Many states run elections as if they are beta tests. An prime example are the Vote Centers in Galveston County Texas. Officials ran into surprises when all vote centers tried to start up at beginning of day, causing the state’s voter registration database to crash. And since these vote centers are dependant on the online…
Sarasota Election Supervisor Kathy Dent was aware that the Diebold OSX optical scanners did not consistently read blue ink. She knew this before the Venice Florida election that was held on Nov 3. But what does the sample ballot for Venice Voters say? It says“Use only the marker provided or a blue or black pen.”…
Verified Voting Foundation Board of Advisors member Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Aaron Burstein submitted the following response to the EAC’s letter from October 21 2009.
Thank you for your reply of October 21, 2009, to our letter of October 13, 2009. We appreciate your pointing out that relevant documents are available on the EAC’s website. Of course, it was the EAC’s commendable policy of making these documents publicly available that allowed us to initiate this dialogue. As you know, neither test plans nor test reports were available under the NASED qualification testing program; this change is important for establishing a more trustworthy voting system testing and certification program under the EAC. After carefully reviewing your letter, however, we continue to question whether iBeta’s test plan for the Premier system fully incorporates some of the lessons of the California Top-to-Bottom Review (TTBR) into EAC testing and certification. Even for the examples the EAC points to in its reply, the test plan does not state in sufficient detail what iBeta proposed to do to test the system. For example, an element of the security test—“port access is controlled” (test plan p. 73)—states a desired result or conclusion but does not describe how iBeta would arrive at that conclusion nor under what conditions would this element fail.