High Point Enterprise (NC) story on e-voting fiasco

[Kelvin Mace]

Some election officials leading up to the Nov. 2 general election dismissed the critics as alarmist or misguided, saying that electronic voting machine technology would ensure a verified vote.

Instead, North Carolina became the national poster child this election season for a voting machine fiasco.

The meltdown in Carteret County, where votes were lost without any hope of retrieving the ballots, "is the kind of problem we worried about with electronic touch-screen voting. If the memory and software fails, there's no record," said Allen, a publisher and author from High Point who's a member of the Joint Select Committee on Electronic Voting Systems.

The recommendations include that every vote cast in North Carolina should generate a paper ballot as a backup starting next year. The committee also recommends allowing state officials to inspect the computer code of electronic machines for potential pitfalls, regardless of proprietary business concerns.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13950600&BRD=1332&PAG=461&dept_id=414366&rfi=8&xb=kumut

Registration required, sorry. Try bugmenot.com

David Allen
www.blackboxvoting.com
www.thoughtcrimes.org

[marions ghost]

1. who is this Joint Select Committee on E-voting

and what power do they have in North Carolina?

The recommendations as stated here--paper ballot and more scrutiny--does this apply to DREs, opti-scan, or both?

Who are the state officials who would inspect code or machines? Would they have independent consultants, and how would they fight the manufacturer's insistance on proprietary code?

[Kelvin Mace]

2. The JCS was appointed by the NCGA

to make recommendations to the state.

Summary of JSC on E-voting

The Committee finds that the critics of pure direct record electronic
voting system -- "black box voting", as they call it -- have raised
enough legitimate questions and found resonance with a large enough
share of the public, that a requirement that all voting systems be
reducable to paper is a necessity.

The Committee recommends that any voting system must generate a paper
form of the ballot. The voter would always be given an opportunity to
review and verify the paper ballot before casting it. Though with
optical scan and direct record electronic (DRE) voting systems, the
electronic or mechanical means would be the primary means of counting,
a hand-to-eye sample count of the paper would be required in every
county as a way of post-testing the accuracy of the count. If a
discrepancy appeared that was significant in a race, a full
hand-to-eye count of all the ballots in that race would be conducted.
The right to a hand-to-eye recount would also be expanded, giving a
candidate entitled to a recount under current law the right to demand
a sample hand-to-eye recount (if the first recount was not
hand-to-eye) in 3% of the precincts in each county. If that sampling
indicated a potential reversal of results, there would be a
hand-to-eye recount in the entire jurisdiction in which the election
was held.

The Committee recommends that the State Board of Elections recommend a
model code of ethics for election board members and their staff that
addresses appropriate relations with vendors that do business or seek
to do business with boards of elections in North Carolina. The code
should address how to avoid both the reality and appearance of
conflict of interest and impropriety. State Board would report the
recommended code to the Committee.

The Committee recommends that the State Board of Elections, with the
assistance of the Office of Information Technology, be given authority
to negotiate with vendors. The State Board, rather than the counties,
would write the "request for proposal" for all voting systems of a
certain type. The counties would still do the purchasing, but their
choices would be limited to certain types of contracts negotiated by
the State Board. The State Board would assure uniformity of cost and
features within the type. All vendors doing business in North Carolina
would be required to escrow their source code and submit it for review
by the State Board and representatives of all the State's legally
recognized political parties. Every vendor would be required to post a
bond to cover damages from defects in the voting system. Every vendor
would be required to have an operating office in North Carolina, to
notify the State Board of updates in its system, and to report defects
it is aware of that have occurred in its system anywhere. Felony
penalties would apply to willful and fraudulent violations of the
duties, and civil penalties would apply to any violation.

We have demanded and are getting:

1) Paper ballots mandatory for BBV machines.
2) Source code MUST be reviewed.
3) Vendor MUST affirm (under oath) that code is same as used on "live"
systems.
4) Violating this provision is a felony.
5) Vendor most post a bond to do business with the state sufficient to
cover a new election if failure of their equipment requires one.
6) SBoE must come up with a new code of ethics concerning election
officials and vendors.
7) The SBoE MUST conduct a post election audit of a statistcally
significant number of precincts in EVERY county to check for error
and/or fraud. Significant discrepencies will trigger hand recounts.
8) Vendor MUST notify the state of any known defect in their
software/hardware.



Helpful links:

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/2/emw207078.htm
http://www.ncleg.net/committees/jointselectcomm_/default.htm
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=170x3594
http://www.votersunite.org/article.asp?id=4828


David Allen
www.blackboxvoting.com
www.thoughtcrimes.org