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How All the votes were lost in D.C.

By Luther Weeks on February 25, 2012

Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server. We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot. Election officials did not detect our intrusion for nearly two business days—and might have remained unaware for far longer had we not deliberately left a prominent clue.

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Internet Voting, more problems beyond the News Hour report

By Luther Weeks on February 22, 2012

Last week there was a PBS News Hour report on Internet Voting. It was fair and balanced as far as it went, but maybe a bit too fair to non-scientists and vendors touting Internet Voting. At Brad Blog, Earnest A Canning has an excellent piece pointing out some additional information not covered in the short News Hour segment.

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Testimony on powers of the Secretary of the State

By Luther Weeks on February 18, 2012

One bill H.B. 5026 covered the emergency powers of the Secretary of the State…there were some additional important distinctions which should be included to expand and limit the bill, along with a related power the Committee should consider for unnatural disasters

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“Military Grade Security” for elections is a non sequitur

By Luther Weeks on February 15, 2012

Who should we believe? Vendors selling internet voting or computer scientists and government intelligence experts? We point out that the greatest danger to internet voting is insider manipulation, even easier for a single rogue election official or network insider. No need to steal paper ballots and fill them out. No risk of being caught in an audit or recount of voter verified paper ballots. UPDATE: Videos

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The Wild West: Presidential Primary “Election” Edition

By Luther Weeks on February 10, 2012

Selecting candidates for President is less safe and less democratic than most of us realize.

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Book Review: Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

By Luther Weeks on February 5, 2012

When it comes to election integrity, we note the many articles on elections and election reform are often emotional, subjective, one-sided, or inappropriately balanced. The same lack of rigor is often present in arguments raised by and to election officials and legislators considering election reform.  We ignore facts, reason, and open debate at our peril.

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Improved election reporting on the way

By Luther Weeks on January 31, 2012

But big changes are coming, including a precinct-by-precinct election reporting system that the state hopes to test in April and use publicly in August to gather unofficial results during the expected primaries for U.S. Senate and state legislative races.

This sounds like the kind of change we called for during the 2010 election for Secretary of the State

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Doug Chapin: New Pew Report Details Progress on Military, Overseas Voting

By Luther Weeks on January 30, 2012

It really is remarkable how far this issue has come in about three years; Pew’s election team and its huge coalition of partners including OVF, the Pentagon’s Federal Voting Assistance Program and the Uniform Law Commission (whose Uniform Military and Overseas Voting Act is one ongoing vehicle for state and local reform) should be deeply gratified at everything they have accomplished.

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Coalition Nov 2011 Audit Observation Report – Data Available for Public Review

By Luther Weeks on January 26, 2012

Coalition finds continuing problems with audit integrity
Provides calculations and official data on the web for public review and verification

For the first time, in the interest of public information and transparency, we are making all official municipal audit reports and the data we complied available for everyone to review on the web. Citizens can see the reports from their own town, other towns, and perform their own audit of the Coalition’s data entry and calculations based on those official reports. The November post-election audits still do not inspire confidence because of the continued:

  • Lack of integrity in the random district selection and race selection processes.
  • Lack of consistency, reliability, and transparency in the conduct of the audit.
  • Discrepancies between machine counts and hand-counts reported to the Secretary of the State by municipalities and the lack of standards for determining need for further investigation of discrepancies.
  • Weaknesses in the ballot chain-of-custody.

 <Full Report, Press Release, Excerpts>        <Review detail data and municipal reports>

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Patriocracy: A lesson in information and misinformation

By Luther Weeks on January 21, 2012

Duncan Buell points out that non-science nonsense slips into the movie Patriocracy. It is an ever present danger. Our minds are easily tricked.

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