Florida Activists

Gov. Crist to recommend ditching touch-screen machines
Florida Sun

Gov. Charlie Crist is preparing to recommend that the controversial touch-screen voting machines used in Broward, Palm Beach and 13 other Florida counties be scrapped and replaced with optical scanners that would count paper ballots.

U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, said the governor would recommend spending at least $20 million on optical scanners for the 15 counties with touch-screen machines when he presents his proposed budget to the state Legislature on Friday.

After the old-fashioned computer punch-card voting system contributed to massive problems with the 2000 presidential election, Florida overhauled its election law. Most of the state's largest counties bought touch-screen machines.

Broward has spent about $20.4 million on touch-screen machines and Palm Beach County more than $14.4 million.

And now they will have to lose all that money because the previous administration refused to listen to us.

Never have so many paid so much for so little.

Sancho gets OK to seek a deal
Tallahassee Democrat

He came in prepared for a grilling, but embattled Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho left the Leon County Commission chambers Tuesday with a unanimous vote of confidence.

The commissioners gave Sancho a green light to pursue a deal with a Louisville, Ky.-based company to provide voting equipment for disabled people. The company, IVS, was the last option on the table that would make Leon County compliant with federal elections law come the September primaries.

The motion drew sighs of relief from more than a dozen Sancho supporters who had come to the workshop worried that Sancho would come under attack from certain commissioners for his failure to sign a contract for voting equipment for the disabled, a delay that has already cost the county about $500,000 in withheld state funding

Florida officials have known about and been warned about problems with voting equipment since the 2000 fiasco. This is not just something that happened. The reason that it wound up being a last minute deal is that many state officials have turned a blind eye to the problem and stubbornly refused to deal with the issue.

Sancho received a similar vote of confidence from the commissioners, despite politically charged remarks and brinkmanship by several of them: County Commission Chairman Bill Proctor suggested the commissioners should be making its own contacts with elections systems companies; Commissioner Cliff Thaell, a Democrat, wanted to have the commissioners recognize Sancho as a hero for liberty - an idea that had many members of the public clapping thunderously; Commissioner Tony Grippa, a Republican, drew hisses from the audience when he called Thaell's comments "grandstanding" and asked the audience how many of them were Republicans.

The reply from one woman in the crowd: "How about taxpaying citizens?"

How about voters? Why does this ass wich to make it a partisan issue? This arrogant fool should be run out of office for this base stupidity.

Read the entire article, it is very entertaining.

Review of vote policy?
Miami Herald

Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that the state ought to consider relooking at the way it examines electronic voting machines, following a county election chief's tests that showed insiders could hack into the computers, change votes and not leave an electronic fingerprint behind.

Bush, saying the subject is ''too important'' to ignore, echoed national computer-security and voting experts, and struck a dissimilar chord to acting Secretary of State David Mann, who expressed less urgency Thursday to retest vote machines. Mann said he was ''concerned'' only that Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho might have given an outsider access to his vote machines' computer codes Tuesday.

Bush also questioned whether Sancho gave away privileged information -- which Sancho denies -- and noted Sancho's ''unorthodox'' media-friendly style, in which he conducted his computer-hacker tests and spoke about them with The Herald before discussing them with the secretary of state's office, which oversees elections.

Sancho gave the hackers the same access that an insider would have to the machines. As most vote fraud is perpetuated by insiders, this is perfectly proper.

Sancho's two computer hackers were introduced to him by the voting watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org sometime this spring. Neither could break into Sancho's system from the outside -- that would require cutting into telephone lines -- so each was allowed insider access.

Attacking different parts of the system, both said they could easily bypass electronic security walls, make losing candidates win, disguise votes and leave no trace. Sancho persuaded Leon County commissioners Tuesday to scrap the Diebold system in favor of one manufactured by Election Systems & Software, which also makes the ATM-style touch-screen voting machines used in Miami-Dade and Broward.

A Diebold spokesman questioned Sancho's tests because they weren't real-world conditions.

As I just said, an insider fixing a race is "real world".

New tests fuel doubts about vote machines
Miami Herald

A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.

Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.

After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors association.

Florida Fair Elections Coalition's preliminary review of documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request to Florida's Division of Elections reveals that the state improperly certified the Diebold "paperless" TSX voting machine and improperly certified Diebold's so-called "blended" system.

Our preliminary findings include the following:

1. Twenty-five percent failure rate: The Florida testing of the TSX took place in March 2005. Four TSX's were supposed to be part of the testing procedure. However, according to handwritten notes found in the margins of the testing procedures, "one TSX screen died." Another note said that TSX serial #203213 was not used due to a "bad screen." Further notes indicate that the tests were then conducted on only 3 machines. Although this constitutes a 25% failure rate, no mention of this breakdown (or breakdowns) is made in the final test results.

2. Provisional ballots not private: A handwritten note in the margin of the test procedures document says the following: "Note: Review of provisional ballots can occur before ballot acceptance. This needs to change." This is startling because it indicates that the TSX shows voter information (name, address, etc.) and how that voter voted before a decision is made as to whether to accept a provisional ballot. This means that provisional voters do not have a secret vote on the TSX. It would seem that this alone should prevent certification of the TSX. No mention of this problem is made in Florida's offical test results report and, in fact, Florida certified the TSX the very next week.