote Count standard enumerated by international authority (OSCE, below, to which the US is a signatory. See page 9). Humans cannot observe the vote count when it is conducted inside a machine, be it touch screen, optical scan, mechanical lever, or any other machine tabulator. No amount of audits, security protocols, or paper trails will change the fact that machines count the vote secretly.

Key policy makers, on the other hand, see no urgency in reconsidering electronic voting systems. Warren Stewart of www.VoteTrustUSA.org recently advised,

"The incoming chair of the Committee on House Administration (which crafted HAVA), Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA), has let it be known ... that it will not mandate any voting technology changes until 2011."

This position simply ignores the science.

As to the most appropriate and best next step, a vocal portion of non-experts envisions an entirely different solution. We rely on expert conclusions about what doesn't work, and we rely on expert descriptions of what constitutes a democratic election: hand-counted paper ballots, at the precinct, before all who wish to observe.

Emphasis in the annotations below appeared in the original document.

REPORTS REVIEWED

Brennan Center, The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World, 2006 http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/Full%20Report.pdf

Compuware Corp. DRE Technical Security Assessment Report for Ohio, November 2003.

Congressional Research Service, Election Reform and Electronic Voting Systems (DREs): Analysis of Security Issues. (Order Code RL32139) November 4, 2003. click here

Cuyahoga Election Review Panel, Final Report, July 20, 2006 www.cuyahogavoting.org/CERP_Final_Report_20060720.pdf Reviewed by Kim Zetter of www.wired.com

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