Reply #15: Chicken Little?? Oh for pity's sake.

[demodonkey]

Come on bals, you are better than this.

Our neighboring Ohio Secretary of State commissioned an in-depth scientific study about voting machines, and OH uses the same machines we do. This study was done in part by high-level academic teams of computer scientists from two of the best universities in Pennsylvania. The study's results showed the voting machines are poorly designed and have some very serious security flaws.

As a concerned citizen and a fellow elected official and party official, I posted these scientific results and asked you to read them and pay attention to them. Somehow that makes me "Chicken Little?" Geesh.

NO ONE is trying to cast aspersions on the integrity of our election process in Westmoreland County. Especially me. As I have said repeatedly in this thread and publicly, I think our Election Bureau is excellent. I have always believed the Westmoreland County Election Bureau cares greatly about their work and they do a great job. But unfortunately, no matter how great our election people and process are in Westmoreland County, the voting machines chosen in 2006 are in fact unverifiable and software-dependent. As long as they are in use there will be risk of a really bad election fiasco.

If those type machines have lost votes it hasn't been in the elections we've conducted with them.

Not so. Don't you remember Westmoreland County got national attention in 2006 when the vendor ES&S misprogrammed the date and time of the election onto every machine we had? Thinking the election should be over already, the machines asked to close the poll EVERY SINGLE TIME a Westmoreland County voter was admitted to vote that day and this required a pollworker to do a two-step override to keep the election going. Pollworkers did not expect this when they opened the machines that morning, some machines got closed meaning in some polling places voters were unable vote for an extended time, and in some cases emergency paper ballots were missing or inadequate in number. A number of voters were turned away or left without voting. Every single one of those voters who was unable to come back definitely lost their vote because of the iVotronic machines.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/election/s_478760.html

None of our IT professionals liked the paper scanning systems, neither did the members of the public that participated in the recommendation process.

The truth is that paper ballots and optical scanners were never seriously considered in Westmoreland County. The Commissioners spent somewhere around $50K of our Help America Vote Act money for a consultant to do RFIs for four voting systems -- and every single one of those four was a DRE. As far back as November 4, 2003 Westmoreland County election officials were quoted in the press as looking primarily at touchscreens to comply with the Help America Vote Act. (See the fifth paragraph from the end in this link.)

As far as these alleged "members of the public that participated in the recommendation process" the public never knew and still doesn't know exactly who these "members of the public" were, how they were appointed or chosen, when/how they met, who had input or access to them, or what they were told and by whom they were told it (vendors? others?) It was never made clear to the public or press what this so-called recommendation process actually was. This was a very uncharacteristic lack of transparency for Westmoreland County and it did not inspire the confidence of our citizens and voters.

Maybe we all should have just deferred to your choice?

Not necessarily, but maybe you should have been more open and transparent about the process. Maybe you should have held a public voting machine fair like so many other Pennsylvania counties did. Maybe you should have listed more respectfully to the many concerned citizens who showed up at Commissioner meetings in late 2005 and early 2006 in support of a verifiable voting system. Many of these citizens, including a good number of prominent Westmoreland County Democrats, expressed concerns to the commissioners about paperless e-voting, and/or asked them to consider paper ballots and scanners. NOT ONE citizen spoke out in favor of paperless DRE machines at any of these meetings. But DREs were chosen anyway and many people felt that the citizens were blown off and not taken seriously. You probably don't want to hear this, but it is the truth.

If a "virus" can be put into the software of the system we are using, why couldn't one be put into the software that reads the scanned ballots?

Yes, of course that could happen with the scanners, but the paper ballots would be available to hand count separate from the software and the hand count would show the voters' intent.

You say the ballots can be manually counted, but there would be no reason to unless the equipment failed.

RIGHT NOW, today, the Pennsylvania Election Code at 25 P.S. § 3031.17 mandates that counties perform "a statistical recount of a random sample of ballots after each election using manual, mechanical, or electronic devices of a type different than those used for the specific election." This isn't an extremely strong audit but it would in all probability serve to detect a bad malfunction, gross fraud, or misprogramming of the type caught by the optical scan system in Pottawattamie County IA. Going forward, we need to work for stronger audits of elections in Pennsylvania but unfortunately until all 67 Pennsylvania counties get on the national bandwagon and get paper ballots that provide something TO audit, our fifty paperless DRE counties -- including Westmoreland -- can't even comply with the Pennsylvania law that is already on the books.

Maybe it would just alter the vote count and who would know?

If our current paperless iVotronics get a virus that altered the vote count, chances are we WOULD never know. The wrong candidates would simply get elected. And even if the results were suspicious, with paperless iVos there absolutely would be no way to know for sure that the results were wrong. We are at the complete mercy of the ES&S software. With scanners, there are paper ballots that can be hand counted. We could follow the current PA Election Code and audit our results which would have a good chance of catching the problem.

By your reasoning, every election in every state that uses these machines is somehow compromised.

Absolutely NOT TRUE. I never said, and I don't believe, that elections in every state using DREs are compromised. But elections every place using these machines are AT RISK, including Westmoreland County. Unnecessarily at risk. There are available paper ballot voting systems that are more secure, more accessible, more auditable and more recountable -- and cheaper to operate to boot.

Then we might as well all stay home because these machines won't be replaced any time soon in the political/economic climate we are in.

Well, I never said people should stay home... Everyone should vote. But as I said before, these machines are going to reach the end of their expected useful life in the next two to five years. Keeping any county property beyond its useful life is not responsible -- it's not fiscally responsible and it's not responsible in terms of good management. It is imperative that the next group of Westmoreland County Commissioners pays attention to this and plans for the orderly replacement of these voting machines before we have real problems in a big election.

Let me ask you something. If our county purchased some road paving material with a certain lifespan and you thought the stuff was OK, and in then in the meantime there were bad wrecks in other states on this same road surface while scientific studies showed this particular road surface is quite dangerous -- if Westmoreland County was lucky enough to get by without a wreck would you support the county keeping our roads paved with this stuff past its lifespan? Would you call citizens and other officials who recommended repavement of these roads with a safer material "Chicken Little?" Or would you do the responsible thing as the roads got older and older, and work repavement with a safer material into the county's budgets to remove the danger before we had a deadly crash?

Let's pay attention to our voting machines before we have that deadly crash on the road to democracy.