James Blackwell

I found out yesterday afternoon that Luzerne county is going to use iVotronic systems to perform electronic balloting. These systems, not much better than Diebold systems, can also be used to steal elections. This prospect doesn't exactly thrill me. I wrote to the county director for voting systems and received the following from him. The person that is supposed to be in charge of this for the county, rather than inform the general public, choose to bury his head in the sand and collect his paycheck for a good day's work of subverting the public trust (I have reformatted the email so that its more readable):

Subject: Re: Polling Place
From: Leonard Piazza
To: jblack@merconline.com

The no alternate is not my plan sir it's the law!

Lp

--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Device

-----Original Message-----
From: James Blackwell
To: Leonard Piazza
CC: jryan@leader.net ; diseman@leader.net
+; citydesk@citizensvoice.com
Sent: Mon Oct 09 11:10:56 2006
Subject: Re: Polling Place

Mr. Piazza,

I have forwarded this email to the news departments (and in the case of the Times Leader, the IT department) of both the Citizen's voice and Times Leader. I do this with the hope that you will reconsider your no alternative plan for those that wish to avoid being disenfranchised from a voting machine that has repeatedly botched elections over a series of four years.

I sincerely hope that the county puts Big Warning Signs up that this technology is not working reliably yet. As for me, I need a different way to vote. I don't mind putting in a provisional ballot, an absotee ballot,
voting in an alternative voter. Regardless, voting with the iVotronic, as with other electronic voting systems, is tantamount to disenfranchisement in this day and age. I thusly will not vote with this machine and demand an alternative. Illustrate below as to why, including references from a variety of news and federal sources for problems specific to the iVotronic systems that have disenfranched voters -- sometimes grossly.

Bear in mind that I'm not a luddite. I'm a programmer and unix system administrator that writes in a variety of programming languages (C++, Python and C being my favorites) and has experience administrating heterogenous networks with operating systems including Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD. I pay my bills online, make my phone calls with VOIP and rely upon technology for all of my needs.

I found this http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~davide/ivo-report.pdf, which says:

Electronic voting machines are computers running programs which can
contain accidental or potentially malicious errors. Because the ES&S
iVotronic voting machines used in Allegheny County provide no way for
voters to personally verify that their votes have been correctly and
accurately recorded, voters must trust the iVotronix program code to
be correct.

I am all too aware as a software designer and system administrator that the question is not whether the system is flawed, but how many flaws there are. I'm very disturbed by the concept that the state is trusting something so serious as the leadership of the county, state and country based on the word of some small company. This proprietary software hides the mechanism for who truly placed in the power of the future leaders of our county, state and country. All that is required to steal an election
(see: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf ) is to have the code surreptiously replaced (such as listed in the same Allegheny report listed above).

These voting machine bugs have also been reported by law.com back in May of 2004 at http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1084316008117 the following:

A scathing internal review of the iVotronic touch-screen voting
machines used in Miami-Dade and Broward, Fla., counties, written by a
Miami-Dade County elections official, has raised fresh doubts about how
accurately the electronic machines count the vote.

The review, contained in a June 6, 2003, memo that came to light last
month, concludes there is a "serious bug" in the voting machine
software that results in votes potentially being lost and voting
machines not being accounted for in the voting system's self-generated
post-election audit.

If we set asside the conspiracy theory from the Government Accounting office and PA report from Allegheny, then we can still look to the fact that iVotronic voting machines has already disenfranchised voters. newsobserver.com reported as recently as 2003 that iVotronic machines had lost over 10% of the votes in Raliegh, North Carolina. You can see the archived version at

http://web.archive.org/web/20021113191604/http://newsobserver.com/news/triangle/story/1876251p-1865783c.html as the story is no longer available on the news site itself.

One would like to hope that iVotronic had fixed these problems. Unfortunately, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, again in Allegheny Co., that groups such as "the Black Political Empowerment Project, VotePA and the Leage of Young Voters" reported wide ranging problems in a whopping 15 districts. You can read the story here:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06153/695166-103.stm

These problems are not unique to Pennsylvania. Do you remember the problems that happened down in florida with the hanging chads? Well, they gave iVotronic a run in Miami a few years later, and it lost votes there too: http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,101105,00.html

So you have on your hands a voting machine that the voter can't verify that his vote was recorded, on a machine known to loose votes. Could it possibly get worse? Unfortunately, yes.

iVotronic machines _have wireless access_. They are falsely claiming that that voting machines are secure between 128 bit WEP. This is not true. Freely available tools such as WEPCrack (available via http://wepcrack.sourceforge.net ) are available to break into 128 bit WEP networks within _minutes_ -- all from the comfort of one's car or from the restroom from a 802.11 enabled device such as a laptop or a palm held PDA named a Ipaq.

Even more disturbing, every single iVotronic machine in the state of Pennsylvania will use the exact same password. With this password one can clear votes, remove votes or install software that biases votes towards a preferred candidate.

On Mon, Oct 09, 2006 at 09:43:33AM -0400, Leonard Piazza wrote:
> James,
>
> Thanks for your email.
>
> All voters that live in a consolidated district will be receiving two
> notices in the coming weeks to let them know where to vote.
>
> Thanks also for sharing your concerns about e-voting. Thankfully, we do
> not have the Diebold system in our county. I'd urge you to share your
> concerns with your US congressman.
>
> You will not be able to cast your ballot on anything other than the
> iVotronic voting system and I'd invite to our website to examine the
> features and try it out online.
>
> Thanks, again.
>
> Leonard
>
> Leonard C. Piazza III

> Director of Elections
> Luzerne County Bureau of Elections
> 20 North Pennsylvania Avenue, Suite 207
> Wilkes-Barre, PA 18701
>
> (570) 825-1570 V
> (570) 820-6399 F
>
> www.luzernecounty.org
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Blackwell [mailto:jblack@merconline.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 6:07 AM
> To: Leonard Piazza
> Subject: Polling Place
>
> Hello,
>
> My voter registration card tells me that my polling place is "TBA
> REDISTRICTING IN EFFECT, PA". The precinct listed on my card is "Wilkes
> Barre City W 06". Would you mind looking up for me where I should vote
> on
> November 7?
>
> Also, I'm really, really, really worried about the insecurity of
> electronic voting machines -- particularly those from Diebold. Will
> there
> be older voting machines or should I ask for a different kind of ballot?
>
> Thank you very much for your time!
>
> James Blackwell