article: warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure

["Margit Johansson" <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/greg_gordon/story/50485.html

Warning on voting machines reveals oversight failure






           By Greg Gordon               | McClatchy Newspapers
                                           WASHINGTON
— Disclosure of an election computer glitch that could drop ballot
totals for entire precincts is stirring new worries that an unofficial
laboratory testing system failed for years to detect an array of flaws
in $1.5 billion worth of voting equipment sold nationwide since 2003.

Texas-based Premier Elections Solutions last week alerted at least
1,750 jurisdictions across the country that special precautions are
needed to address the problem in tabulation software affecting all 19
of its models dating back a decade.Voting
experts reacted skeptically to the company's assertion that election
workers' routine crosschecks of ballot totals would have spotted any
instances where its servers failed to register some precinct vote
totals when receiving data from multiple memory cards.



                       Like
nearly all of the nation's modern voting equipment, Premier's products
were declared "qualified" under a voluntary testing process overseen
from the mid 1990s until 2005 by the National Association of State
Election Directors.Computer scientists, some state officials and
election watchdog groups allege that the NASED-sponsored testing system
was a recipe for disaster, shrouded in secrecy, and allowing equipment
makers to help design the tests.The federal Election Assistance
Administration, created in 2002, took over the testing responsibility
in 2005, but has yet to certify a single voting machine.As a
result, charged Susan Greenhalgh, a spokeswoman for watchdog group
Voter Action, the systems on which Americans will decide the race
between Barack Obama and John McCain in November are "scandalously
flawed"' and "the integrity of this election is in question."David
Beirne, executive director of the Election Technology Council, which
represents the leading makers of voting machines, said there's no
reason for concern. Without mentioning NASED, he said that members'
products "have all been certified" as meeting 2002 voluntary federal
standards.NASED officials took on the testing in the mid 1990s,
after the Federal Election Commission adopted voluntary federal
standards for voting machines but Congress failed to create a testing
agency. The industry was frustrated, too, by being governed by a
hodge-podge of state standards."We had two choices: To try to do
something or to do nothing," said Thomas Wilkey, who headed NASED's
volunteer Voting Systems Committee for several years while executive
director of New York's elections board. "We had a set of standards. It
was a crime to let them sit on a shelf."NASED watched over the
issuance of "qualified" reports from Independent Testing Laboratories,
but with little control over the testing. The vendors secretly
negotiated payments with the labs, helped design the tests, got to see
the results first and only shared the codes driving their software with
three NASED technical experts who signed non-disclosure agreements.NASED officials posted only "qualified" ratings on the group's Web site.The
lab endorsements aided vendors in selling nearly $1.5 billion in
equipment to states and counties from 2003-2007, most of it financed by
a gush of federal dollars under the 2002 Help America Vote Act.Wilkey
says the labs' approval was never a "certification." But EAC members
have referred publicly to NASED's "certification" of voting machines,
and numerous states enacted laws barring purchases of equipment unless
it passed the NASED-sponsored tests.Questions about NASED's
testing grew in intensity over the last couple of years, after
independent tests for the states of California, New York, Ohio, Florida
and Connecticut found performance defects and security gaps in both
systems that will serve most voters this fall: touch-screens and
optical scanners.The concerns prompted New York's elections
board to scrap a $60 million contract to buy new touch screens to
replace its decades-old lever voting machines. Vice Chair Douglas
Kellner said it's now clear that a "qualified" rating from NASED is
"meaningless ...a piece of toilet paper."David Jefferson, a
voting machine security expert who works at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, said NASED's tests were "of no value if your
concern is security against insider threats," such as tampering by
election officials.John Washburn, a software tester in the
Milwaukee suburb of Germantown, predicts that nearly all of the
machines bought in recent years will have to be replaced in a process
he likened to the early 20th Century Teapot Dome scandal "as just the
epitome of how government money goes down a rat hole," he said.Worries
about the touch-screens' lack of a verifiable paper trail have already
prompted states to replace thousands of barely used machines costing
hundreds of millions of dollars in favor of the scanners, which
preserve each voter's original paper ballot for use in a recount.Congress
passed the HAVA law and allotted billions of dollars for new equipment
in the wake of the tumultuous 2000 presidential election battle that
hinged on the validity of machine-counted punch-card ballots with
"hanging chads" in Florida.Ironically, the rush to buy voting
machines to avoid a recurrence has triggered a new wave of public
distrust because of questions about the testing and new reports of
election regularities, including allegations of 18,000 missing votes in
a 2006 congressional race in Florida.Meantime, the EAC has made
slow progress in setting up a federal testing and certification system
— still voluntary, as directed by Congress. With help from the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, the commission toughened
standards in 2005 and again last year.In an interview,
Commission Chairwoman Rosemary Rodriguez said the agency feels the
pressure, but "we're not going to sacrifice any of our stringent
requirements to satisfy election administrators or manufacturers."A couple of voting systems could be certified soon, she said, but not in time for the November election.Rodriguez
conceded that the commission fumbled its handling of a 2006 report
raising questions about the qualifications of NASED's most
controversial software-testing laboratory, operated in Huntsville,
Ala., by Colorado-based CIBER, Inc. The report criticizing CIBER's
inadequate testing resources and lack of documentation was issued in
August, 2006, but was kept secret until that December, after the
general election.The secrecy was a mistake, she said, and the
commission decided to "peel off the scab" and face public criticism.
She vowed to keep the process more transparent in the future.A
spokesperson for CIBER, which is on the verge of winning EAC
accreditation to resume testing voting equipment, did not respond to
requests for comment.Critics also have questioned the agency's
hiring of Wilkey as its executive director and of former FEC official
Brian Hancock to oversee voting system certification, since both were
involved in the much-criticized NASED process.The agency,
however, has taken a tough regulatory stance, angering manufacturers
and county election officials by refusing to certify any NASED-approved
machine or recent upgrades without fully testing the entire system."We're trying," Rodriguez said, "not to repeat any mistakes."