It is clear by now that the prospect of having to answer how systems like the defective Diebold GEMS central tabulator were recommended for certification is simply a no-win situation for most of the voting machine examiners.

::::::::

Key witnesses have notified the California Senate Elections Committee that
they will refuse to show up at the hearing on how certification is being
done. They don't want to be questioned.

Shawn Southworth (Ciber) has notified the investigating committee that he
will decline to appear. Jim Dearman (Wyle Labs) has notified the committee
that he will decline to appear.

No word yet from California voting machine examiner Steve Freeman or
California technical advisor David Jefferson, who have accepted at least
$150,000 and $50,000, respectively, in Calif. taxpayer money for their
roles in testing and certification and recommendation.

The hearing, scheduled for Feb. 16, was called by Calif. Senate Elections
Committee chairperson Debra Bowen. Thus far, no subpoenas have been issued.
The process for issuing a subpoena takes place in the Senate Rules
Committee, which Bowen is also a member of. Without subpoenas, it now seems
likely that not a single key witness will show up for questioning.

They won't show up without a fight, and here's why:

QUESTIONS NEED TO BE ASKED ABOUT THE BREAKDOWN IN VOTING SYSTEM
CERTIFICATION

It is clear by now that the prospect of having to answer how systems like
the defective Diebold GEMS central tabulator were recommended for
certification is simply a no-win situation for most of the voting machine
examiners.

The Diebold system has been recommended for certification over and over,
and according to time sheets obtained for the examiners, many hours have
been invested in examining its security. Yet two different hacks in
projects conducted by http://www.blackboxvoting.org, one by Dr. Herbert
Thompson and a different one by Harri Hursti, quickly penetrated the
system, altering election results.

It took Hursti only 24 hours to spot the fatal flaw in Diebold's memory
card architecture. Both federal and state certifiers should be asked why
they recommended this system for certification. Did they not notice the
problem, or did they ignore the problem, or did they think it was not a
problem?

It took Dr. Thompson less than five minutes to identify the fatal flaw in
the GEMS tabulator. Both federal and state certifiers should be asked why
they have repeatedly approved GEMS for certification. Did they not
understand that a Visual Basic Script can be used to hack a Microsoft
Access application? Did they not know GEMS uses Microsoft Access? Do they
believe that using a voting program that is hackable with a simple script
is secure?

The Steve Freeman time sheets reveal that he specifically billed the state
of California for testing in response to the RABA Technologies report and
the CompuWare report. His time sheets show an additional five-hour
examination of GEMS security. The August 18, 2004 CompuWare report rates
the GEMS risk High, High, High and the RABA report says that GEMS should be
rewritten entirely.

Freeman needs to be asked, under oath, why he repeatedly recommended GEMS
for certification even after numerous reports detailed its security flaws.
As recently as November 2005, Freeman recommended GEMS for certification
again, this time admitting that there were defects but saying they were
planning to find a way to mitigate them. (However, California has not yet
mitigated the defects, but will continue to use GEMS.)

Both federal and state certifiers should also be asked why they approved
interpreted code in Diebold machines, contrary to FEC standards. Do they
think there is no interpreted code? If so, why is there a program called
the "interpreter"? Do they think it is okay to have an interpreter running
code in a voting system during an election?

According to documents obtained from the state of California by Black Box
Voting, Diebold actually stripped out security measures on its absentee
ballot counting machines, removing the only safeguard against GEMS hacking
available, short of counting all of the ballots by hand. Both federal and
state examiners need to be asked why they approved this. Nearly 40 percent
of California votes are mail-in. Given the known risks with GEMS, was it
appropriate to remove the voting machine results tapes, leaving mail-in
vote security solely up to GEMS? Did the examiners not know this? Did they
not consider it to be a problem? (See also: Mail-in ballot risk )

TAXPAYER FUNDS PAYING FOR WHAT?

Here are some of the time logs and payment records for the voting examiners
who examined security on GEMS and the optical scan machine, but recommended
for certification anyway, saying nothing publicly about the defects:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/19300.html

These important documents and many more were obtained by a California
citizen, Joan Quinn, as part of an effort to safeguard the 2006 Election by
shedding sunlight on the certification and testing process. If you think
the documents obtained by Joan Quinn are important, and you'd like to get
involved in gathering evidence to protect Election 2006, please write
privately to crew (at) blackboxvoting.org - include your location and we'll
send you individualized instructions to obtain strategic documents.

NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS?

While voting machine examiners like Southworth, who examined the GEMS
software, and Jim Dearman, who has run the Wyle testing that examined the
Diebold optical scan firmware, will be hard-pressed to explain themselves
to the California Senate Elections Committee, the other examiners -- Steve
Freeman and David Jefferson -- might be able to explain their silence by
pointing to nondisclosure agreements.

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/17717.html

Black Box Voting has received reports that the nondisclosure agreements
(NDAs) signed by state voting system examiners prohibit them from telling
what they know.

These NDAs are apparently being executed directly between the state voting
system examiner and vendors like Diebold. A response from the Calif.
Secretary of State to a BBV records request states that the secretary of
state does not have a copy of the NDAs between voting system examiners
(paid by the Sec. State's office) and the voting system vendors.

But there's another problem: Nondisclosure agreements do not explain why
California examiners recommended GEMS and the interpreter and the Diebold
memory card design for certification. Even if they withheld what they knew
from the public (a questionable practice, when being paid by public funds),
they didn't have to recommend certification.

WHERE R & G AND DID THEY TAKE ANY DOCUMENTS WHEN THEY FOLDED UP SHOP?

To add to the murkiness, the contractor the secretary of state's office
paid for some of Jefferson's work, R & G Associates LLC, has now vacated
its offices, disconnected its phones, and shut down its Web site. The
documents obtained by Joan Quinn show invoices to the state of California
from R & G for over $1 million. When Black Box Voting investigator Jim
March showed up at the R&G office on their most recent corporate filing,
they'd vacated the premises. Yet R&G work agreements obtained by Joan Quinn
seem to indicate they were contracted with the state of California through
2006.

Next questions: Did R & G have any documents, contracts, invoices, reports,
computer files, or anything else related to work done by the voting machine
examiners? If so, where are those documents now?

ANOTHER NO-SHOW FOR THE HEARINGS

Documents related to certification, requested by Bowen's office of
Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. As of Friday, she reportedly had not
received any response McPherson, and the delay in production of these
records violates the time limits in California public records law.

THE LIST OF PEOPLE WHO NEED TO RECEIVE SUBPOENAS:

- Shawn Southworth (Ciber)
- Jim Dearman (Wyle)
- Steve Freeman (California voting system examiner)
- David Jefferson (California voting system technical advisor)
- Talbot Iredale (Diebold Election Systems chief engineer)
- Ken Clark (Diebold Election Systems GEMS designer)
- Guy Lancaster (Co-Designer of the Diebold optical scan system)
- Jeffrey Dean (worked on the GEMS system and the mail-in voting systems
which
interface with GEMS)
- Tom Wilkie (NASED voting systems certification, has moved up to EAC)
- R. Doug Lewis (The Election Center, involved with selecting the ITAs, ran
interference for the ITAs for 10 years)

===================================

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Submitter: Joan Brunwasser

Submitters Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Submitters Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.