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by Pete Edwards

Electronic voting machines once again came under fire in an article published this

week by the Associated Press. The subject of the article was Ion Sancho, election supervisor for Leon County, Florida.

Sancho says, he needs to guarantee an honest election and to do that requires voting machines that are secure and reliable. He said, the machines authorized by the state are easily compromised and that "Americans have taken elections for granted for far too long."

Sancho angered many state election officials when he asked a group of computer specialists to test his machines manufactured by Diebold, by hacking in to the voting system. They succeeded on all four occasions they tried, changing

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results with what one of the the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. The tests that Sancho ordered so angered and embarrassed electronic voting machine manufacturers that all three authorized for use in Florida  refused to do business with his county.

On Feb. 14, 2005, in Tallahassee, computer expert Herbert Thompson met with Sancho and tried to crack the Diebold system remotely. The first attempt failed. On a second attempt, by directly accessing a computer where the votes are counted in a final tally, he manipulated returns. They used a local high school election for the

experiment.

A September 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, pointed to significant security and reliability problems often the subject of complaints from computer scientists and security experts. A major concern of these experts is that computerized ballots of many electronic voting machines such as the MicroVote machines used in Bradley County, fail to provide a voter verified paper receipt of votes cast, using only a reprint of data from a memory card if election results are contested. Recent studies have shown that using simple technology, these cards can be reprogrammed to rig an election and the trail covered without possibility of detection. When a voter makes a selection there is no verification that it is recorded correctly by the machine, and nothing to recount to check that it was.

Sancho is rare among Florida's 67 election supervisors in challenging the industry's claim that electronic voting machines are foolproof and secure. Concerns of election fraud are so high in Tennessee that some counties are refusing to use the electronic voting machines because of the lack of a paper trail. At a recent meeting of a group of western Tennessee county election officials, State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson, who moderated the gathering, said that the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a federal law passed in the aftermath of the 2000 Florida election scandal, mandated counties use authorized electronic voting machines. Later officials said Thompson misled them because in fact HAVA says the older

systems were permitted provided voters are educated in their use.

There is a feeling among many state election officials including Thompson, that electronic voting machines are foolproof and secure, so therefore need no paper trail back-ups to verify their accuracy, but this is contrary to numerous studies including the one by the Government Accountability Office which question reliability and security issues.

In an interview with The People News in 2002, when asked to review records of election fraud complaints made to his office, Brook Thompson said that no complaints had been received and if they had, a record would not have been kept. He also said that he was unconcerned about documented election irregularities in Bradley County and any complaints should be handled by the local election commission. He also refused to supply dates and times of meetings scheduled by the state election commission and was less than cooperative to help ensure the public and the media had confidence in the election process.

Brook Thompson has worked in the Secretary of State's office since 1988 and was appointed to the Election Coordinator's job in 1995.

In Bradley County, The People News has witnessed glaring security breaches including: electronic voting machines inadequately secured and stored, unsecured memory cards, and results from early voting and election day ballots tabulated with unsecured computers used for everyday office work. When interviewed, Bradley County Election Commission officials said they were unconcerned about security and made assurances that the process was honest, but later said that Brook Thompson had authorized them to prevent The People News from witnessing parts of the election process to verify compliance with state requirements.

The debate continues on whether electronic voting machines can be relied on to count every vote accurately and provide the security necessary for an honest election.
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