Florida Voting Machine Logs Reveal Anomalies

boot1780 writes "Having 'successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election,' Black Box Voting reports that the 'internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.' Besides the date discrepancies, they claim to have discovered countless other errors and anomalies, including a case of one voting machine being 'powered down 128 times during the election'." Given the findings here, can we have a do-over?

No National Voting System?

[abscissa]

Free market voting?

In Canada we have a national voting system. Voting is the same wherever you go, no matter what part of the country you are in. Each person writes a little X on a piece of paper next to the cantidate of his choice, then you put it in a box. There are serial numbers on the ballots, so if any ballots are missing, duplicated, or anything else is funny, there is a way to tell. (Not tracable, though, -- ie you can't tell who voted for whom.)

There are no computers in national elections and there is a paper trail that can be recounted as many times as anyone wishes. And results don't take weeks to come in either... or months for that matter. We always seem to have our Prime Minister and government chosen within a few hours after the polls have closed...

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[phoenix.bam!]

Black box voting is non-partisan. They are fighting for open voting. They are not trying to prove that Bush stole the election (Although they might do that during their investigations) they are trying to show that the black box voting machines are going to kill democracy.

Re:How hard is it?

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

The first Ukrainian presidential election in November 2004, which was recognized by most of the world as fraudulent, used such a pen and paper system. Pen and paper does not ensure that elections can't be rigged and I am amazed at how many people seem to think that is exactly what it does.

Re:No National Voting System?

[Chirs]

I'm Canadian as well.

The big difference is that in the US the ballot contains an awful lot more than just "pick your local candidate". They vote on all kinds of stuff (school board, municipal, etc.), making the ballots way more complicated.

Palestine had more democratic elections

[smooth wombat]

The recent elections in Palestine (January 9, 2005) were, judging by continuing announcement such as this, more democratic than we have here in the U.S.* in spite of the Israeli occupation**. For reference:

European Election Observation Mission, Final Report [eu.int] (pdf format).

Even with all the illegal restrictions that Israel imposed on movement in the West Bank and Gaza and most importantly, Palestinian citizens living in East Jerusalem***, the Palestinian elections have a valid paper trail that can be checked as well as having independent, neutral monitors observe how the voting took place.

Does this mean that the Palestinian elections were perfect? Of course not. No election is. However, they made a good faith effort to have as free and open an election process as possible under the occupation conditions. They allowed the monitors full access to every aspect of the vote including the final vote counts.

One would think that if we're trying to spread the benefit of democratic elections to the world we should first start by taking a serious look at our own election process and bring in outside monitors to help us get a handle on this kind of nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse for these kind of activities to take place other than to manipulate election results.

*Investigation into the 2004 U.S. Election [cooperativeresearch.org]

**Palestinian Monioring Group, Israeli Obstructions of the Palestinian Election Process [nad-plo.org]

***Observer Report, Norwegian Assocation of NGOs [elections.ps] (pdf format)

Re:Oh, quitcher whinin'

[aborchers]

I'm not inferring anything except that the story will be reported differently in our polarized media. That is what my post said, wasn't it?

BTW, don't try to educate me about Palm Beach County elections. I live in PBC and am intimate with local politics. It doesn't surprise me that the case was made here because you don't have lawsuits without complainants, and people here are very suspicious of the process because of the crap that happened in 2000. You can basically assume that every election from now until hell freezes over is going to be monitored, torn apart and sued to no end in this county.

Now, as to whether it would be reasonable to infer what you suggest that I infer: PBC is deep blue. FL at large is red. If irregularities in the only county successfully tested, Democratic or otherwise, are representative of patterns throughout the state, then there might be a case to made for fraud. However, like you, I'm more inclined to blame incompetence and the closed-source/trade-secret mentality. Our Rep (Wexler, D) is a major advocate for paper trails on voting hardware, and I also think that would go a long way.

Re:Do over?

[DavidHumus]

> What was the final tally of recounts there? 3? 4?

No, the number of recounts was zero. There was an attempt to count ballots rejected due to machine errors - aka the infamous "hanging chad" - but "recount" is a deliberate mis-characterization of this effort to make it seem trivial and un-warranted.

FDR

[qwyeth]

I wonder, do you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?

Now that you mention it, FDR, along with General Marshall, General Gerow, Admiral Stark and Admiral Turner, did fail to stop the attack. It was strategically obvious that Pearl Harbor would be the target when (and if!) the Japanese attacked... On December 5, 1941 FDR received the decrypted Japanese declaration of war, and he did nothing about it. The message was never sent to Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the commander in chief & commanding general, respectively, of the pacific fleet. Our jackass-in-chief FDR wanted to go to war on the 'moral high ground,' in the eyes of the public.

But that'll never make it into high school history books. History is written by the winners, and it's common knowledge that we were taken by surprise, and that FDR was (overall) a really swell guy.

Re:Get over it already!

[Peyna]

Is there anyway to vote for "None of the above"?

You don't have to vote in every race in an election. Look at the poll results sometime and you'll see that there will be many more total votes for President in a particular district than for the local school board candidates.

Guinness Voice: Brilliant!

[TPS Report]

It amazes me that the voting box companies, who are paid disgusting amounts of taxpayer money to develop these things, can't figure out how to code properly. Yes, I know Sequoia [wikipedia.org] is the company discussed in the article, but Diebold has 80% of the voting market. So if they can't do it right as the market leader, I'm afraid of what will be found when/if someone demands a code audit on the Sequoia stuff.

Diebold [wikipedia.org] :

(Support Guide [equalccw.com] - Review [avirubin.com]) (pdf):

4.4 Key management and other cryptographic issues with the vote and audit records [...] the audit logs are encrypted and checksummed before being written to the storage device. Unfortunately, neither the encrypting nor the checksumming is done with established, secure techniques. [...] (Recall that we have already discussed the lack of cryptography in other potions of the system.) [...] All of the data on a storage device is encrypted using a single, hardcoded DES [22] key: #define DESKEY ((des_key*)"F2654hD4"). Note that this value is not a hex representation of a key, nor does it appear to be randomly generated. Instead, the bytes in the string "F2654hD4 " are fed directly into the DES key scheduler. [...] from the CVS logs, we see this particular key has been used without change since December 1998 [...] ...

In June 2005, [Kevin Shelley, the California Secretary of State], reported that when given access to Diebold vote-counting computers, Bev Harris- a critic of Diebold's voting machines - was able to make 65,000 votes disappear simply by changing the memory card that stores voting results for one that had been altered. Although the machines are supposed to record changes to data stored in the system, they showed no record of tampering after the memory cards were swapped. In response, a spokesperson for the Department of State said that, "Information on a blog site is not viable or credible."

... [insert completely awed silence here]
.
I think I'll buy "C++ Programming for Dummies" and faxes a quick resume to Diebold

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[TPS Report]

TRANSPARANCY is the key

No, actually, the key [avirubin.com] is F2654hD4. :)

Quote:

All of the data on [the Diebold] storage device is encrypted using a single, hardcoded DES key:

#define DESKEY ((des_key*)"F2654hD4")

Note that this value is not a hex representation of a key, nor does it appear to be randomly generated. Instead, the bytes in the string "F2654hD4 " are fed directly into the DES key scheduler... from the CVS logs, we see this particular key has been used without change since December 1998 ...

rofl.

Re:Take back our elections

[nojomofo]

Do you recall during the debates before the 2000 election, Dubya commented that Clinton had recently (I'm paraphrasing here) launced a million dollar missile at a tent in a desert, and how he would never waste our money that way? I'll refresh your memory: that tent in the desert had held Osama bin Laden until about 15 minutes before the airstrike. Clinton was using the intelligence that he had to try to remove bin Laden as a threat. When Clinton handed over the keys to the white house to Dubya, Dubya was told that the single most important thing his administration had to worry about was terrorism. On 8/6/2001, Dubya received (but didn't read) a briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". His administration never made any attempt to investigate any terrorism, and in fact, ignored Richard Clarke's warnings that the administration needed to be paying attention to this problem.

Now tell me, who didn't try to stop 9/11?

Re:Take back our elections

[jc42]

[D]o you consider FDR to be the "jackass" who failed to stop Pearl Harbor?

The main quibble here is the use of the word "the", which implies uniqueness. If you read the histories about the Pearl Harbor attack, you'll find that there's general agreement that there was widespread incompetence all along the US chain of command. They pretty much had the evidence in the hours before the attack, but a combination of failure to understand and failure to believe the evidence led to the disaster. But it wasn't one person's failure; it was failure of the entire system to use the information that it had.

This is similar to our current situation with 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, etc. George Bush isn't the sole "jackass" responsible for any of these. It's a systemic problem, with incompetence combined with corruption at all levels.

One of the clearest examples is the admission that they had tapes of the perpetrators' conversations days and weeks before the 9/11 attacks. But they didn't have enough translators fluent in Arabic to get them translated in time. This problem existed despite several decades of growing problems with Arabic-speaking radicals, including the earlier bombings of embassies, the Cole attack, and the earlier attempt to bomb the World Trade Center. Anyone competent saw the need for more Arabic translators, and there are at least a million Arabic-speaking Americans who could have been hired.

Further incompetence is shown by the fact that there aren't nearly as many Arabic-speaking Americans willing to do the job now. The widespread anti-Arab attacks and discrimination of the past few years have made sensible Arabic speakers very wary of getting involved with the US government. If you want a clear example of why, google for "Sibel Edmonds". Her story isn't an anomaly; it's a good example of a government agency attacking and driving out out of the people who could have done the most to help. There are a number of other similar stories.

But there isn't a single "jackass" responsible for this. It's a systemic problem that can't be solved by replacing just one high-up jackass.

(The widespread "English only" attitude of Americans is also part of the problem, but that's a different issue.)

Re:Caution in your Commentary

[AoT]

No crime?

How about this [bradblog.com]?

A sworn affidavit that there was voting fraud taking place.

Or the discepancy in exit polls [72.14.207.104].

What exactly are you looking for?

It is not our fault that the government refuses to investigate.

Re:As keeper of the Terry LePore fan page...

[Syberghost]

The big "Palm Beach voting debacle" was that Pat Robertson got 3000 votes and there weren't 3000 members of the Reform Party.

What never gets mentioned is that Pat Robertson lives in Palm Beach County and had 1,000 people show up at a paid campaign dinner there not long before the election.

This is about like complaining that George Bush got more votes in Crawford, Texas, than there are Republicans there.

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[maize]

There's other information regarding the votes besides this particular audit. You may consider U.C. Berkely a leftist institution, but their Quantitative Methods Research Team has quite a bit of credentials. U.I.Chicago, Notre Dame, Cortnell, U. Penn., U. of Wisconsin, Stanford, and Princeton might also be in a blue states, but they are also very highly respected. Other schools that have weighed in include Temple, U. of Utah and Southern Methodist U. Mathematical arguments like this may not sway dick and jane, but I would expect them to have more credence with the slashdot crowd:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Pol ls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf [electionarchive.org] (PDF)

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national
poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%.
Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as
different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1
in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to
chance.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:
1. Statistical Sampling Error - or Chance
We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be
ruled out.
2. Inaccurate Exit Polls
This is the theory that Edison/Mitofsky put forth. They hypothesize that the reason the exit polls were so
biased towards Kerry was because Bush voters were more reluctant to respond to exit polls than Kerry
voters. Edison/Mitofsky did not come close to justifying this position, however, even though they have
access to the raw, unadjusted, precinct-specific data set. The data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their
report show how implausible this theory is.
3. Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of
Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election
results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted
cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu:7101/ [berkeley.edu]

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade,
respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch
voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in
Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of
81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm
Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should
have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 -
a difference of 19,300 votes.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the
significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting
cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of
electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for
President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this
appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once
in a thousand chances."


http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/us/FL2004/WandF lorida2004.pdf [stanford.edu] (PDF)

Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in just the
most critical st

Re:Life's tough all over

[spitzak]

Um, Clinton DID win the popular vote. Unless you mean he got less than 50% but that is true of lots of presidents. The only elections where the Electorial vote disagreed with the popular vote was 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000.

Re:Devil's Advocate...

[maize]

The discrepencies in the polling data would really just be an interesting anomaly if there weren't so many other corroborating circumstances.

If you read the actual studies that I posted, you would see that while the first study is discussing the statistical unlikelihood of the exit poll results, other studies are noting the statistical correlation between the use of electronic voting machines and nonrandom skewing toward Bush (compared to registered voters, previous trends in the voting area, and results from other areas). Yet another study explores the high correlation between where the errors occured and how important the region was toward securing the electoral vote toward Bush.

There were signifigant nonrandom errors that always skewed toward Bush.
They were unprecepended regarding:
1) polling data predictive history
2) correlation with the use of electronc paperles devices
3) correlation with areas in the country that had unusual leverage over electoral votes

The CEO of Diebold had previously been quoted as saying:
http://www.wanttoknow.info/031109nytimes [wanttoknow.info]

IN mid-August (2003), Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. ''I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year,'' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is based in Canton, Ohio.

That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime Republican, he is a member of President Bush's ''Rangers and Pioneers,'' an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race.

But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of paperless, touch-screen voting machines.

Partisans have fought the ability to audit electronic voting machines with every legal argument possible
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7386582p-7298 824c.html [adn.com]

If any process should be open, transparent, and verifiable, shouldn't it be voting? Dismissing concerns over voting irregularity out of a partisan satisfaction that whichever preferred side may have won this time is ridiculously shortsided.

A few more details from Black Box Voting

[JimMarch(equalccw)]

The pattern of date discrepancies does NOT look like "pure machine glitch" (hardware issues like a CMOS battery failure or corruption) and also doesn't look like the possible result of an OS bug.

The way they're mostly "clustered" in a limited date period of Oct. 13th - 20th of the correct year says to me "human intervension". It's not "randomized" the way most computer glitches are.

Next: by way of Jeremiah Akin, Riverside County elections staff have said that the PS/2 keyboard port on the back of each touchscreen terminal is used for, among other things, "to change the date and time".

We know from the logs on the serial numbers of the machines affected that the dates were accurate during the "logic and accuracy test" typically performed up to a month before the election.

OK, let's assume the Riverside folks are right about the keyboard being required for manual date/time changes.

Standard practice in the elections biz is to do the L&A then shut the machine down and DON'T mess with it until election morning. This is basic across all voting machines and has been since the lever days going back to the 19th century.

If the date was messed with by a human with a keyboard between the time of the L&A and the time of the election, well...what the holy hell were they doing? Once the keyboard is in you can tweak the boot order in ROM, loading new code off of new media, or maybe individual programs. (We know little about the OS on these but the boot ROM system is basically same as any laptop.)

In other words, it's not that radical a guess to say that somebody was up to something no good and the date weirdness was just a side effect.

If they were doing a very serious hack involving loading new code, it's possible that what they did hosed the date and they needed to reset it by hand...and in 40 or so cases they forgot that part?

Under this hypothesis the range of dates from the 13th to the 20th is maybe the time the "midnight black hat crew" spent touching each machine. The number of days involved is about right.

Again, this is speculation. We need the manuals on these things to understand the date function in detail. And the process by which new code or data is loaded, probably via PCMCIA card.

We need to replicate ALL these various errors and figure out how they happened, what could cause them and whether or not they're "pointers" to deeper problems, whether that's just "bad gear" or somebody actually loading a vote-shaving routine of some sort.

Jim March
Black Box Voting staff
http://blackboxvoting.org/ [blackboxvoting.org]