Investigative Series on Overlooked E-Voting Concerns: 'Citizens Should be Screaming From the Rooftop

[WillyT]

CBS4 Miami Kicks Off Investigative Series on Overlooked E-Voting Concerns: 'Citizens Should be Screaming From the Rooftops'
Veteran FL election official, Ion Sancho warns: 'It is wrong to assume that the machines are always right. They’re not'...
By BRAD FRIEDMAN - BradBlog
10/5/2012 1:23pm PT

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Lost in all of the front-end voter suppression and voter registration fraud news over the past many months this cycle, is the continuing "back-end" threat to Election Integrity still very much present in our unoverseeable, easily-manipulated, oft-failed electronic voting systems --- both touch-screen and paper ballot optical-scan systems.

Helping to balance that, if only a bit this week, we get some excellent investigative local TV news reporting from Miami's Michele Gillen and her CBS4 Investigative team. They have noticed that we still have a very serious problem with the privatization of our supposedly-public electoral system, which now employes proprietary computer systems from private companies to determine the results of our elections...

From the printed version of the above report...

MIAMI (CBS4) – Ion Sancho is a man on a mission. Just weeks from the presidential election, one of the most veteran election supervisors in the state of Florida, thinks there’s plenty for him and his colleagues to lose sleep over.

What keeps him awake at night? Whether you can trust the machine you will be voting on.

“We still have not secured the process to ensure that that machine has read that ballot correctly and it is 100 percent accurate. Because it is wrong to assume that the machines are always right. They’re not, ” Sancho tells CBS4 Chief Investigator Michele Gillen.

“I think the citizens should be screaming from the rooftops,” he punctuates with the candor and directness he is known for.

The legendary Ion Sancho, quoted above, is Leon County, FL's long-time Supervisor of Elections, so trusted by both parties that he was named to oversee the (eventually aborted) 2000 Presidential Election recount in the Sunshine State. He was also the first election official in the nation to allow an independent hack test of an electronic voting system. That test resulted in the stunning hack of a Diebold optical-scan system as seen in the shocking climactic scene of HBO's Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy.

Despite that very public hack, almost seven years ago, the very same machines are still in use in dozens of states. All the rest use computers that are virtually identical, and as easily manipulated and as often malfunctioning.

Sancho goes on, in the report above, to give today's Florida election system a grade of "F. F. F." He's being kind though.

CBS4's report goes on to add that "other Florida election supervisors" that they have met with to date have similarly stressed that "they are uncomfortable that they must rely so heavily on the machine’s manufacturers for answers as to what’s working…. and potentially not working… in their voting systems."

Sound familiar?

Just go read the rest and/or watch the video report above from CBS4's Michele Gillen, please: http://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/10/02/cbs4-investigates-does-your-vote-count/

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More (w/Video): http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9615

[WillyT]

1. Kick !!!

:kick:

[porphyrian]

2. Ion Sancho is a good guy. n/t

[Melinda]

3. Good to know there are GOOD soldiers on the BBV front!

Ion Sancho. K&R!!

[Viva_Daddy]

4. These machines must be made illegal. They are a threat to Democracy.