(Ed Felten on) Sarasota: Limited Investigations

[Wilms]

Sarasota: Limited Investigations

By Prof. Ed Felten, Princeton University

February 05, 2007

This article was posted at Freedom to Tinker and is reposted here with permission of the author. (See also, the comments at the link.)

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Two attempts have been made to investigate. The first was by representatives of Christine Jennings (the officially losing candidate) and a group of voters, who filed lawsuits challenging the election results and asked, as part of the suits’ discovery process, for access by their experts to the machines and their code. The judge denied their request, in a curious order that seemed to imply that they would first have to prove that there was probably a malfunction before they could be granted access to the evidence needed to tell whether there was a malfunction.

The second attempt was by the Department of State (DOS) of the state of Florida, who commissioned a study by outside experts. Oddly, I am listed in the official Statement of Work (SOW) as a principal investigator on the study team, even though I am not a member of the team. Many people have asked how this happened. The short answer is that I discussed with representatives of DOS the possibility of participating, but eventually it became clear that the study they wanted to commission was far from the complete, independent study I had initially thought they wanted.

The biggest limitation on the study is that DOS is withholding information and resources needed for a complete study. Most notably, they are not providing access to voting machines. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you want to understand the behavior of voting machines, it helps to have a voting machine to examine. DOS could have provided or facilitated access to a machine, but it apparently chose not to do so. The Statement of Work is clear that the study is to be “a … static software analysis on the iVotronics version 8.0.1.2 firmware source code”.

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http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2242&Itemid=113