http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=1013&IssueNum=55Reporter Andrew Gumbel did a great job with this. (Much of this information was reported in March at
http://www.blackboxvoting.org. Gumbel visited the people involved last week, and wrote a very good analysis here. Note to mods: This article is very, very long -- 30 paragraphs -- and consists of several sections. I excerpted parts of 8 grafs. Hope that's okay in this case. )
DOWN FOR THE COUNTby Andrew Gumbel
Riverside County’s outspoken registrar was a national poster child for touchscreen voting, but problems with the machines may have just ended her career ... Late Monday, word came that Mischelle Townsend, Riverside County’s Registrar of Voters, had abruptly quit her job mid-term. She said she wanted to spend more time with her family ... But she didn’t mention anything about a controversial March 2 election for county supervisor that was still being contested, and the recount that had become entangled in problems attributable, in part, to the county’s electronic voting machines. Nor did she mention anything about potentially explosive new details regarding the possible manipulation of those machines.
...At around 8:50, Soubirous’s campaign manager, Brian Floyd, received a call from an election observer in Temecula informing him that the vote count had been stopped – apparently by Registrar Mischelle Townsend herself. The reason was not made clear. So Floyd and another Soubirous campaigner named Art Cassel jumped into a car and drove to Townsend’s office to investigate. Sure enough, the counting area appeared to be near-deserted. But then they noticed two men huddled at one of the vote tabulation computers. One, according to their account, was typing away on the computer keyboard, while the other was standing just next to him.
The two men turned out to be employees of Sequoia Voting Systems, the private company which manufactures Riverside County’s AVC Edge touchscreen machinery. Their presence was unusual, to say the least, and even the possibility that they might be making changes to the vote tabulation software in the middle of an election was alarming to Cassel and Floyd. Sequoia insists the two men’s activities were entirely benign ... Cassel and Floyd said the man at the keyboard, a Sequoia vice president called Mike Frontera, was wearing a county employees’ ID badge – something that has not been adequately explained by anyone. “What they were doing there we’ll never know,” Cassel said...On March 4, Floyd and Cassel saw the second Sequoia employee, Eddie Campbell, return to the registrar’s office and watched him pop into his pocket what looked like a PCMCIA card similar to those used to store votes on individual touchscreen machines ... Floyd shouted out: “Where are you going with that?” But he received no answer.
...For the moment, we have only Cassel and Floyd’s version of these events. CityBeat gave Townsend a long list of written questions outlining their account and inviting her to rebut it with her own. At first she said she would be glad to answer, but she missed a mutually agreed deadline, and failed to respond to messages left at her office. Eventually reached on her cell phone, she said she had been advised by her lawyers not to contribute to an article that “obviously was not going to be factual.” Pressed on what she meant by this, she ended up answering some questions, but would not be drawn in on the specifics of Cassel and Floyd’s allegations. She also failed to mention that she had just quit her job.
.... the Soubirous campaign requested a recount in early April ... a lawyer, who drafted a closely worded formal request for 44 separate items ... Of the 44 items requested, only five were provided ... in the end the recount went ahead without any examination of redundant data, audit logs, error reports, or any information documenting the chain of custody for data passed around on cartridges or over Intranet systems ... After he (the lawyer) wrote to Townsend expressing his dismay at her refusal “to provide information which has already been generated, and should have been retained by you in the ordinary course of your official business,” her lawyers wrote back that the materials requested were “not relevant to the counting of ballots” and, in many cases, did not exist – for reasons they did not elaborate. The materials, the lawyers argued, would become relevant only if it could be shown that they had been subject to fraud or error – an argument that turns the issue on its head because, of course, the only way to find out if anything is wrong is to inspect the materials first.
Riverside was the first California county to embrace touchscreen, or Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting ... Townsend was held up as an example to be followed everywhere ... In truth, though, the system was beset with problems from the outset. Although little reported at the time, election night in November 2000 was a near-disaster, as the tabulation software overloaded and started deleting votes from the tallying system. ... The man who headed Sequoia’s resuscitation team in Riverside, southern sales manager Phil Foster, was subsequently indicted in Louisiana for “conspiracy to commit money laundering and malfeasance” – charges later dropped in exchange for his testimony against Louisiana’s state commissioner of elections.
... Townsend found herself increasingly in the spotlight because she, more than any other California county registrar, had grown almost messianic in her advocacy of touchscreen technology ... Townsend has denounced much of the above as “groundless and politically motivated innuendo.” At one point in April, she went to the Riverside District Attorney, Grover Trask, and asked him to open an investigation into the allegations ... To the surprise of nobody in the county, the district attorney came back after a few days and announced that the election had been in perfect accordance with state and federal law. Art Cassel and Brian Floyd said the district attorney’s office reached its conclusion without talking to either of them.
... We are learning much more about the architecture of Sequoia’s computer codes because they, too, showed up on an unguarded File Transfer Protocol site on the Internet last year and are now being studied in earnest. Jeremiah Akin, a Riverside County computer scientist and anti-touchscreen campaigner, has discovered a way of writing modifications into the WinEds ballot management software in such a way that all trace of outside intervention vanishes automatically ... Sounds like a handy way of rigging elections. A similar flaw was noticed in a Technical Security Assessment Report commissioned by the state of Ohio last year, which noted: “There is a risk that an unauthorized person with access to the administrator account … might use any Operating Database Connectivity compliant product to access the Sequoia server and access or modify the database.” The Ohio report didn’t consider this very likely because it assumed some basic security procedures would be in place at county registrars’ offices.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
