Felton on Sequoia discrepancies; Sequoia threatens Felton

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was in NJ last week visiting Ed Felton's Center for Information
Technology Policy lab at Princeton.  Ed is one of the premier
computer scientists studying both voting technology and the policy
issues that surround it.  I talked with him and his students about
auditing.

As has been pretty widely reported, NJ had a bunch of discrepancies in
their primary election results.  They don't yet know all the details,
but it is clear that the system has bugs, and probably gave the wrong
ballot to many many people on election day.  See Felton's writeup of
the evidence in his great "Freedom to Tinker" blog:

 Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies
  http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1266

Sequoia has presented their interpretation of what went wrong, but it
is inadequate, as Felton writes here:

 Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story
  http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1267

The other outrageous aspect of this, is that, although the Union
County Clerk has asked Felton's lab to investigate, Sequoia has
sent him a threatening letter:

 Interesting Email from Sequoia
  http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1265

In which Sequoia says among other things:

 As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey
 election officials have stated that they plan to send to you one or
 more Sequoia Advantage voting machines for analysis. I want to make
 you aware that if the County does so, it violates their established
 Sequoia licensing Agreement for use of the voting system. Sequoia has
 also retained counsel to stop any infringement of our intellectual
 properties, including any non-compliant analysis. We will also take
 appropriate steps to protect against any publication of Sequoia
 software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other
 infringement of our intellectual property.

Check it out - "non-compliant analysis"!!  And note that Felton's lab
already bought two earlier Sequoia machines at a surplus auction in
Georgia.  I saw one of those machines while I was there.

Whether or not Sequoia would have legs to stand on in this case, this
is another reminder that these licensing agreements need to be very
carefully vetted, and counties should never sign away the right to get
independent analysis of their equipment.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/