Why Many Californians Don’t Trust the Vendors of Electronic Voting Systems and Election Officials Who Defend Them

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Michelle Gabriel

Good people, many of them county elections officials, ask why election integrity advocates don't trust vendors and elections officials. There are many reasons and examples.

The statement by the Sequoia Voting Systems official after California Secretary of State Bowen’s hearing on Monday on the reports by computer experts on the vulnerability of electronic voting machines is just one example. In Alameda County we tried for months to get a real attack test on the Sequoia equipment prior to it being purchased. Sequoia and the county elections officials blocked it. There was even law suit to get some real testing done!!! But the Board of Supervisors backed down and listened to the Registrar of Voters. Instead, we once again had people sitting in a room examining documents and thinking about possibilities. Even this study came up with a number of serious security issues.

Yet here is what the Sequoia representative said:

”In summary, a more effective test would have been for the Red Team to have attacked a simulated target jurisdiction. Said jurisdiction would have prepared the equipment in keeping with traditional, current, and legally mandated equipment and procedural safeguards. The results of this test would have pointed out true weaknesses in election process security and provided real data from which governments could have improved their security profile. As it stands today, all that has been proven is that any computerized system, removed from its environment and placed, in this case almost literally, out in the street or into a laboratory for anyone to tamper with, can be successfully attacked. The data is thus unfortunately muddled by the inappropriate test methods, forcing governments to separate the wheat from the chaff of its ramifications for secure elections.”

I wonder why he didn't feel that way when we were trying to do just that in Alameda County? How about in Riverside County when one of the Supervisors made a 1000 to 1 bet that the machines couldn't be hacked and then backed down?