image © Utah Count Votes
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Utah: Count Votes!
Information about Utah's process for selecting voting
equipment to help you make sure that "Utah Counts Votes"
Here are links to some of the reported problems with digital recording electronic (DRE) -style voting machines that record votes
electronically and do not provide paper ballots that are hand recountable, from
Diebold
and
ES&S
and perhaps Sequoia.
The major flaw with all these systems is the lack of a hand countable paper ballot. Voters must take
the time to check both the computer screen and the small paper rolls to see if they match, but will have
no idea if the electronic votes and the bar-code on the paper rolls are correct. In addition counting the paper
rolls would be unbelievably complex and the paper rolls do not qualify as a legal ballot under Utah law and so may not
even be legally countable.
Sequoia, Diebold and ES&S use proprietary (SECRET) software, and their voting machines
have been found to have security
flaws which make it possible to easily hack into them during elections
to change vote counts and erase
log files without leaving a
trace. You can learn how to do it yourself by watching the above video. Neither vendor has thus far designed voting machines which preserve the
American Democratic tradition of "Secretly Cast, Publicly Counted" Ballots.
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See these sites for more information:
DRE Voting machines like Diebold and ES&S voting machines have other
problems which
expose elections to programming errors or electronic failures.
Federal case law in both California and Florida has sided with
voters' right to a voter verified paper trail in case of machine malfunction or
disputed elections, yet neither Diebold or ES&S have
provided effective means of providing paper recounts because:
ES&S and Diebold were the vendors of DRE voting machines used in elections in Alabama,
Georgia, and Nebraska where the highly unlikely outcomes in comparison to scientifically
conducted polls
would lead one to strongly suspect that the elections there had been rigged. In Florida in the
2000 election, the Miami Herald found that Gore would have won the election he had requested
a hand recount of Florida's op-scan counties which used Diebold and ES&S voting machines. In
2004, the Opscan counties which were counted by only Diebold and ES&S voting machines had highly
suspicious results and a Miami Herald hand recount of 2.7 of these op-scan counties showed that enough
votes shifted from Bush to Kerry that if they'd been multiplied out based on the proportion of the
population, Kerry would have won the election in Florida. Ballots must be guarded and recounted
if ES&S and Diebold are used to count them, and it would be wisest to require a nonproprietary ballot
that can be recounted by a different voting machine vendor's scanning machines for an independent
audit or recount.
Sequoia
America's second largest voting corporation is Sequoia Voting Systems.
This company is owned by the British company De La Rue, who also owns 20% of the
British National Lottery. In 1995 the SEC filed suit against Sequoia for inflating
revenue and pre-tax profits. In 1999 charges were filed by the Justice Department
against Sequoia in a massive corruption case that sent top Louisiana state officials
to jail for bribery, most of it funneled through the Mob. Sequoia's executives were given
immunity in exchange for testimony against state officials. In 1999, two Sequoia (Voting Systems) executives, Phil Foster and Pasquale Ricci, were indicted for paying
Louisiana Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler an $8 million bribe to buy their voting machines. Fowler, is
currently serving five years in prison. ES&S and Diebold have equal or greater unsavory
histories.
For instance, in Riverside County during the 2000 presidential election, a computer from Sequoia began dropping touch-screen ballots from the vote tally.
A Sequoia salesman who was on hand intervened and fixed the problem.
Two years later in Bernalillo County, N.M., neither local election officials
nor a Sequoia representative noticed on election night that a programming error
was causing a computer running Microsoft SQL server software to delete 25 percent
of ballots cast by early voters. Three days later, a Democratic Party lawyer spotted a
discrepancy between the number of voters who signed in at the polls and the number of
digital ballots counted. Sequoia then managed to recover the lost votes.
``They messed up,'' said Mary Herrera, the Bernalillo County clerk, of Sequoia.
Responded Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles: ``It was just a bug in Microsoft that required an
additional step in converting data into the database format. There was a patch that was later
applied by Microsoft.''