3 Responses

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   David Jefferson said on 2/8/2008 @ 11:18pm PT: [Permalink]

   John, the first sentence of your intro this evening is absolutely false and insulting to the many computer scientists who have beat their heads against the wall trying to identify the cause(s) of the Sarasota CD13 undervote.

   The authors of the various scientific reports did not “[do] their best to absolve the Sarasota Co. iVotronic DREs from fault in the Congressional District 13 race of 2006”. Quite the opposite in fact: Although you may not believe it, they did their very best to find any and all faults in the machines’ behavior and software that might have accounted for the undervote problem. They were highly motivated to do so. Imagine what heroes they would have been had they been able to do that! Imagine what a classic cybersecurity case this would have been for decades to come. I can assure you, as one who was in touch with the principals throughout the original investigations and testing, that everyone wanted to find a software smoking gun that would resolved the problem, seat the correct winner of the race, and incidentally make the point about the dangers of dependence on complex software producing unauditable results.

   The fact is that, try as they might, no one was able to find any real evidence that either the hardware or the software was at fault. They worked themselves beyond exhaustion to try to find the problem, but concluded it probably was not to be found in the software. Therefore, that is exactly what they wrote, precisely, and without embellishment.

   What annoys me is the number of people–many of them voting integrity activists–who seem to believe they know what happened, even if the investigators don’t. Some hold strong opinions even though they have had no access to the systems in question, do not have deep understanding of the technology, and are not in a position to judge from any first hand knowledge. In my opinion most of these opinions (but not all) are essentially speculative wishful thinking.

   It is easy to find limitations with the testing and the investigations. The investigators themselves listed the limitations of their work in the reports. But even though the original investigators could not eliminate every technical hypothesis, they did eliminate almost all of the really promising ones, so that the remaing technical scenarios have to be considered more farfetched and unlikely. The biggest gap in the original analysis, in my opinion, was the failure to demonstrate that the code running in the iVotronics machines was actually compiled from the source code that was later reviewed. The recent GAO report claims to have closed that gap, and I see no reason to doubt it.

   What would have made a huge difference and satisfied almost everyone I think is if the Jennings team had had the opportunity to do their own technical investigations. I think it is quite likely that they also would not have found a solid explanation for the undervotes (although they might have!), but at least they would have been satisfied that they had been given the chance to try. It was a miscarriage of justice that they were not permitted to investigate as they saw fit, and I hope we learn this lesson in regard to futue controversies.

   It is hard is to accept the fact that we will probably never know for sure what the problem was. I believe that the undervotes were probably not caused by a hardware nor software problem. I wish to hell they had been because a clean explanation is far better than this permanent uncertainty, but at this point I don’t think so. I am willing to say I don’t know, and I think others should consider whether they should simply say the same, without some sote voce insinuation such as you have made that the investigators somehow did a poor, or worse, a biased job.

   The lesson to take away from this, as others have said, is that the Sarasota CD13 experience is one of the most powerful examples we have in recent years of the essential need for transparent, auditable voting systems. One good thing came from this debacle: Florida is finally getting rid of paperless DREs. Would that Georgia and lots of other jurisdictions could learn the same lesson.

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   JEANNIE DEAN in FL-13 said on 2/9/2008 @ 9:34am PT: [Permalink]

   But David, they didn’t test the PEB’s…did they?
   Ever yours,
   Jeannie D.
   Sarasota, FL.

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   Ancient said on 2/9/2008 @ 7:46pm PT: [Permalink]

   Good one Jeanie and thanks for your work up in NH!