Verified Voting's Statement On the South Carolina Primary

[Bill Bored]

On the South Carolina Primary
A call for recountable, auditable voting systems
June 15th, 2010

Last week’s surprising outcome in a party primary in South Carolina for United States Senate was accompanied by anecdotal reports of voting problems on election day, and many questions about the accuracy of the vote count.

Whether specific reports of irregularities in this election are confirmed, the most important fact about South Carolina’s voting system is that most ballots cannot be effectively audited or recounted. Serious concerns about the integrity of the primary (and of other elections conducted using the same technology) are inevitable, and legitimate.

South Carolina uses paperless touch-screen electronic voting machines...

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In a statewide election verified by a risk-limiting audit, many more people would have to commit egregious error or collude actively in order for electronic vote miscounts to cause an incorrect winner to be certified. By contrast, a paperless system such as South Carolina’s requires the error or malfeasance of a relative small number of individuals to change an election’s outcome.

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Some interpreted a GAO report on the FL-13 undervote as exonerating the iVotronic machines, but we noted in our report that the GAO did not analyze firmware for the cards that enable voting for each voter; and verified only that the firmware found on the sampled machines contained the certified firmware...

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A 2007 report commissioned by Ohio’s Secretary of State also found:

“…taken as a whole, the security failures in the ES&S system are of a magnitude and depth that, absent a substantial re-engineering of the software itself, renders procedural changes alone unlikely to meaningfully improve security. Nevertheless, we attempted to identify practical procedural safeguards that might substantially increase the security of the ES&S system in practice. We regret that we ultimately failed to find any such procedures that we could recommend with any degree of confidence.” (p.30)

More at:
https://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6762&preview=1

[L. Coyote]

1. A voice of reason is a sea of uncritical hysteria.