Avante Letter to Colorado Daily

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is the Avante response to the Colorado Daily article of 12/12 
which quoted Neil McClure, and was sent to me by John Byrne of Avante 
who confirmed I could share it with the list.

I converted it to plain text for the list, so please blame any 
formatting errors on me.

Look for it in print!

Joe

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My name is Kevin Chung; the CEO of AVANTE International Technology, 
Inc. AVANTE is one of the four vendors currently in contention for the 
Boulder voting system. I would like to help clarify some of the issues 
and concerns in the article “County to vote on voting system finalist” 
on December 12 Colorado Daily.

	AVANTE is the pioneer of the touch-screen voting system with voter 
verifiable paper record and audit trail. AVANTE VOTE-TRAKKER™ voting 
system is currently certified by both Federal NASED and SOS of 
Colorado. The system had been used in elections successfully in the 
State of California and Connecticut. Therefore, the discussion and 
concern that no voting system with voter verifiable paper record 
satisfies both the Federal and State law is erroneous.

	“…under state law, a recount must be conducted on the same media on 
which the original vote is cast…..”

To really interpret the aspect of recount, we have to examine two of 
the current election statutes. Colorado statute “1-5-601- Use of voting 
machines or electronic voting systems” states “In all elections held in 
this State, the votes may be cast, registered, recorded, and counted by 
means of a voting machine or by means of an electronic voting system, 
consisting of a ballot which is marked by the elector and counted by 
electronic vote-counting equipment or counted by electronic voting 
equipment on which votes are recorded simultaneously on a paper tape 
and a removable “prom” or other electronic tabulation device or a vote 
recorder which the elector uses to record each vote on a ballot card 
and the vote-counting equipment, as provided in this part 6.”

That is, current state law requires multiple media and one of them must 
be paper tape.

	The recount statute is outlined in 1-10.5-110 (3) and (4). “All 
recounts of votes cast on direct record electronic voting machines 
shall be conducted using electronic ballot images. As used in this 
section, “ballot image” means a record of each vote cast by a voter 
that is stored on a removal memory device contained in such voting 
machine. All ballot images shall be randomized in such voting machine 
to assure voter anonymity.”  Ballot images in the election industry 
means direct print out of each of the ballots as cast. Recount is 
normally done manually by reading these printed ballot images. Since 
the ballot images have already been printed as paper tapes or paper 
records, one would assume that the recount be performed on such paper 
tapes or records.

More importantly, the Federal HAVA law requires that all recounts be 
done using the paper records (paper tape in Colorado State Statute).

	There was an interesting quote in the article from Mr. Neil McClure of 
Hart InterCivic: “Since when did paper become a tamper-proof media? I 
could print ballots on my $175 home printer that would look like real 
ballots”.  AVANTE being the pioneer of this type of technology, has 
posted a white paper on  HYPERLINK "http://www.vote-trakker.com"; 
www.vote-trakker.com titled “A manufacturer’s View Point On the Voter 
Verifiable Paper Record and Audit Trail”.  There is a section that 
answers this simple question.

The paper record produced by the proven VOTE-TRAKKER™ voting system not 
only has a unique random generated tracking number, it also has an 
encrypted relational check code binding the selections with the 
tracking number. More importantly, the paper record produced by AVANTE 
VOTE-TRAKKER™ also has a relational encryption printed on the paper 
record. AVANTE challenges anyone to duplicate or simulate such a paper 
record.



Sincerely yours,

Kevin Chung, Ph.D., CEO, AVANTE International Technology, Inc.