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VOTERESCUE's RESPONSE to the Travis County Commissioners Court on their decision to spend another $102,000 on electronic voting machines.
VOTERESCUE
in partnership with
Texans for REAL Elections
September 2, 2008
Travis County Commissioners and Judge Biscoe,
Thank you for allowing time on the agenda last Tuesday (August 26th) to hear citizen comments about the purchase of yet more electronic voting systems. Clearly, many Travis county voters share our concerns.
When it comes to the security analysis and testing of our voting systems, it is most unfortunate and irresponsible to your Travis County constituents that Commissioners Eckhardt, Davis, and Gomez, and Judge Biscoe, have chosen to believe the word of a non-technical election official, Dana DeBeauvoir, over an internationally renowned Ph.D in computer science, Dr. Dan Wallach of Rice University, who has thoroughly examined the Hart Intercivic eSlate for California's "Top to Bottom Review" of 2007 commissioned by the California Secretary of State. In addition, Dr. Wallach has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico and the European Union and has served as an expert witness in a number of voting technology lawsuits.
We are shocked and extremely disappointed in your judgment in making your funding decision in this manner. Even though we understand you are not prepared to totally “pull the plug” on funding these voting systems yet, surely the evidence we have provided should be just cause to warrant a decision to deny funding more machines for early voting. In our opinion, this would have been the proper decision to uphold your fiduciary responsibility to the Travis County taxpayers.
In the days after the June 25, 2008 Interim Hearing on electronic voting technology at the Texas Capitol, we urged Dana on a conference call to allow a meeting to occur between “her” computer experts and “our” computer experts, after she said that "her experts" were assuring her that the machines are secure and that her testing protocols could detect attempts at hacking.
Our experts, in accordance with the GAO, the Brennan Justice Center, NIST (which is actually one of the groups Dana states she relies on), studies commissioned by the Ohio, Colorado, and California Secretaries of State, and countless other scholarly experts including Dr. Dan Wallach, have been saying for years that "important [security] flaws will always escape any amount of testing" and that "currently deployed voting systems are susceptible to undetectable malicious attacks."
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As we requested on that call, we are still very interested in setting up a meeting with
Dana, her staff, her experts and our experts to clarify the issue of her reliance on her three testing procedures (hash code, logic and accuracy, and parallel testing). We will be asking Dana to give us the names of the specific experts she relies upon.
At the risk of repeating ourselves on this critical topic, the following is a quote from an e-mail of Dr. Dan Wallach of Rice University, dated August 25, 2008, that comments directly on the three tests that Dana uses and swears by:
“When Dana says she does "hash code testing", what she really means is that, when a new CD arrives in the mail from Hart InterCivic, she verifies that the contents of it match something that was submitted to NIST's database. Her hash code testing defends against people trying to pretend to be Hart InterCivic by mailing her bogus CDs. It does not protect against machines that have been tampered in the field or by insiders in her office. If an eSlate had been tampered with, in the fashion that we discovered as part of the California Top to Bottom Report, Dana's hash code testing would not detect it. If somebody tampered with her tabulation equipment after the official software was installed, her hash code testing would not detect it.
The "logic and accuracy" testing procedure is entirely meaningless in the face of tampered voting machines. It's trivial for a machine to distinguish between these sorts of tests and an actual election, and thus the machine can behave correctly during the L&A tests.
Dana's parallel testing is somewhat more interesting. As I understand it, she keeps one or more spare precincts' worth of machines around. She then selects one or more whole precincts of equipment, from the entire pool, and pulls them away for election-day parallel testing. (This is a good thing; so far as I know, nobody else in Texas does this.) This parallel testing procedure can detect some forms of machine tampering, but not all. In particular, it *will* detect machines that had been tampered in advance to generate incorrect results. It will *not* detect machines, tampered in advance, that are waiting for a "secret knock" that switches them from good mode to cheating mode. Likewise, her parallel testing procedure does nothing for machines, already in the field, which might be tampered with while the election is ongoing.’
…continuing with Dan Wallach’s statement: “What I don't know about Dana's procedures is how they would deal with corruption of her central tabulation systems, if that were to occur, either as a consequence of an insider attack or as a consequence of a tampered eSlate attacking her other equipment. Hart systems are notably weak in this regard.”
We’d like to add that, in Travis County and other counties in Texas, all of the Hart Intercivic eSlate Judges Control Booths, or JBCs as they are called, are sent home with the Precinct Judge for several days just prior to the election. These “sleepovers”, as they are called, allow unfettered access to this crucial part of the voting equipment. The JBCs, which are about the size of an older model VCR, are the computers that actually run and record the electronic election in each polling place.
You asked us to provide any evidence that hacks have occurred in e-Slates in Travis County. We believe that the preponderance of evidence from true experts in computer programming and security clearly indicates how simple it is to undetectably hack these machines and manipulate vote totals. So we ask you, our elected officials: CAN YOU, or DANA, PROVE TO US THAT HACKING HAS NOT OCCURRED? CAN YOU PROVE THAT EVEN ONE VOTE IN TRAVIS COUNTY IS BEING COUNTED AS CAST?
We already know that the answer to both of those questions is “NO”. And that should be enough reason to take these machines immediately out of use, and to demand a refund from Hart InterCivic for our hard-earned taxpayer dollars – whether through HAVA, or through County taxes: It is all taxpayer dollars.
We are recapping in an attachment to this document exactly what evidence we provided you last week in hopes that you will actually take the time to review it all.
Given the undeniable vulnerability of Hart Intercivic eSlate voting systems to undetectable fraud, here is the only reasonable solution and our recommendations:
(a) Pull the machines out of use immediately and return to hand-counted paper ballots with enhanced security procedures starting November 2008 as allowed by current Texas Election Code.
(b) Demand (or sue to get) your money back from Hart Intercivic and buy one Ballot Marking Device (such as the AutoMARK) for each polling place in Travis County to satisfy the HAVA requirement for disabled voters and therefore, provide a paper
ballot for them, too, which can be hand counted.
(c) Or, you could keep one Hart Intercivic eSlate for each polling place for the disabled community to use unless they object because they want to know, not trust, that their votes are counted correctly like the rest of us do.
Counting paper ballots is not rocket science. Every layer of complex technology adds additional risks to our goal of accurately counted elections. We are confident that the day will come when you, the Travis County Commissioners Court, will do as the residents of Travis County demand and reject electronic voting systems and return to a simple, fully transparent paper ballot system.
There are many statements that Dana made last week that need a clear and factual rebuttal. We will be responding to them with another letter in the near future, and we will continue to bring you more evidence to build our case that we simply cannot trust these voting machines. Perhaps when the avalanche of evidence is high enough, you will stop funding them, as other officials are doing across the country.
Sincerely,
Karen Renick
Vickie Karp
Jenny Clark
Representing VoteRescue and Texans for REAL Elections