election integrity

In 2006 I pushed hard to elect Jennifer Brunner as secretary of state for Ohio. Luckily we won that hotly contested race, replacing a corrupt Republican secretary of state with an honest Democrat. This means our chances for fair elections in Ohio in 2008 are looking good.

Jennifer Brunner has done such a good job cleaning up the messed up Ohio election system that she has actually won an award. From the Springfield News-Sun:

Brunner to be honored for her political courage

Study of Ohio's election system earns Secretary of State prestigious award.
By Bridgette Outten
Staff Writer

Monday, April 21, 2008

COLUMBUS -- Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner kept her campaign promise to review Ohio's election system, a challenge that earned her a place among the 2008 recipients of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Brunner is being honored for her "political courage by a distinguished bipartisan committee of national, political, and community leaders," according to a statement from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation...

"I was stunned" upon learning of the award, Brunner said. "I had not applied for it."

Even more stunning was the personal call that came from Caroline Kennedy, president of the JFK Library Foundation, offering congratulations, Brunner added.

Brunner's decision to review the system amidst "quite a bit of furor" was based on ensuring accuracy and reliability of the state voting system, not receiving accolades, she said.

The foundation of any democracy has to be free and fair election. I have written considerably about the danger the over-priced, insecure and non-verifiable DRE eVote machines are. By now you'd think the evidence was more than enough to kill any interest any state might have in these machines.

To me one of the deciding factors should be the fact that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has advocated the decertification of these machines because:

According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.

In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.

The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," according to the paper.

The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

But there recently is yet more evidence that the DRE machines suck. Florida under Jeb Bush was a state that embraced the DRE machines early. Perhaps Jeb should have waited. DRE machines are probably responsible for an 18,000 vote undercount in Florida's FL-13 Congressional race in 2006 which more or less made those election results a farce.