Cover the Election Reform Battle: A Letter to David Sarasohn

Dear Mr. Sarasohn,

The O seems reluctant to inform us as to the dire threat to our democracy of the gradual and alarming privatization of our election systems. Could you please help inform Oregonian's readers of this crisis by writing about this danger more frequently?

This issue is crucial to Oregonians because, as Ohio (or any other corrupted or corruptible swing state) goes, so goes our nation. An angle that occurs to me is that Oregonians themselves may be complacent or even "above it all" sometimes, because our system seems so good compared to other states. But does the high quality of our system excuse the disinterest of the media and regular citizens concerning the alarmingly bad election systems threatening our democracy via the critical swing states?

We in the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition constantly wonder why the stories of blatant corruption of our elections by insecure and secret software, voter supression and blatant official conflicts of interest haven't been covered like the real scandals they are. Many of us who have taken even a preliminary look at the real evidence are deeply puzzled by the lack of coverage of these issues. Can you explain it? In particular, do Dems think this crisis will magically go away when they go to the polls in 2006 and 2008 and (try to) elect Democrats using the very same systems (or worse in some cases) that have proven so flawed, insecure and inconclusive in 2004?

Closer to home, we, a qroup of ordinary concerned citizen activists, wonder if Oregonians even know that 100% of our own votes here in Oregon are counted by opti-scanners and central tabulators that are operated entirely with trade secret, proprietary software. The code is subject to a private contract and is not viewable by our own election officials or by the Secretary of State. Using secret software is tantamount to allowing the two big Oregon election system vendors, ES&S and Sequoia, to take all of our much lauded paper ballots of record into a separate room, count them, and emerge later to announce the winner. There is no method to verify the result recorded on those paper ballots before certification of the "election result."

In any case, I've attached below some important recent articles that merit coverage in the Oregonian, including some follow-up information on the virtually uncovered-by-any-media GAO Report on the dangers and insecurities of electronic voting systems and software. Maybe you could include them in your column someday? We'd appreciate anything you could do to give this important story the coverage it deserves.

We are a non-partisan citizen advocacy group and we would welcome the opportunity to discuss this crisis with you and provide further information on election system problems both Nationally and in Oregon if you would like to meet with us.

Sincere thanks for your insightful columns,

Virginia Ross, J.D.
Oregon Voter Rights Coalition
503-292-7674
http://www.OregonVRC.org

With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman / December 6, 2005
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1607
A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor.
Voting Machines Under Scrutiny: States Face a Jan. 1 Deadline to Meet Reliability Standards By Brian Bergstein / Associated Press / Wednesday, December 7, 2005; A23

The potential perils of electronic voting systems are bedeviling state officials as a Jan. 1 deadline approaches for complying with standards for the machines' reliability. Across the country, officials are trying multiple methods to ensure that touch-screen voting machines can record and count votes without falling prey to software bugs, hackers, malicious insiders or other ills. These are not theoretical problems -- in some states they have led to lost or miscounted votes.
The alert that follows originated as a Daily Kos post by Dan Hrkman [Subscribe] Dan Hrkman's diary

Republicans, suffering from dismal approval ratings and sensing there is no way they will retain control of Ohio's legislature in 2006

unless they prevent actual votes from being counted, have come up with an incredibly corrupt "election reform law."

A divinity student is continuing his prayer vigil and hunger strike at the Ohio Statehouse despite heavy snow and brutally cold winter temperatures.

Brad Friedman has written about it in BradBlog: blog entry is here.

What HB3 Will Do:

HB3's most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote.

But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution,

exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny,

quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts

and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio.

When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and a Rovian wishlist of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio could be all but over.

HB3 has passed the Ohio House already along strictly partisan lines. The Ohio state Senate will vote this Tuesday, Dec. 13th.
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002037.htm
Though the GAO report was non-partisan, requested by the Chairmen and ranking members of three different U.S. House Committees, and was released last month after a year-long investigation along with a rare bi-partisan joint press release which lauded it, not a single wire service or mainstream American newspaper to date, that we know of, has devoted a single paragraph reporting on its release or the information contained within.

The complete text of Holt and Davis' letter to colleagues follows [emphasis in original] ...

November 16, 2005

". . . computer programs could access these cast vote files
and alter them
without the system recording this action in its audit logs."
GAO Report: ELECTIONS: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to be Completed – September 2005

Dear Colleague:

In May of 2004, the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Government Reform Committee, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on Science asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the security of electronic voting systems because “[e]xperts have indicated that [the software used in electronic voting machines] has security gaps that could potentially allow unscrupulous individuals to alter the vote count, unlawfully impacting election results while leaving no paper trail or other auditable evidence”. The GAO issued its report in response to that request in September 2005. Its findings included the following:

# “ . . . several evaluations demonstrated that election management systems did not encrypt the data files containing cast votes . . . . in some cases, other computer programs could access these cast vote files and alter them without the system recording this action in its audit logs.”

# “Two reports documented how it might be possible to alter the ballot definition files on one model of DRE so that the votes shown on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for a different candidate.”

# “ . . . a county in Pennsylvania made a ballot programming error on its DRE system [that] contributed to many votes not being captured correctly by the voting system, evidenced by that county’s undervote percentage, which reached 80 percent in some precincts.”

# “ . . . California officials documented how a failure in a key component of their system led to polling place disruptions and an unknown number of disenfranchised voters.”

# In a Florida County, “election monitors discovered that the system contained a flaw that allowed one DRE system’s ballots to be added to the canvas totals multiple times without being detected.”

# “ . . . a DRE system in Ohio caused the system to record approximately 3,900 votes too many for one presidential candidate in the 2004 general election.”

With respect to system failures noted during elections, the GAO concluded that “[w]hile each of these problems was noted in an operational environment, the root cause was not known in all cases.” In addition, it stated that “ . . . election officials in one state noted that when voting machines malfunctioned and started generating error messages during an election, state technicians were unable to diagnose and resolve the problems because the vendor’s documentation provided no information about what the error messages meant, or how to fix the problems.” One independent testing authority (ITA) official stated that its “testing does not guarantee that voting systems are secure and reliable.”

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 550) would amend the Help America Vote Act to protect the electoral system from those risks, in time for the general election in 2006. In addition, it would create a uniform national standard for independent auditability of election results, by mandating that the voter-verified paper record – the only record verified by the voters rather than by the machines -- be treated as the vote of record. That way, voters in every state will be confident that the results reported in every other state will be of equal verifiability and integrity.

The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act had 50 original bipartisan cosponsors when it was introduced in February, and now it has almost 160. It has been endorsed by VerifiedVoting.org as the “gold standard” of verifiability legislation. If we do not pass this legislation, we may as well outlaw recounts in federal elections. For more information or to become a cosponsor, please contact Michelle Mulder of Representative Holt’s staff at (###) ###-#### or [removed]@mail.house.gov.

Sincerely,

RUSH HOLT
Member of Congress

TOM DAVIS
Member of Congress