Reply #6: Thanks - some State News that Dill's newsletter included is

[papau]

MARYLAND DIEBOLD SECURITY REVIEW
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Maryland commissioned a report from SAIC, a defense contractor with computer security expertise, on the security of Diebold touch screen machines. The state signed a contract to buy them a week before the appearance of the Johns Hopkins/Rice study that reported serious security flaws.According to an article by Kim Zetter in Wired News, the State announced that a redacted version of the report would appear Friday (it seems not to have, possibly because of the hurricane). The full article is at
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60486,00.html

California recall election. The recall had already stimulated some press interest in the electronic voting question, but this decision puts voting technology front and center (instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger). Some of the news articles I've seen lead readers to the false conclusion that California counties are required to upgrade to touch screen machines. Untrue! Central and precinct-based optical scan systems, and even a punch card system called the DataVote, have residual vote rates much lower than punch cards. According to the testimony of the ACLU's expert witness in the case, Prof.Henry Brady of the University of California at Berkeley, DREs are actually have slightly higher residual vote rates than the DataVote and precinct-based optical scan systems. (see
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/09/brady1.pdf)

Regardless of the scheduling of the recall election, California counties have to get rid of punch cards by March 2004. If this decision stands, it will not increase the pressure to upgrade, and it will not mandate the use of DREs. But it is a great opportunity to discuss voting machines!


MIAMI/BROWARD PRINTER PURCHASES
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The good news is that Miami-Dade county had a meeting to decide whether to buy voter verifiable printers for their ES&S iVotronic machines. The bad news is that they decided against doing so.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/miami/sfl-dmachines12sep12,0,2413613.story?coll=sfla-news-miami

Other good news is that Broward county is now considered buying voter
verifiable printers for the iVotronic machines. The bad news is that they decided to defer discussion.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/6777779.htm

Both counties have ES&S equipment, and the ES&S printers won't be certified in Florida before the November, 2003 election.

CONNECTICUT
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A correspondent tells me that Connecticut will be conducting a trial of electronic voting machines on November 4, 2003 in 8 towns. One of the machines to be evaluated will be Avante's, which offers a voter
verifiable audit trail. It would help to make sure the citizens of
Connecticut understand the concerns about the integrity of electronic voting before that time.Here is an article about one town
http://www.record-journal.com/articles/2003/09/16/news/news02.txt


ARKANSAS
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Electronic voting seems to be a political issue in Arkansas now. A quote from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette "The National Organization for Women in Arkansas is trying to persuade Secretary of State Charlie Daniels to hold off purchasing touch-screen electronic voting machines until the new machines are proved trustworthy.
'I love computers,' said Lisa Burks of Hot Springs, vice president of
legislation for Arkansas NOW and president of NOW's Hot Springs chapter. 'I'm not a technophobe.' " This story has quotes from political groups, election officials, and R. Doug Lewis of the Election Center, who says (as usual) that everything is fine.
They fail to mention that computer technologists have said anything on the subject.

The full story is at
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/story_Arkansas.php?storyid=41630