Reply #175: state finishes report that tested the touch screens

[chorti]

Please see my thread here:
<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x108401>

<http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/touchscreen.htm>

<http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/november2004_pmp_report.pdf> (203 pp with appendices)

The California Secretary of State has completed their report of testing the accuracy of the touch screen voting machines used in ten California counties - six were Sequoia, two were Diebold, one was Hart/eSlate, and one was ES&S. The accuracy was near 100%.

But the state was clear that this level of testing was not enough. On the first page they wrote: "Notwithstanding this additional level of testing, there are forms of malicious code that could affect the accuracy of a voting system that would not be detected by federal, state, local or parallel testing. Other detection methods, such as the Accessible Voter Verification Paper Audit Trail (AVVPAT), are necesary to expose these types of election tampering."

Among the ten counties using touch screen, Riverside stood out for two reasons – it insisted on changing the random methodology of the state’s testing procedure and it did not print out results directly to the state testers, because its DREs could not print. Instead it took out the memory cards of the tested machines the next day and sent them overnight to Sacramento. Why didn’t the state testers take the memory cards with them when they left on election night?

Also, the touch screens used in LA county for the early voting were not tested at all by the state.

Tim, in Petaluma