85% of PA voters will use known hackable e-voting machines

[Dominus Atheos]

Ars Technica

On the eve of tomorrow's hotly contested and relatively close Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania, a number of voting activists are sounding the alarm one last time about the state's election systems. Over 85 percent of PA voters will vote on paperless touchscreen machines that are hackable, failure-prone, and fundamentally unauditable.

The ever-vigilant Bradblog has a roundup of which models will be used in tomorrow's contest, and it's not pretty:

• Two PA counties, one of which, Montgomery, is the state's most populous, will use the same Sequoia AVC Edge touchscreens that are now the subject of an investigation in New Jersey because of their spectacular failure in that state's recent primaries.
• Sixteen counties will use the Diebold Accuvote TS touchscreen model. Regular Ars readers will recall that my 2006 article, "How to steal an election by hacking the vote," described in some detail how to steal an election using this machine. (I hope that nobody from PA decides that it would be a good idea to print copies of the free PDF of this how-to article to bring to the polls with them as a form of protest, because you would probably get in trouble. So don't do that.)
• 51 counties will vote on the infamous iVotronic touchscreen from ES&S. This is the same model that brought us the Florida 13 controversy that ultimately resulted in Florida scrapping touchscreens altogether.

So as is typical this cycle, the people of PA will vote tomorrow in an election that is impossible to audit, one in which the government cannot meet its burden of proof of election integrity.

[FSTargetDrone]

On the eve of tomorrow's hotly contested and relatively close Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania, a number of voting activists are sounding the alarm one last time about the state's election systems. Over 85 percent of PA voters will vote on paperless touchscreen machines that are hackable, failure-prone, and fundamentally unauditable.

The ever-vigilant Bradblog has a roundup of which models will be used in tomorrow's contest, and it's not pretty:

• Two PA counties, one of which, Montgomery, is the state's most populous, will use the same Sequoia AVC Edge touchscreens that are now the subject of an investigation in New Jersey because of their spectacular failure in that state's recent primaries.
• Sixteen counties will use the Diebold Accuvote TS touchscreen model. Regular Ars readers will recall that my 2006 article, "How to steal an election by hacking the vote," described in some detail how to steal an election using this machine. (I hope that nobody from PA decides that it would be a good idea to print copies of the free PDF of this how-to article to bring to the polls with them as a form of protest, because you would probably get in trouble. So don't do that.)
• 51 counties will vote on the infamous iVotronic touchscreen from ES&S. This is the same model that brought us the Florida 13 controversy that ultimately resulted in Florida scrapping touchscreens altogether.

So as is typical this cycle, the people of PA will vote tomorrow in an election that is impossible to audit, one in which the government cannot meet its burden of proof of election integrity.

Well. I just got back from voting. My voting place in Montgomery County uses the Sequoia AVC Advantage machine. I didn't have any trouble voting, but there was no paper receipt, nor did there appear to be provisions for any receipt. I've used the same kind of machine since living in the area for the last 8 years.

This was the first time I voted in a presidential primary where I had to vote for not only the Candidate, but also for up to 6 delegates (a maximum of 3 male and 3 female) committed to the candidate.

Curiously, there were no campaign workers outside the school where I voted. In each of the previous times I've voted, there have always been campaign workers, by the front doors, handing out pamphlets about their respective candidate. I went earlier in the day than normal when voting, so maybe they will show up later on. Who knows.

Anyway, the only "confirmation" of my vote selections is a green light that illuminates when I press the square on the "screen" next to the name of each person.

[Glocksman]

I early voted yesterday*, and we use those ES&S iVotronic machines mentioned in the article.

The Ars article links to another story about the FL-13 missing votes and contends that it was due to poor ballot design, rather than with any fault in the machine itself.


Link

The 2006 midterm elections in Florida have focused attention on undervotes, ballots on which no vote is recorded on a particular contest. This interest was sparked by the high undervote count— more than 18,000 total undervotes out of 240,000 ballots cast—in Florida’s 13th Congressional District race, a race decided by a total of 369 votes. Using a combination of ballot-level and precinct-level voting data, we show that the high undervote rate in the 13th Congressional District race was almost certainly caused by the way that Sarasota County’s electronic touchscreen voting machines placed the 13th Congressional District race above and on the same screen as the Florida Governor race. We buttress this claim by showing that extraordinarily high undervote rates were also observed in the Florida Attorney General race in Charlotte and Lee Counties, places where that race appeared below the Governor race on voting machine screens. Using a precinct-level statistical imputation model to identify and allocate excess undervotes, we find that there is a 90 percent chance that Sarasota undervotes were pivotal in the 13th Congressional District race. With more precise estimates that use ballot data, we find that there is essentially a 100 percent chance that Jennings would have won the CD 13 race had Sarasota voters voted in Charlotte County.

Though even if the machines were 100% secure, I much prefer paper ballots because I'm an old Luddite.



*my county (Vanderburgh in Indiana) allows early voting at three public libraries.