Tag: Voting
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Vendor misinformation in the e-voting world
Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony). I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different. This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports. I was part of the…
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NJ Election Day: Voting Machine Status
Today is primary election day in New Jersey, for all races except U.S. President. (The presidential primary was Feb. 5.) Here’s a roundup of the voting-machine-related issues. First, Union County found that Sequoia voting machines had difficulty reporting results for a candidate named Carlos Cedeño, reportedly because it couldn’t handle the n-with-tilde character in his…
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Bizarre Undervote on iVotronic in France
In France, most municipalities use paper ballots in elections, but a few places have begun using DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines. Pierre Muller, a French computer scientist, has recently sent me a report of a malfunction by an ES&S iVotronic machine in a recent municipal election. In this spring’s elections (and he believes this also happened…
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voting ID requirements and the Supreme Court
Last week, I posted here about voter ID requirements. There was a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court on the same topic. It seems Indiana was trying to require voters to present ID in order to vote. Lawsuit. In the end, the court found that the requirement wasn’t particularly onerous (the New York Times’s…
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NJ Voting Machine Tape Shows Phantom Obama Vote
I’ve written before (1, 2, 3) about discrepancies in the election results from New Jersey’s February 5 presidential primary. Yesterday we received yet another set of voting machine result tapes. They show a new kind of discrepancy which we haven’t seen before – and which contradicts the story told by Sequoia (the vendor) and the…
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Shamos on paper trails
In an interview today with CNet, Michael Shamos talks about paper trails. Shamos is a professor at CMU who has served as a voting system analyst for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State. In this article, a transcript of an interview conducted by Declan McCullagh, he spends a fair bit of time trashing paper trails, and…
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How can we require ID for voters?
Recently, HR 5036 was shot down in Congress. That bill was to provide “emergency” money to help election administrators who wished to replace paperless voting systems with optically scanned paper ballots (or to add paper-printing attachments to existing electronic voting systems). While the bill initially received strong bipartisan support, it was opposed at the last…
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NJ Election Discrepancies Worse Than Previously Thought, Contradict Sequoia's Explanation
I wrote previously about discrepancies in the vote totals reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey’s presidential primary election, and the incomplete explanation offered by Sequoia, the voting machine vendor. I published copies of the “summary tapes” printed by nine voting machines in Union County that showed discrepancies; all of them were…
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California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100
California’s Secretary of State has been busy. It appears that ES&S (manufacturers of the Ink-a-Vote voting system, used in Los Angeles, as well as the iVotronic systems that made news in Sarasota, Florida in 2006) submitted its latest and greatest “Unity 3.0.1.1” system for California certification. ES&S systems were also considered by Ohio’s study last…
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Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story
I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey. Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened. Here’s the relevant part: During a primary election, the “option switches” on the operator panel must be used to activate the voting machine. The operator…