Utah Newspapers Ignore Voting Machine Sec. Reports

Utah Newspapers Neglect to Cover Voting Machine Security Reports Released May 11 & 22

Despite it being covered nationally in the New York Times, Newsweek and CA and PA papers, and on many technical web sites, including Utah's BYU computer scientist, Phillip Windley's blog, who is a former CIO of the state of Utah -- although there was an article presenting all sides in the Tooela newspaper this week and KCPW.org has covered it -- not one Utah newspaper has yet reported on the public release of the two security reports on May 11 and May 22, that were done as a result of Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk's diligent investigation by computer security experts:

The May 11 report is available here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbvtsxstudy.pdf

and a May 22 supplement is available here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbvtsxstudy-supp.pdf

(Security reports take many many months to accomplish due to the technically time-consuming process of determining what machine code and electrical circuitry is constructed to do.)

Please Utah Press! Utahns deserve to know the truth about their voting machines!

Why is anyone still believing anything that Diebold (and our Lt. Governor's office) tells them?

All modern security measures were set aside in the design of Diebold's touchscreen voting system. Why?

Worse, Doug Aagard's HB348 recently re-wrote UT election law, including definition of what a ballot is, without any mention of the voter verifiable paper-roll ballot records - making it illegal to count the voter-verifiable ballot record and hence making it illegal to conduct any independent checks of Utah's vote counts to detect errors (innocent or deliberate)!

A paper ballot trail is worse than useless if it is not counted - because it gives voters a false sense of security.

Renowned computer scientists hired to evaluate voting systems in MD, IA, and PA, plus others like CA's David Dill, have publicly commented on the hackability of Utah's voting systems - These computer scientists are available to be interviewed by Utah press.

Utah could use existing federal merchantability laws to demand that Diebold take back its TSx touchscreens and replace them with Diebold's more secure optical scan voting system that uses voter verified paper ballots and creates scanned images of ballots that could easily be independently audited. It is time Utah's Election Officials followed Bruce Funk's example and begin to do their job of ensuring that Utahns are guaranteed "one man, one vote". "

Utah Lt. Governor's office, since it forced all Utah's county's to adopt these Diebold TSx voting machines, termed "a national security threat" and "the worst flaws ever seen in any voting system" by computer scientists, should do their fiduciary duty to Utah citizens and chose its options wisely.

We could:

1. Require that Diebold replace the TSx with a more secure optical scan system; or

2. obtain a two-year HAVA extension just as New York and Connecticut have done.

Diebold and Election Officials who implemented Diebold voting machines, are now being sued in at least three states and other Diebold lawsuits are being planned in other states like MD and GA. Utah, do the right thing now!

Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections

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