Flooded machines: Now who do you trust?

More information on ES&S incidents and problems here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/7659/70721.html

Report commissioned by the state of Ohio, details on problems with ES&S:
http://www.bbvdocs.org/ESS/EVEREST-ESS.pdf (2,200 KB, PDF file)

Original full 334-page report: http://www.bbvdocs.org/ESS/AcademicFinalEVERESTReport.pdf
(11,334 KB)

Contracting with Dalton Consulting would presumably at least limit the pool of who has inside access to Johnson County vote counting. It's still counting votes in secret and it still forces Johnson County voters into the "Trust Me" mode.

As you'll see from reviewing the ES&S portion of the EVEREST report, Johnson County voters also have to "Trust Me" for all poll workers in Johnson County, since with ES&S voting machines, the entire county voting system results can be altered by inserting malicious code into any precinct-level voting machine, which can be achieved by poll workers or even voters, using hand held devices, causing results-altering code to travel up the line into the central tabulator to affect all the other precincts.

Black Box Voting is releasing a new free online 2008 Tool Kit which will contain a partial mitigation for this, if Johnson County agrees to upload its precinct results to a Web site AS THEY COME IN, rather than waiting until later to provide all the detailed results. Many locations do this, including every single county in New Mexico. It does not require fancy Web work. The ES&S "Unity" system can spit out interim precinct results at the push of a button, and can save those unofficial results to PDF, which can be uploaded in minutes to the county Web site. Even better, in New Mexico the ES&S system spits out interim level precinct results in plain vanilla HTML, which makes it very easy to monitor. You might want to enquire to see if Johnson County will be willing to upload interim precinct results as they stream in on Election Night.

Here's why this is important: If a machine was infected at the precinct such that it changed all the other precinct results, and you can see the original precinct results in "time slices" (interim points in time as they have come in) you'll be able to see any point at which the other precincts changed when looking at the incoming stream of precinct results (unless the infected precinct was the first to upload.)

To describe this better: If you have a video, you have more information than a still photo. Getting interim precinct results uploaded as they come in is the "video" equivalent to the "still shot" of just getting final results at the very end.

There is a way to automate collection of this incoming precinct data, developed by John Howard, a volunteer who has contributed some wonderful research to Black Box Voting. Additional tools have been provided for automation of this process by another volunteer, Donovan Levinson. These are technical tools, but if you know a computer buff, let them know about it. We'll publish details in our NEW 2008 Tool Kit over the Fourth of July Weekend (yes, it's finally coming out!)

More: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.html

You can also e-mail us to request a printed copy of the Tool Kit in booklet form for free.

Another safeguard for Johnson County will be for Johnson County citizens to organize a posse to document the voting machine results tapes at each precinct on election night. We've found that it's easier to videotape them than photograph them, but either is acceptable evidence. You want something that can stand up as evidence, so just going and writing it down on a piece of paper is of little value. Don't even bother with a Poll Results Posse unless you plan to video or photo what you find.

According to figures provided by the US Election Assistance Commission, Johnson County had 75 polling places in 2006. Black Box Voting has done precinct results runs before; you can get to about 10 locations in a couple hours if you map out a route ahead of time. It will take about eight Johnson County volunteers to do this. So -- there's plenty of time before November -- how about it, Johnson County? Please consider organizing a precinct results posse with some friends. More information for this is in the 2008 Tool Kit.

A Precinct Posse or a Time Slice precinct collection doesn't protect Johnson County from all the other ways to manipulate the ES&S system, and especially does not protect it from malicious BALLOT LAYOUT tactics which shift votes from one candidate to another as they are cast. It is this BALLOT LAYOUT area where the three vendors who have submitted bids are especially relevant.

Now, since Johnson County has to replace its voting machines anyway, if it will replace the water-damaged iVotronic DREs with optical scan machines instead, there is another very exciting way to mitigate the tamper-friendly ES&S system. Humboldt County, California and Pima County, Arizona have already announced they are going to do this, and I'll feature an article on that next week. These pioneering counties simply bought (or in the case of Pima County, will buy) another "off the shelf" scanner. They are scanning all the paper ballots on this system as well, to put on the Internet and/or make available to the public on disk. That way, people can check what went into those ES&S scanners to compare it with the ES&S results.

It is unacceptable for citizens to have to trust some person to count votes in secret, but since Johnson County will be stuck with that, choose wisely who to trust, and protect against at least some of the problems with election protection actions.

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