Tonight’s “Featured” article begins: “The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) works for the People. They don't work for special interests. They don't work for the voting system vendors. The EAC has an obligation, spelled out in their past advisories, public statements and, most importantly, in federal law, to carry out oversight of the voting systems we, the People, use in our federal elections. It does not matter that the EAC commissioners are not elected to their positions. They are still servants of the People.” ...

The Arizona Attorney General’s office has now stepped in and “informally” asked the court to allow the disputed ballots from the ’06 Pima County Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) election to be released to them. The state’s Treasurer presently has authority over the ballots but she is not sure whether to destroy them or keep them in storage. The hope is that they be released to the AG and then the AG count the ballots in an investigation to see if, in fact, there was fraud committed in that election. ...

Again a majority of the election news is coming from Minnesota. Both the Franken and Coleman camps are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in court and the tax payers are surely footing the bill for a large part of the cost. Eventually the tax payers are going to get tired of this circus and demand it stop. My guess is that this will now happen sooner rather than later. But, that’s just my thought. I may be wrong....

Here we are again opening our elections system to a vendor and software that has not been tested by any test lab or certified to be used on any voting system. Aspen Colorado is going to hold a mock election using two different modes of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). In order to do this with the voting machines they will be using the city has hired “True Ballot” to write the software to count the ballots on the optical scan machines in use by the city. Yes this is a mock election. But who expects that once a decision on which IRV system will be used the new software will be removed from the machines and never used until it has been certified for use on those machines....

Lots of news today. Ex-New Mexico SoS Rebecca Vigil-Giron has some questions to answer regarding use of funds for elections when she was in office. Colorado is talking more about going to all-paper voting in the future. Utah legislators seem to have a fear of a deluge of aliens coming into the state just to vote in their elections so they are trying to require proof of citizenship. And now the Coleman camp in Minnesota is declaring the ongoing trial as a “legal quagmire”. It doesn’t get any better than this....

Today we have three “Featured” articles. Regular readers will note that we have been warning about the recent call for Internet voting and the fact that the Internet is not secure for elections use. The first two articles clearly bring this concern to the forefront. If the Internet was secure, the New York Times wonders, why would scientists be designing a newer, better Internet?

The second “Featured” article says, “Reported cyber attacks on U.S. government computer networks climbed 40% last year, federal records show, and more infiltrators are trying to plant malicious software they could use to control or steal sensitive data.”

If the Internet is so insecure why in the world would any responsible election official even suggest using the it to transmit completed ballots? One has to wonder what is really behind this new Internet voting push. That brings us to the third of our “Featured” articles...

A slow news day today. We hope you had a good President’s Day weekend....

“Replacing trusted people with computers doesn't make the problem go away; it just moves it around and makes it even more complex. The computer, software, and network designers, implementers, coders, installers, maintainers, etc. are all trusted people. See any analysis of the security of electronic voting machines, or some of the frauds perpetrated against computerized gambling machines, for some graphic examples of the risks inherent in replacing people with computers.” Bruce Schneier in the first of our ‘Featured’ articles. Bruce is one of the foremost experts on network security in the world.

In our second ‘Featured’ article we have an editorial from The Olympian of Olympia Washington that discusses the newest threat to Washington State and national elections; Internet voting. The staff of the Olympian correctly warns the state legislature and the Secretary of State to take a deep breath and actually consider how to ensure the security of whatever scheme they decide to use. They recommend that actual experts, and not vendors, be brought in to review and comment on the security of any Internet voting scheme....

For all of you paraskevidekatriaphobiacs or triskaidekaphobiacs this may not have been a very good day. For all the rest, hope you had a Happy Friday the 13th.

The chances of Norm Coleman taking back his lead over Al Franken in the Minnesota Senatorial race have taken a long step back today with a ruling from the recount trial judge that lowers the number of rejected absentee ballots that can be recounted. ...

VoterID has been accepted by the Mississippi state House. No surprise for a ‘Red-State’. Meanwhile a House legislative committee in Minnesota has voted against a VoterID bill. Once that decision was made, the sponsor of the bill made accusations of voter fraud in the Senate race. He needs to speak with the Coleman lead attorney who has clearly said, "There hasn't been a whiff here, of any fraud."...

"Pre-eminent computer scientists have come to a scientific consensus that the (e-voting) technology is a bad idea," elections attorney and member of the commission Paul Hultin said at a Colorado Election Reform Commission meeting on Tuesday. This statement was made while the commission recommended that the state get rid of electronic voting machines and go to an all-paper system by 2014. Another DRE state may soon be falling to paper ballots....

Scantegrity, a registered non-profit organization, has announced a collaborative effort with Takoma Park Maryland to hold a primary and general election on an open-source voting system with both conventional paper and cryptographic audit trails. I’m sure there will be a lot more on this later....

Premier/Diebold has filed a lawsuit against SysTest Labs. The voting machine vendor claims that SysTest’s loss of EAC accreditation in the middle of testing on the newest Premier voting system has wreaked havoc on Premier’s business. This should be an interesting suit.

“Even though reports from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), and dozens of computer security experts strongly and unanimously warn of insurmountable threats to the privacy and security of ballots cast over the Internet, the Washington State legislature is proposing – and fast-tracking – a bill to allow Internet voting for its military and overseas voters.” “VotersUnite does not believe in using military and overseas voters as guinea pigs in a voting scheme that has already been determined by experts to be an “essentially impossible” task given the current architecture of the Internet.” ...

Not much in the news this weekend. Of course more from Minnesota and the Senate recount/court case. That will be going on for awhile more I’m afraid. ...

“…he didn't see anything wrong with asking to work for Premier Elections Solutions, despite still managing a public office that owed the company $2.2 million.” So claimed Buddy Johnson the former Supervisor of Elections of Hillsborough Co. Florida and often mentioned in this space. Also being reported, “Johnson spent about $2.5 million in federal grants on "voter education," including TV spots, radio ads, mass mailings and print pieces that featured his name and image prominently in the heat of a tight campaign.” As I recall Johnson ended-up spending just a fraction of his campaign funds as compared to the newly elected SOE Phyllis Busansky....