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Docs Point to E-Voting Bug in Contested Race

April 17, 2007, Wired.com, by Kim Zetter

Symptoms consistent with a known software flaw in a popular electronic voting machine surfaced widely in a controversial election in Sarasota County, Florida, last November, despite county officials' claims that a bug played no role in the election results, according to documents obtained by Wired News.

Activists say the flaw might have contributed to the high number of lost or uncast votes in a now-contested congressional race.

Incident reports from the election reveal Sarasota County poll workers from at least 19 precincts contacted technicians and election officials to report touch-screen sensitivity problems with the iVotronic voting machine. In those incidents, voters were forced to press the screen harder and repeatedly to register a vote. The complaints mirror the symptoms of a bug that the machine's maker, Election Systems & Software, revealed prior to the election in a warning unheeded by the county.

Additionally, the documents -- obtained through public records requests by Wired News and the Florida Fair Elections Coalition -- show the problems also appeared on a smaller scale during the primary election in Sarasota County two months earlier. This contradicts statements by Sarasota supervisor of elections Kathy Dent, who told Wired News last month that no such problems happened during the primary, and that she only learned voters were having problems with the touch screens after the November election was over and votes were counted.

Seven voting machines had touch problems in the September primary, five of which later clocked in an unusually high number of "under votes" in the now-contested race for the U.S. House of Representative's 13th Congressional District.

In that contest, Republican Vern Buchanan edged out Democrat Christine Jennings by fewer than 400 votes. More than 18,000 ballots recorded no vote in the race. Jennings is now contesting the results in court. The House Administration Committee has formed a special task force to investigate the congressional race, which is expected to convene Tuesday for the first time.

Susan Pynchon, with the Florida Fair Elections Coalition, says the software flaw could be partially responsible for a high under-vote rate in the race, despite county officials' statements to the contrary. "It's clear that something happened with those machines," Pynchon says.

Dent did not respond to a request for comment.

The public learned about the known bug only recently when a letter written by machine maker ES&S was published online.

ES&S sent Sarasota County election officials the letter in August, describing the issues caused by a poor "smoothing filter" design. ES&S also sent a sign (.pdf) for poll workers to post in polling places instructing voters to hold their fingers firmly on the screens until their selections were highlighted. The sign warned: "This may take several seconds."

Sarasota's Dent opted to post a different sign (.pdf) that listed steps for casting a ballot and encouraged voters to check the review screen at the end of the ballot for accuracy -- but didn't mention that voters might need to press the touch screen for seconds.

According to the Election Day records, voters repeatedly complained that machines were not responding to touch. Out of 176 reports Wired News examined discussing machine problems -- including printer and battery issues, blank and frozen screens and the wrong date and time on machines -- 50 reports discussed problems with machines not registering votes; 24 of these described screens requiring extra pressure or repeated touching.
In some of the voter complaints, technicians checked the machines and found nothing wrong, or subsequent voters were able to use the same machine without difficulty. This is not inconsistent with the ES&S letter, which warns the touch issue "may vary from terminal to terminal and also may not occur every single time a terminal is used."

Despite reports flowing into its central call center on Election Day, county officials did not consider the issue serious or connect it to the software problem ES&S had warned of three months earlier. In some cases, documents show the machines were taken out of service after voters complained. But in others, voters continued using them.

A group of computer scientists who examined the source code for Florida said no bug in the software -- including the smoothing filter flaw -- would have produced the under votes. But on Friday two other computer scientists challenged the source-code review and other tests conducted on the machines, and said more extensive tests are needed.

Doug Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist who used to test voting machines for his state, agrees with the latter assessment and says the filter could have caused some under votes in the 13th District race but not all of them.

He says the incident reports indicate additional problems with the machines, beyond the smoothing filter, were likely in play.

Twenty-three of the 50 reports on vote problems cite issues with a specific decision on the ballot, which contained 40 races and initiatives. Two reports mention problems with the Senate race, and one with a ballot measure. Of the 23 complaints, 20 are about the congressional race. In each of them, voters reported selecting Jennings, then finding no vote registered in that race on the review screen.

Two reports from precinct 19 say "many hundreds" of voters complained the race was fixed or "very suspicious" and that "every other voter" was complaining about it. These match news reports about problems published during early voting and after the election.

Jones says these reports don't match the smoothing-filter symptoms, because the filter would affect every race on a ballot, not just one. Some voters were also adamant that the 13th District race wasn't displayed on the ballot the first time they looked, but showed up after they reached the review screen and went back to the page where the race was supposed to be. This could be explained by the poor ballot design in that race, which made the congressional choices easy to overlook.

Both Dent and Buchanan have dismissed all the complaints as related to ballot design.
But Jones says if the reports are true, they suggest a complicated mix of problems. "All of the reports make me suspect that there could be more than one thing going on with the machines," Jones says. "It's probably something messy. It's definitely more than just human factors and smoothing-filter issues causing the problems. "

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/04/evotinganalysis?currentPage=all



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