Singer Complaint includes "Hart Ballots Not Secret"

["Joe Pezzillo" <jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, from the former Hart employee's (William Singer) complaint to  
the Ohio Secretary of State on July 29th, 2004 (yes, 2004, before the  
presidential election), at a minimum, it sounds like he's saying that  
the company has "misrepresented" the system...does any of this sound  
familiar to anyone???

"These companies have a long history of concealing problems and have  
become willing to exercise their silence whenever they thought they  
could get away with it.  In some cases during my years at Hart,  
believing only at the time that I was supporting my customer (and  
ultimately the public interest by promoting public confidence), I  
have participated in withholding information that might have raised  
concerns about our competence, our customers approach to the rollout  
or use of their electronic voting machines.  Had this been a handful  
of rare incidents, where the repercussions were indeed minor, I could  
have continued to believe that Hart as a company was doing the right  
thing.  I eventually left Hart Intercivic because it became clear to  
me that the company's silence had little to do with "rare" incidents  
but instead revealed a number of potentially serious problems which  
appeared to be systematically hidden or ignored largely for the sake  
of corporate profits.  While at Hart I had evidence of what I  
believed to be criminal fraud, extreme negligence, and a distinct and  
troubling pattern of failure to uphold the public trust both in  
violations of the spirit of its contracts, but also in concealing  
problems in an industry which so crucially represents the public  
interest."

"- The vote storage on Hart's JBC/eSlate voting equipment is not  
random, and under the right circumstances, while unusual, it is  
possible to identify how someone voted.  I reported this to the  
management team immediately after identifying the problem, because  
the sales force repeatedly made this claim, and simple efforts to try  
and make the storage and retrieval more random and secure were never  
made."

"- Hart sales staff has claimed to the Ohio SOS office that results  
are not transmitted over public networks.  This is untrue, and  
indeed, absurd.  Unofficial results are transmitted through public  
phone lines, and even mediocre "hackers" can access such networks via  
the internet." [PS - I don't personally believe that a "mediocre"  
hacker can access the public phone network, but clearly it's  
possible, just ask the NSA].

"- Compuware says safeguards are in place to prevent the Hart system  
from crashing.  While not a programmer for these products, I am not  
aware of any such safeguards, but am aware of a number of system  
crashes and preventable causes for them which were infrequently and  
inconsistently revealed to customers."

"- Compuware was unable to modify the MBB vote storage cards trying  
to use the Windows file system.  The report suggests that this cannot  
be done, and it cannot, but this gives the impression that such  
information is highly secure only because the Windows file system  
cannot be used.  Publicly available tools can be used to make such  
changes while working in Windows, and I don't believe the report  
should be communicating a false sense of security in this regard."

The entire complaint should be read, these are some serious  
allegations against the company that makes our voting equipment. I  
hope that law enforcement is investigating this (especially since  
they were willing to investigate Al Kolwicz in his home).

http://www.BradBlog.com/Docs/WiliiamSinger_OhioSosComplaint_072904.doc

[http://tinyurl.com/kzwbj]


He also sent a note to the Texas Secretary of State with some  
additional concerns:

"- The audit trail for Hart's election generation software (BOSS) had  
invalid entries."

"- The public test was fake. [...] I should also note here that the  
public observers who did show up were totally unqualified to inspect  
the election processes, technology, databases, or even the results.   
I believe that official trained observers should be present, conduct  
a thorough analysis and document that analysis, if the public test is  
to be seen as anything other than a joke."

"- Hart sold a device to Tarrant County called an M2B3, claiming that  
it was both faster than the previous card readers Hart had sold, and  
would prevent corruption problems with the cards that held votes.   
However, internal testing revealed that the M2B3 was not faster, nor  
did it entirely resolve the data corruption issues, though the county  
was never told nor given any sort of refund, either for the M2B3 or  
the card readers they were initially charged for.  Despite the data  
corruption issues, no refund was offered for the cards either, though  
Tarrant had purchased a large number of them at considerable expense."

"- Hart admitted to Tarrant County that votes are sometimes lost when  
using the disabled voting units, but only after such problems had  
developed, and never informed them that the claims of an ability to  
rebuild vote records was not consistently available, and would always  
require shipping the voting devices to Colorado.  However, this was  
not a requirement because of the altitude, rather the programming  
team refused to reveal the process for vote recovery. "


http://www.BradBlog.com/Docs/ 
WiliiamSinger_TarrantSosComplaint_072904.doc

[alt url: http://tinyurl.com/j72tb ]


Here's the link to the original story. You may not like the idea of  
blogs and citizen journalism, but BradBlog has been quite reliable on  
this topic (they broke a few Diebold stories), and, well, none of the  
journalists in Boulder County seem to be covering this (yet).

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002542.htm

How can we consider spending another penny with company until these  
claims have been answered? And if they are true, when do we get our  
refund?

Joe



Joe Pezzillo
PO Box J
Boulder, CO 80306 USA
jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx
303-938-8850


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Colorado Constitution:

Article VII Section 8. Elections by ballot or voting machine.
All elections by the people shall be by ballot, and in case paper  
ballots are required to be used, no ballots shall be marked in any  
way whereby the ballot can be identified as the ballot of the person  
casting it. The election officers shall be sworn or affirmed not to  
inquire or disclose how any elector shall have voted. In all cases of  
contested election in which paper ballots are required to be used,  
the ballots cast may be counted and compared with the list of voters,  
and examined under such safeguards and regulations as may be provided  
by law. Nothing in this section, however, shall be construed to  
prevent the use of any machine or mechanical contrivance for the  
purpose of receiving and registering the votes cast at any election,  
provided that secrecy in voting is preserved.

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