If we all know this, why do we allow the people in Florida to add their vote to a national election. It has become Jebistan, no matter who the current governor is.
Georgia is just as bad. It's a solid-state. Diebold country
State: Florida Voting Machines Can Be Hacked
By Marc Caputo
The Miami Herald
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Tallahassee - Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State's office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical-scan machines.
The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an "adversary" could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate's votes for another or create a "ballot-stuffing attack" that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue.
A Diebold spokesman, Mark Radke, said the company is confident it will upgrade the "minor" software glitch by an Aug. 17 deadline the state has set. If it doesn't, Secretary of State Kurt Browning said his office would eventually ban the use of optiscan Diebold machines in Florida, where 25 counties, including Monroe, use its fill-in-the-blank systems.
All other voting vendors are being examined for the same security issues, including Elections Systems & Software machines, which Miami-Dade and Broward use as well. A new state law requires that, by next year, all counties must use paper-trail style machines.
Browning, who credited Diebold for its openness, said he ordered the FSU study in the wake of a test conducted in late 2005 by Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, who allowed a Finnish computer scientist named Harri Hursti unfettered access to the voting systems to see if they could be compromised. Hursti found that votes could be changed without leaving much of a trace.
At the time, the previous secretary of state, David Mann, said he wasn't concerned and, along with Diebold, dismissed the Hursti study as unrealistic because it didn't take place in a real world-type environment. Radke noted that Hursti declined an offer from California elections officials to repeat his Leon County study.
Browning didn't see it that way.
"There's a new secretary in town," he said. "We kind of categorize this Hursti event as a pretty major issue. It showed you could go in manipulate the system and the key word is to do it undetected."
In addition to requiring the software upgrade, Browning plans to ask elections supervisors to have a uniform security policy to ensure a chain of custody for elections equipment that would show who touched what elections system and when.
Browning's examination was vindication for Sancho, but the nonpartisan election supervisor said it's just a first step. He said the contested Sarasota congressional race that ultimately helped lead to the demise of touch-screen voting machines in Florida still exposed a big wound in Florida's elections systems: Their software is run and owned by private companies.
"The larger issue in my mind is: Since we've all been asleep at the wheel, there maybe should have been more effective tests on the machines than we've run," Sancho said. "So there's a lot we still don't know about."
Voting Officials Face New Rules to Bar Conflicts
By Ian Urbina
The New York Times
Wednesday 01 August 2007
The state officials who run the nation's elections - most with little oversight - are facing new efforts to limit what have been widely criticized as political and financial conflicts of interest.
Across the country, state voting officials routinely participate as candidates in races they are responsible for overseeing or act as leaders in their political parties. In the last presidential election, the secretaries of state in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio, were chairmen of their states' re-election campaigns for President Bush.
While federal ethics rules require lawmakers to wait a year after leaving office before they can take a job lobbying their former colleagues, no such rules exist for election officials, creating a revolving door between election administration and the voting machine industry. In recent years, top election officials in at least five states have moved from government posts directly into jobs as lobbyists for the voting machine industry, which itself grew immensely after Congress allocated billions of dollars to help states update equipment.
Accusations of overt impropriety or bias are rare. But voting experts and a growing number of lawmakers say the perception of conflicts of interest undermines public confidence in the integrity of the voting process.
"I think we are reaching a crunch point where Americans are coming to realize that they cannot afford an election that is run by people who have a stake in the outcome," said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University and executive director of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, a panel convened in 2005 to recommend ways to improve elections.
Past efforts have focused on fixing the machines rather than the people who run them, Dr. Pastor said. But recently, several states have taken steps to insulate election administration from the influence of money and politics.
In the past year, Colorado, Massachusetts, Ohio and Virginia have enacted laws limiting the political activity of election officials. In at least seven states, the secretaries of state have said they will voluntarily refuse to serve on political campaign committees or publicly endorse candidates, according to the National Association of Secretaries of State.
In New Mexico, a newly appointed ethics task force is exploring the issue, and in North Carolina, state officials have created an oversight system for handling conflict of interest complaints, the association said. Federal lawmakers have also proposed measures prohibiting top officials from serving on political campaigns of federal candidates.
And at least six states have laws that prohibit or restrict the ability of election officials to accept employment with election equipment vendors doing business with the state upon leaving office, according to the association.
But the vast majority of states have no such limits. In the past several years, secretaries of state in at least seven states have overseen races for governors' offices or Congress in which they were candidates. Most top election officials oppose any efforts to change the situation.
"Just because you are elected to office doesn't mean you check your constitutional right to free speech at the door," said Todd Rokita, the Indiana secretary of state and the new president of the secretaries of state association. In April, Mr. Rokita became the co-chairman of the state finance committee for Mitt Romney, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.
Mr. Rokita said it was better to elect top voting officials rather than appoint them because they were more accountable when they knew they could be voted out of office if they failed to act impartially. Political parties help keep election administration transparent and honest, he said, because the process is watched more closely as parties look over each other's shoulders.
Many states have ethics rules that require election officials to wait a designated period before they can begin lobbying former colleagues, but few rules prevent industry representatives from becoming election officials.
In San Diego, for example, after being the chief elections officer for over a decade, Deborah Seiler went to work in 1991 as a customer service and sales representative for two voting machine vendors. In 2004, she left the industry to become a top election official again, first in Solano County and now in San Diego, where one of her duties is to negotiate contracts for purchases of voting machines or services used in her county.
"I would bend over backwards to be fair and choose the best system for the county," Ms. Seiler said, adding that decisions were made not by her alone but by a large team of colleagues. "I have no desire to compromise my career to favor someone in the industry."
Some voting experts say limits on the revolving door are needed now more than ever to control how voting machine vendors interact with election officials and how involved these companies get in politics.
"I don't think regulations have caught up with current realities," said Ray Martinez III, a former vice chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission. Last week, at a Senate hearing about voting, Mr. Martinez called for an industrywide stance preventing all voting machine company executives from endorsing, assisting or contributing to candidates, political parties or political organizations.
He said he became concerned about the issue in 2003 after Walden W. O'Dell, then chief executive of Diebold, a voting machine manufacturer, sent a letter to Ohio Republicans promising that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Last month, Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland criticized his state's elections director for agreeing to appear in a brochure for Diebold, which the governor, a Democrat, said violated state ethics rules.
The issue of potential conflicts in election administration first came to wide public attention in the 2000 presidential election, when the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris - who was a chairwoman of George W. Bush's state campaign committee - certified the election despite demands for a recount.
As a result of that disputed election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, spending more than $3 billion in part to help states buy better voting machines. That money, however, also created an industry that brought with it significant political power and potential conflicts of interest.
"So, now, when the U.S. promotes democracy abroad and provides funding to help other countries vote, we have standards that we don't apply at home," said Dr. Pastor, of American University. "We don't require the people running our own elections to maintain strict independence from powerful financial or partisan interests."
But efforts to adopt new rules have met with strong resistance.
Representative Susan A. Davis, Democrat of California, has introduced a bill prohibiting chief state election officials from serving on the political campaigns of federal candidates. When Ms. Davis submitted the bill to the National Association of Secretaries of State for its support, she said she was initially told that they would present it for discussion at the annual convention. Later, however, she was told that it would not be because opposition was too strong.
"No one likes anyone to meddle in their jobs," she said. "But you can't be both a player and a referee at the same time."
A similar bill in the Senate is sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Mrs. Feinstein's bill has 11 co-sponsors, all Democrats, and is expected to face significant Republican opposition, as is the House bill.
Neither bill would prohibit election officials from overseeing elections in which they are candidates. Aides to both Ms. Davis and Mrs. Feinstein said such provisions might raise First Amendment or states' rights challenges.
State ethics rules that limit the partisan behavior of election officials are rarely enforced and frequently come with loopholes, advocates of voting change say.
In May, after one of his staff members was found to be running a business that sought to sell voter databases to Republican candidates, Mike Coffman, the Colorado secretary of state, adopted rules that have been hailed by election experts as some of the strictest in the country. The rules bar certain employees from publicly endorsing or working for a political candidate, a political party or a statewide ballot initiative.
The day after announcing the rules, however, Mr. Coffman was the featured speaker at a Mesa County Republican Party event in Grand Junction.
"The secretary still continues to be an active Republican in the state," said Jonathan Tee, a spokesman for Mr. Coffman, explaining that the new rules allowed him to help his party so long as he did not raise money or endorse candidates.
Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat who is the secretary of state in Maine, where the top election officials are chosen by the State Legislature, said he believed that election officials were watched more closely when they wore their philosophies on their sleeves.
"But it's a pinpoint balancing act you have to play," Mr. Dunlap said. "In order to get elected by the Legislature, you want your candidates to get elected."
Call Out The independents.
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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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