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Florida Elections
Prophet Without Honor?
Leon County's test of its electronic voting machines angered the manufacturer and state officials - then California did a similar test.
Sancho got a vindication of sorts on Valentine's Day, when California's Voting Systems Technology Assessment Advisory Board confirmed the vulnerabilities that had been uncovered in Leon County. The California analysis stated that the 16 bugs in the system were "all easily fixable" but also warned that the only way to detect such attacks is by "examining the paper ballots."
Two weeks later, Dawn Roberts, director of Florida's Division of Elections, issued a four-page advisory containing enhanced security safeguards for all voting systems in Florida. Her memo mentioned the California assessment but made no reference to the Leon County test.
Roberts says that Sancho conducted his test under a cloud of secrecy, and the reason her technical advisory memo refers to the California report, and not Leon County's test, she says, is because unlike Sancho's test it was "transparent" and contained published results with factual information.
The refusal by Diebold to sell Leon County voting equipment put the county in a "real Catch-22," recalls Leon County Commissioner Jane Sauls. Eventually, Cobb intervened, and Diebold sold Leon County the machines it needed in April. But Attorney General Charlie Crist is investigating why the three machine manufacturers refused in the first place and whether the companies might have violated antitrust laws.
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Miami lawyer Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a partner with the Duane Morris law firm and immediate past chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, says Sancho did a favor for Floridians. "Ion Sancho proved that there is an incredible opening for fraud because of technical deficiencies" in the voting equipment.
In June, a report on voting system security issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law identified 120 potential threats to voting technologies used today. Countermeasures recommended by Brennan include "automatic random audits comparing voter-verified paper records to the electronic record."
Voting equipment expert Roy Saltman has his doubts about the ultimate impact of Sancho's test. "The only thing it taught anybody was keep untrustworthy people away from your system and away from your offices and re-count ballots, but a lot of administrators don't want to bother with ballots any more. They want to get away from paper."
That's not good enough, according to election reform activists who want to see touch screens supplemented with a voter-verifiable paper trail and want all election results, regardless of the system used, to be audited regularly.
