Comprehensive Report on Voting Equipment Selection

Press Release
July 7, 2005
http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=84

Announcing a Comprehensive Report on Voting Equipment Selection

In June of 2005 Utah's Lt. Governor, Gary Herbert, selected Diebold DRE (digital recording electronic) voting equipment for use in the state of Utah. He did not consult with any independent computer voting system or security experts in making this decision.

Diebold's DRE voting system has been widely studied by computer scientists and found to be the “most reported to have security flaws” of any voting system in recent years. It was the system used in a statistically implausible election in November of 2002, which ousted Georgia's Governor Roy Barnes, and U.S. Senator Max Cleland, both of whom were comfortably ahead in the polls prior to the election.

This comprehensive report was written by Kathy Dopp, who has a master's degree in mathematics with graduate-level computer studies and is President of USCountVotes - a nonprofit with plans to build a National Election Data Archive to detect irregular patterns of election results indicating vote miscounts.

The report presents many detailed explanations of the issues and the problems involved in using the Diebold voting machines.

The primary problems with electronic ballot voting machines include:

• They are not secure.

• They do not provide voters with a way to ensure that their votes are being tabulated correctly.

• They do not provide a mechanism for independent recounts when errors arise.

Ms. Dopp concludes that unless the state invests more funds on the extra equipment required to perform recounts of the voter verifiable paper record, the implementation of Diebold's DRE voting systems will be a disaster for the integrity of our elections.

Although the state of Utah has already decided to go with the Diebold machines, its counties are still free to purchase more reliable, secure, less costly systems should they choose to do so.

The full report is available at

http://electionarchive.net/doc_other/dopp/AdviceReDiebolds.pdf

And is mirrored by the New Zealand Scoop

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0507/S00100.htm

US Count Votes has also released two short papers to help all U.S. state and county election officials:

How Can Independent Paper Audits Detect and Correct Vote Miscounts?

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/Paper_Audits.pdf

What Election Data can Election Offices collect and publicly release in order to Monitor Elections for accuracy?

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/ElectionArchive_advice.pdf

Press Contact: Kathy Dopp, President of US Count Votes

ElectionArchive.org kathy@uscountvotes.org 435-608-1382

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Kathy Dopp

http://electionarchive.org

Mission: The National Election Data Archive Project plans to create a nation-wide database of detailed election results, voter registration information, and demographic data and make it publicly available. Our goal is to use the data to detect irregular vote counts worthy of investigation in time for candidates of any party to challenge the results.

Please donate to help implement NEDA:

http://electionarchive.org/fairelection/donate.html

USCV brochures are available:

http://uscountvotes.net/docs_pdf/info/US/USCVbrochure.pdf