This is from Bev Harris' web site where she talks about the decertification of electronic voting in CA... ________________ Here's what pushed it over the top: There were many, many people and groups involved, among them BlackBoxVoting.org, VerifiedVoting.org, VotersUnite.org, True Majority, SAVE-Democracy, California Voter Foundation, but this produced intense stress and left, really, no choice: California completed its audit of certified versions in use. ONLY ONE county in California was using certified software (Orange County). Even there, significant problems arose. The California secretary of state's office issued a report, which was critical to all vendors but brutal on Diebold. A couple weeks back, I got an email from James Dunn, a California citizen who reported interesting things about his experience as a tech putting together the Diebold TSx system. I thought his information was important and passed it to Jim March, a Republican/Libertarian gun lobbyist who lives in Sacramento, for follow up. Jim is on of my co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit in California asking for restitution from Diebold, and he is highly skilled in persuasive lobbying. Jim drove to Stockton to take a formal declaration from James Dunn. It was devastating. Basically, Diebold hires techs, and "rovers" for election day, by having a temp agency place ads on Monster.com. They hired Dunn over the phone and told him to show up for work and start assembling Diebold machines. Diebold's voter card encoder was not functioning properly, and therefore Diebold created several patches and told Dunn and the others to put them on the machines. Later, at the county facility, the Secretary of State paid a surprise visit. The assistant county registrar and Diebold employees were there. The techs were told not to tell what they were doing, and not to answer questions. After a brief conference among county and Diebold project managers, the techs were sent home with pay. There was no inventory control. Patches went on some voter card encoders but not others, and records weren't kept of which were which. Patches overwrote other patches on the installation cards, with hand written version numbers crossed out and competing with each other for attention. Though Diebold's technical data specs for the TSx machines specify that Diebold is ISO compliant (a quality management system for software) no attempt was made to follow even the most basic quality control standards to comply with ISO 9000. Most machines were not even tested after the patches. The batteries kept dying, even when the machines were in transit only for a short time. But the batteries didnt even need to run down; when they got low, the machines lost their software. The techs warned everyone who would listen that this was going to be a problem on election day. Diebold instructed them to ship the machines out around to various counties (and to Johnson County, Kansas) despite the flaws. The encoders did indeed fail on election day, causing many,many people to lose their ability to vote at all. ******** At the hearing yesterday: Bob Urosevich started off, and said he had no idea of the battery problem, and that Diebold had fixed all the problems identified by the various reports (SAIC, RABA) But then Dunn testified that they did know about the problems. Urosevich was cross examined, and it got pretty cross (on the part of the voter board) and tense (on the part of Diebold's lawyer, who kept jumping up to whisper in Urosevich's ear). His answers were evasive, nonsensical, parsed words beyond the meaning of "is" and so frustrated the panel that one panel member said "so we can look at your answer two ways -- you were trying to be misleading or you were lying. Which is it?" ******** Enter the next set of documents -- the lawyers memos. Out of perhaps 600 pages, about 50 pages were deemed to be of compelling public interest. The most important information on these was provided directly to two gentlemen who had an appointment to meet with Kevin Shelley who was, at that time, out of the state. On Monday, March had provided Dunn's declaration to the secretary of state's office and to the California attorney general. While traveling a few days ago, my plane touched down for about 20 minutes in Oakland while I was on my way to Dallas. I grabbed my cell phone and called Ian Hoffman of the Oakland Trib to tip him off about a set of documents that had become available, and he was keenly interested. He made the correct inquiries to locate a selection of memos. Hoffman printed two articles in the Oakland Tribune and the Tri Valley Herald, on Tuesday this week, detailing the problems exposed by the memos: 1) Diebold's lawyers were planning to lie to the secretary of state by saying the smart card system was commercial off the shelf, and didnt need to be certified. This was in response to a suggested interrogatory I provided for the January voting panel hearing via Jim March. Of course, this system is customized and heavily modified. 2)Diebold's lawyers described absurd answers to the interrogatories, like saying that to get hold of the source code for the TSx might take several months. However, if a software developer is following ISO 9000 standards, or any certification and auditability standards, of course they can lay their hands on their own source code. In a matter of a few minutes, certainly. 3) Diebolds lawyers said they needed to "find out what the secretary of state's office has" especially, if they had documents from the Diebold FTP site. They said they wanted to minimize document production. It so happens that strong evidence of the customized votercard programs was on that FTP site -- at least nine different versions of it. 4) Diebold's lawyers also outlined a number of areas where they had concluded that their client had probably broken the law. 5) They also made patently absurd written responses about the Windows CE system. _____________________ Calif. Moves to Block Diebold's E-Voting Machines By Jim Wasserman Associated Press Writer Thursday, April 22, 2004; 4:42 PM SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines in the November election because the equipment malfunctioned in last month's primary, an advisory panel said Thursday. The state Voting Systems and Procedures Panel said that the machines made by Diebold Election Systems did not perform well last month and that many voters in San Diego County were turned away. The panel cited a litany of other problems, including fears that the systems are vulnerable to security breaches. The 8-0 recommendation affects machines only in San Diego, Solano, Kern and San Joaquin counties. If Secretary of State Kevin Shelley goes along with the recommendation, those counties will have to revert to paper ballots. Machines made by Diebold and other manufacturers in 10 other counties are unaffected, although the panel is to make a recommendation about those machines next Wednesday. Mark Radke, Diebold's marketing director, said the company disagrees with the recommendation and plans to outline its objections to Shelley, who has until April 30 to make a decision. San Diego County Registrar of Voters Sally McPherson said the county spent almost $30 million for its 10,200 Diebold machines and officials there "believe in touch screens. We were prepared to move forward." San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters Debbie Hench said she was stunned by the news. The county bought 1,626 Diebold touch-screen machines for $5.7 million. "I don't understand how they can say they didn't work well. We didn't have a problem in San Joaquin County" during the March election, she said. The panel's recommendation represents a "step backward" for Kern County, said Registrar of Voters Ann Barnett, who bought 1,350 Diebold touch-screen machines for $5 million. Many county voting officials have said that voters like the touch-screen machines and that the glitches could be fixed easily. Diebold Election Systems is an affiliate of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., a leading ATM maker.
