The Voting News Daily: IL undervote fix creates new bug, Judge orders new review of NJ voting machines, Internet transmission of ballots insecure

McHenry Co. IL. Clerk Kathy Schultz discovered that a state mandated software “undervote warning fix” can sometimes cause the county’s voting machines to forget all the preceding votes they’d recorded…

New Jersey judge orders re-evaluation of voting machines by experts, says disconnect machines and tabulators from internet as well, but stops short of decommissioning them….Pam Smith, President of Verified Voting has an overview of this ruling and says that NJ’s voting systems “cannot be audited, there’s no way to check for accuracy.”…

Safe or not, e-mail voting headed to Washington State Senate. About Washington State’s House Bill 2483 and Senate Bill 6238, Holly Jacobson of Voter Action says: “Washington state should not implement a system that the Pentagon rejected as fundamentally insecure”. Voter Action is monitoring Ivoting legislation in the US…

All this and much more in today’s voting news below….

CA: Los Angeles Times Editorializes Against Petition Privacy
http://www.ballot-access.org/2010/02/01/los-angeles-times-editorializes-against-petition-privacy/

CT: Connecticut Citizen Election Audit Coalition – Nov 09 Election Observation Report – Improvement, Yet Still Unsatisfactory
Coalition Finds Unsatisfactory Improvement In Election Audits Across The State
http://www.ctvoterscount.org/?p=2855
Citizen observation and analysis show the need for more attention to detail by officials, improvement in counting methods, and ballot chain-of-custody

IL: County Clerk To Defy Election Board * (software “fix” creates problems)
http://www.firstelectricnewspaper.com/2010/01/county-clerk-defies-election-board.html#links
McHenry Co…The law Schultz is going to break is one that says she has to rejigger the County’s voting machines to warn people they’ve failed to vote for someone, that is anyone at all, in a race, a common voter practice. Schultz is afraid if she “fixes” the machines, under certain circumstances they could forget all the preceding votes they’d recorded. She said Thursday she’s already made them do it in tests.

IL: Grass-roots reporting of election problems in Illinois
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Grass-roots-reporting-of-e-by-Roy-Lipscomb-100201-985.html

IL: New ballot rules tested in Tuesday’s primary election (Cook County)
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/clout_st/2010/02/new-ballot-rules-tested-in-tuesdays-primary-election.html

IL: Election fraud teams to be out in force
http://www.herald-review.com/news/local/0e44ea15-5ff1-548b-b8b8-200a3a6ddee3.html

IL: Some Illinois voters could get a surprise in Tuesday’s primary: a rejected ballot.
www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/wire/chi-ap-il-ballotalerts,0,5085784.story

IL: Homer Township election judge maced, arrested, fired
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2010/02/homer-township-election-judge-sprayed-with-mace-fired.html

MD: Strong Brief Filed in 4th Circuit in Case Over Invalidation of Signatures due to Omission of Middle Initials, Etc.
http://www.ballot-access.org/2010/02/01/strong-brief-filed-in-4th-circuit-in-case-over-invalidation-of-signatures-due-to-omission-of-middle-initials-etc/

NJ: Ruling Issued in Rutgers–Newark Law School’s Constitutional Litigation Clinic Challenge to NJ’s Electronic Voting Machines
Judge Orders Re-evaluation of 11,000 Machines by Panel of Computer Experts Within 120Days
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6747
Unlike the panel that currently evaluates voting machines, the new panel must have requisite knowledge of computers and computer security.

Judge Feinberg also ordered that all voting machines and vote tally transmitting systems be disconnected from the Internet immediately.

NJ: Judge Orders Expert Review of Voting Machines in New Jersey
http://blog.verifiedvoting.org/2010/02/02/396
February 2, 2010 By Pamela Smith, Verified Voting
“…until New Jersey deploys voter-verified paper ballots systems statewide, and initiates the routine conduct of robust post-election manual audits, its election officials cannot prove that the votes are being counted properly.”

NJ: Congressman Rush Holt’s statement about the ruling:
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/nj12_holt/febvoting.html

NJ: Judge’s ruling could cause New Jersey to scrap 11,000 voting machines
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/state/judges-ruling-could-cause-new-jersey-to-scrap-11000-voting-machines

Verified Voting Blog: Judge Orders Expert Review of Voting Machines in New Jersey

A judge in New Jersey has ordered a new review of New Jersey’s voting systems, this time by qualified technical experts, in a partial victory for advocates challenging the systems’ constitutionality. State law requires that voting systems be “accurate and reliable.” From our vantage point, these systems don't meet that standard; because they cannot be audited, there's no way to check for accuracy. A recent report from researchers at UCSD illustrated a stunning new kind of vulnerability in the type of voting system in widespread use in New Jersey (AVC Advantage), where code could be inserted, modify results and vanish without detection. An author on that study, and expert witness in the New Jersey case, Prof. Edward Felten, said preventing such attacks “requires an extraordinary level of security engineering, or the use of safeguards such as voter-verified paper ballots.”

While other requirements from the Judge address some security measures, including criminal background checks on personnel working with the voting machines and all third party vendors who examine or transport them, and protocols for inspecting machines to ensure they have not been tampered with, such checks have no impact on any tampering that may have occurred in the past (such as during the extended periods of time in which they were left unattended at polling places before and after past elections), and provide no failsafe that would ensure reliability. Voting systems can no longer be connected to the Internet, which we trust means New Jersey will now provide a more secure way to allow for the return of voted ballots from overseas voters.