The title isn’t lying folks. The Dem Party in Colorado is warning all voters to use absentee ballots in the upcoming November 7th election because it doesn’t trust the new electronic voting machines now certified to be used there:
The Colorado Democratic Party on Thursday urged all voters to cast absentee ballots for the November election to avoid potential fraud, after a key state official said in a deposition that he certified the computer voting equipment even though he has no college education in computer science and did little security testing.
Much more below the fold . . .
Not only that, but it seems both candidates for Secretary of State in Colorado have seen fit to make the validity of these machines an issue in their campaign:
State Sen. Ken Gordon, the Democratic candidate who currently is Democratic majority leader in the state Senate, called on Dennis to “immediately hire competent staff and perform an adequate and thorough testing, as the law requires.”
Mike Coffman, currently Republican state treasurer, said his first act if elected would be a full review of all voting systems in Colorado.
Why is this happening? Politicians from both parties claiming to be concerned about the reliability of elections conducted with electronic voting machines? Well, maybe it has something to do with a certain little lawsuit . . .
Voting on computer screens is so vulnerable to massive fraud that Colorado’s November election is “headed for a train wreck,” says an attorney who is seeking to have the equipment barred at trial next week.
An expert would need just 2 minutes to reprogram and distort votes on a Diebold, one of four brands of computerized voting systems attacked in the suit, says attorney Paul Hultin. His firm, Wheeler Trigg Kennedy, has taken on the case pro bono for a group of 13 citizens of various political stripes.
All I can say is thank you, whoever you brave 13 souls are. You are doing your state and our country a real service, and teaching us all a lesson in what people powered politics really means. And thank you attorney Paul Hultin. Finally, somone is taking action about the threat these voting machines pose to our democracy rather than just wringing their hands or trying to ignore the issue and hoping it will go away.
And what is the concerns which the lawsuit is seeking to address? The usual litany of problems that are well known by most of us here:
National computing experts have advised against using computers for voting because they cannot ever be secure, Efaw said.
Just this week, Princeton University researchers experimenting with a Diebold model said that malicious software can modify all records. They said the software can be stored on a memory card and installed by someone in a clerk’s office or at the manufacturer’s in as little as one minute. They also found that viruses could spread the software to all the machines in a system.
Hultin said instructions for tampering with the Diebold machine have been posted on the Internet. […]
Gordon and the Democratic Party were alarmed by a deposition in the case released this week, in which the secretary of state’s staffer in charge of testing the machines says he did only 15 minutes of security checks.The staffer, John Gardner Jr., also said he had no college training in computer science, causing Gordon and others to question whether he was qualified for the job. Gardner also had been information technology chief for the El Paso County clerk, which runs elections there.
The plaintiff’s attorneys say Gardner’s security checks on the four systems did not include attempts at hacking. Instead, Gardner merely checked whether the manufacturers included security documentation.
“Of course” Gardner should have tried hacking, Hultin said. “Isn’t that the idea of a test?”
What? Test machines to see if they could be hacked? Oh those untrusting lefties, always thinking of new ways to make government more intrusive and burdensome. I mean if you can’t trust Diebold …
Security Flaws in Electronic Voting Machines
Colorado Lawsuit to Ban Electronic Voting Machines