The iVotronic voting machines had come under criticism long before the EVEREST study. During the 2004 Presidential Election, questions were raised about the credibility of iVotronic machines in Ohio, which produced the margin of victory for the re-election of President George W. Bush over Democrat John Kerry.
After the 2008 presidential election, the Brennan Center for Law at the New York University of Law sent a letter to the secretaries of state of the 16 states, including South Carolina, that used the iVotronic machines, stating that voters had complained of "vote flipping," where they voted for one candidate or party, but another showed up on the review screen. "There is a good chance that at least part of this problem can be attributed to calibration on the iVotronic machines," the letter said.
The machines were then manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, whose previous chief executive, Walden O'Doul, had been a top fund-raiser for President Bush and had sent fund-raising letters to Ohio Republicans telling them he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
California, Ohio, and Florida were among the states that mothballed their electronic machines in 2009.
Republican and Democratic organizations raised concerns about the security and reliability of the iVotronic machines in a number of other states, including Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and West Virginia, during the 2010 elections. Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported on his cable television program, Dan Rather Reports, that some of iVotronics machines were manufactured in the Philippines under "sweatshop conditions" that caused malfunctions.
In early 2012, the magazine Scientific America used South Carolina to point out the problems with electronic voting machines, which it said, produced no tangible proof that the results were valid. "If you have a machine collecting and recording votes with an electronic ballot box there's no way to go back after the fact and see if the machine made a mistake, whether through malice or simple software error," says Stanford University computer science professor David Dill and founder of Verified Voting Foundation, a nonpartisan election watchdog.
Heindel's work put him in contact with others who shared his concerns about the voting machines used in South Carolina, including Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science at the University of South Carolina; Eleanor Hare, a retired computer science professor from Clemson University; Barbara Zia, president of the League of Women Voters in South Carolina; and Chip Moore, a computer scientist from Cambridge, Massachusetts who had grown up in South Carolina. They began sharing their work and posting their results on the website, http://www.scvotinginfo.com/
As a result of FOIA requests and a computer analysis of voting records of the 2010 elections, Heindel, Buell, Hare, Zia, and Moore found "disturbing conclusions" about the voting in the state, including a 10 percent "over vote" in Colleton County; 1,100 votes not counted in Richland County; and "19,000 missing digital ballot images in Charleston County." Digital images are supposed to be stored by the machines and used to verify vote counts.
Furthermore, they found out that the state had no procedures for auditing the voting results.
"There was an unacceptable amount of blind faith, but no auditing," Heindel said. "Remarkably, the State Election Commission did not have anyone employed capable of analyzing any of the electronic data. You can't find evidence of problems if you don't have the skills necessary to properly examine the evidence."
In addition to the concerns of the credibility of the voting machines, the Argonne National Laboratory, which is operated by the University of Chicago, reported that electronic voting machines are "ridiculously easy" to be compromised by hackers.
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