Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure in at least 1,750 jurisdictions across the country
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Taylorcofan
Aug 24, 2008, 10:51:29 PM8/24/08
to Talk Marion County 24/7
Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure
By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop
ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an
unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an
array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold
nationwide since 2003.
Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least
1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are
needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19
of its models dating back a decade.
Voting experts reacted skeptically to the company's assertion that
election workers' routine crosschecks of ballot totals would have
spotted any instances where its servers failed to register some
precinct vote totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards.
Like nearly all of the nation's modern voting equipment, Premier's
products were declared "qualified" under a voluntary testing process
overseen from the mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of
State Election Directors.
Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups
allege that the NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for
disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment makers to help
design the tests.
The federal Election Assistance Administration, created in 2002, took
over the testing responsibility in 2005, but has yet to certify a
single voting machine.
As a result, charged Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog
group Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the
race between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are
"scandalously flawed"' and "the integrity of this election is in
question."
David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council,
which represents the leading makers of voting machines, said there's
no reason for concern. Without mentioning NASED, he said that members'
products "have all been certified" as meeting 2002 voluntary federal
standards.
NASED officials took on the testing in the mid 1990s, after the
Federal Election Commission adopted voluntary federal standards for
voting machines but Congress failed to create a testing agency. The
industry was frustrated, too, by being governed by a hodge-podge of
state standards.
"We had two choices: To try to do something or to do nothing," said
Thomas Wilkey, who headed NASED's volunteer Voting Systems Committee
for several years while executive director of New York's elections
board. "We had a set of standards. It was a crime to let them sit on a
shelf."
NASED watched over the issuance of "qualified" reports from
Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the
testing. The vendors secretly negotiated payments with the labs,
helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared
the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts
who signed non-disclosure agreements.
NASED officials posted only "qualified" ratings on the group's Web
site.
The lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in
equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed
by a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Wilkey says the labs' approval was never a "certification." But EAC
members have referred publicly to NASED's "certification" of voting
machines, and numerous states enacted laws barring purchases of
equipment unless it passed the NASED-sponsored tests.
Questions about NASED's testing grew in intensity over the last couple
of years, after independent tests for the states of California, New
York, Ohio, Florida and Connecticut found performance defects and
security gaps in both systems that will serve most voters this fall:
touch-screens and optical scanners.
The concerns prompted New York's elections board to scrap a $60
million contract to buy new touch screens to replace its decades-old
lever voting machines. Vice Chair Douglas Kellner said it's now clear
that a "qualified" rating from NASED is "meaningless ...a piece of
toilet paper."
David Jefferson, a voting machine security expert who works at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said NASED's tests were "of no
value if your concern is security against insider threats," such as
tampering by election officials.
John Washburn, a software tester in the Milwaukee suburb of
Germantown, predicts that nearly all of the machines bought in recent
years will have to be replaced in a process he likened to the early
20th Century Teapot Dome scandal "as just the epitome of how
government money goes down a rat hole," he said.
Worries about the touch-screens' lack of a verifiable paper trail have
already prompted states to replace thousands of barely used machines
costing hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of the scanners,
which preserve each voter's original paper ballot for use in a
recount.
Congress passed the HAVA law and allotted billions of dollars for new
equipment in the wake of the tumultuous 2000 presidential election
battle that hinged on the validity of machine-counted punch-card
ballots with "hanging chads" in Florida.
Ironically, the rush to buy voting machines to avoid a recurrence has
triggered a new wave of public distrust because of questions about the
testing and new reports of election regularities, including
allegations of 18,000 missing votes in a 2006 congressional race in
Florida.
Meantime, the EAC has made slow progress in setting up a federal
testing and certification system — still voluntary, as directed by
Congress. With help from the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, the commission toughened standards in 2005 and again last
year.
In an interview, Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez said the
agency feels the pressure, but "we're not going to sacrifice any of
our stringent requirements to satisfy election administrators or
manufacturers."
A couple of voting systems could be certified soon, she said, but not
in time for the November election.
Rodriguez conceded that the commission fumbled its handling of a 2006
report raising questions about the qualifications of NASED's most
controversial software-testing laboratory, operated in Huntsville,
Ala., by Colorado-based CIBER, Inc. The report criticizing CIBER's
inadequate testing resources and lack of documentation was issued in
August, 2006, but was kept secret until that December, after the
general election.
The secrecy was a mistake, she said, and the commission decided to
"peel off the scab" and face public criticism. She vowed to keep the
process more transparent in the future.
A spokesperson for CIBER, which is on the verge of winning EAC
accreditation to resume testing voting equipment, did not respond to
requests for comment.
Critics also have questioned the agency's hiring of Wilkey as its
executive director and of former FEC official Brian Hancock to oversee
voting system certification, since both were involved in the much-
criticized NASED process.
The agency, however, has taken a tough regulatory stance, angering
manufacturers and county election officials by refusing to certify any
NASED-approved machine or recent upgrades without fully testing the
entire system.
"We're trying," Rodriguez said, "not to repeat any mistakes."
By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop
ballot totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an
unofficial laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an
array of flaws in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold
nationwide since 2003.
Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least
1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are
needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19
of its models dating back a decade.
Voting experts reacted skeptically to the company's assertion that
election workers' routine crosschecks of ballot totals would have
spotted any instances where its servers failed to register some
precinct vote totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards.
Like nearly all of the nation's modern voting equipment, Premier's
products were declared "qualified" under a voluntary testing process
overseen from the mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of
State Election Directors.
Computer scientists, some state officials and election watchdog groups
allege that the NASED-sponsored testing system was a recipe for
disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment makers to help
design the tests.
The federal Election Assistance Administration, created in 2002, took
over the testing responsibility in 2005, but has yet to certify a
single voting machine.
As a result, charged Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog
group Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the
race between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are
"scandalously flawed"' and "the integrity of this election is in
question."
David Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council,
which represents the leading makers of voting machines, said there's
no reason for concern. Without mentioning NASED, he said that members'
products "have all been certified" as meeting 2002 voluntary federal
standards.
NASED officials took on the testing in the mid 1990s, after the
Federal Election Commission adopted voluntary federal standards for
voting machines but Congress failed to create a testing agency. The
industry was frustrated, too, by being governed by a hodge-podge of
state standards.
"We had two choices: To try to do something or to do nothing," said
Thomas Wilkey, who headed NASED's volunteer Voting Systems Committee
for several years while executive director of New York's elections
board. "We had a set of standards. It was a crime to let them sit on a
shelf."
NASED watched over the issuance of "qualified" reports from
Independent Testing Laboratories, but with little control over the
testing. The vendors secretly negotiated payments with the labs,
helped design the tests, got to see the results first and only shared
the codes driving their software with three NASED technical experts
who signed non-disclosure agreements.
NASED officials posted only "qualified" ratings on the group's Web
site.
The lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in
equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed
by a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.
Wilkey says the labs' approval was never a "certification." But EAC
members have referred publicly to NASED's "certification" of voting
machines, and numerous states enacted laws barring purchases of
equipment unless it passed the NASED-sponsored tests.
Questions about NASED's testing grew in intensity over the last couple
of years, after independent tests for the states of California, New
York, Ohio, Florida and Connecticut found performance defects and
security gaps in both systems that will serve most voters this fall:
touch-screens and optical scanners.
The concerns prompted New York's elections board to scrap a $60
million contract to buy new touch screens to replace its decades-old
lever voting machines. Vice Chair Douglas Kellner said it's now clear
that a "qualified" rating from NASED is "meaningless ...a piece of
toilet paper."
David Jefferson, a voting machine security expert who works at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said NASED's tests were "of no
value if your concern is security against insider threats," such as
tampering by election officials.
John Washburn, a software tester in the Milwaukee suburb of
Germantown, predicts that nearly all of the machines bought in recent
years will have to be replaced in a process he likened to the early
20th Century Teapot Dome scandal "as just the epitome of how
government money goes down a rat hole," he said.
Worries about the touch-screens' lack of a verifiable paper trail have
already prompted states to replace thousands of barely used machines
costing hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of the scanners,
which preserve each voter's original paper ballot for use in a
recount.
Congress passed the HAVA law and allotted billions of dollars for new
equipment in the wake of the tumultuous 2000 presidential election
battle that hinged on the validity of machine-counted punch-card
ballots with "hanging chads" in Florida.
Ironically, the rush to buy voting machines to avoid a recurrence has
triggered a new wave of public distrust because of questions about the
testing and new reports of election regularities, including
allegations of 18,000 missing votes in a 2006 congressional race in
Florida.
Meantime, the EAC has made slow progress in setting up a federal
testing and certification system — still voluntary, as directed by
Congress. With help from the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, the commission toughened standards in 2005 and again last
year.
In an interview, Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez said the
agency feels the pressure, but "we're not going to sacrifice any of
our stringent requirements to satisfy election administrators or
manufacturers."
A couple of voting systems could be certified soon, she said, but not
in time for the November election.
Rodriguez conceded that the commission fumbled its handling of a 2006
report raising questions about the qualifications of NASED's most
controversial software-testing laboratory, operated in Huntsville,
Ala., by Colorado-based CIBER, Inc. The report criticizing CIBER's
inadequate testing resources and lack of documentation was issued in
August, 2006, but was kept secret until that December, after the
general election.
The secrecy was a mistake, she said, and the commission decided to
"peel off the scab" and face public criticism. She vowed to keep the
process more transparent in the future.
A spokesperson for CIBER, which is on the verge of winning EAC
accreditation to resume testing voting equipment, did not respond to
requests for comment.
Critics also have questioned the agency's hiring of Wilkey as its
executive director and of former FEC official Brian Hancock to oversee
voting system certification, since both were involved in the much-
criticized NASED process.
The agency, however, has taken a tough regulatory stance, angering
manufacturers and county election officials by refusing to certify any
NASED-approved machine or recent upgrades without fully testing the
entire system.
"We're trying," Rodriguez said, "not to repeat any mistakes."
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