Ciber-sleuthing in the secret world of voting machine accreditation

[kster]

January 16, 2007 at 08:16:04

by Michael Richardson

The mystery of Sarasota, Florida's 18,000 "undervotes" in the recent Congressional elections gets more confusing when one tries to penetrate the wall of secrecy surrounding testing of the controversial electronic voting machines at issue.

The day after the New York Times reported on the Election Assistance Commission ban on Ciber, Inc., the nation's largest so-called independent testing authority, Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Division of Elections was quick to tell the Sarasota Herald Tribune that Ciber had no role in the minimum performance standards of the ES&S voting machines in Sarasota. Independent testing labs, including Ciber, are funded by the voting machine vendors and receive lax oversight from the EAC, which secretly pulled Ciber's permit to test voting machines last year.

According to Ivey's statement to the Herald Tribune, a different test lab, Wyle Laboratories, actually conducted a "review" of the ES&S iVotronic machines used in Sarasota. However, Ciber's role in approval of the iVotronic machines is not quite that simple to dismiss.

Joe Hall, a respected electronic voting machine authority and self-described "politechnologist", explains there is more to the hidden process of certification than meets the eye. "Since the test reports are not public, it is difficult to find information about who tested what when."



http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070116_ciber_sleuthing_in_t.htm

[Patsy Stone]

1. Okay!

Show of hands:

Who's had it already with the "wall of secrecy"?

[kster]

2. -

[hunter]

3. What "wall of secrecy?"

The machines are crap, everyone knows it, and articles like this promote a kind of helplessness.

So what do you do about it?

The states still have a lot of power here to make things right. Effective strategies for dealing with this problem will vary by state, depending upon state law. What works in one state might not work in another.

But beyond that, there is a growing public perception that these machines are an unprecedented disaster. As activists we need to feed that. Otherwise we may become mired in small technical details that won't matter once the general public begins to reject these machines out of hand.

Computers can be programmed to cheat, therefore we shouldn't use them as voting machines. It's as simple as that. Tell that to people and they'll understand. Everything we write as election activists should be framed that way, even highly technical discussions of statistics, politics, and computer science.

Michael Richardson needs to grow some fangs and a snarl. As an editor of mine once said, "Don't be a dust bunny." As a reporter it's your job to clean up the mysteries, not feed them.