This information is NOT intended to discourage voting.  It is important information about problems with Vermont’s election system.  The more people vote, the better.  So get out the vote!  But we must correct these problems and restore confidence in our system.

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Dear Vermonter,

Many of you are not aware of the significant security vulnerabilities with our state’s election system.  The Diebold optical scanners used to count most of the votes in our state have been proven to be vulnerable to both computer bugs and malicious hacks.  In both cases, it is possible for the wrong results to put the wrong person in office, without anyone knowing.

Many independent tests on the Diebold system have confirmed these problems.  The most significant was the widely accepted report from the William Brannan Center for Justice.  It was put together by the heads of security for Microsoft and Lawrence Livermore Labs, as well as many other of the world’s most prominent computer security experts.  You can read the report here.The report confirmed the problem and made strong recommendations to conduct random audits on every election.  These audits would consist of randomly sampling a small number of ballots to count by hand and compare to the Diebold results.

Twenty-two other states have adopted some form of mandatory random audits on their elections.  Vermont has no mandatory random audit, but Deb Markowitz has done some (very small) auditing on a few of the last elections.   However her auditing procedures, and the amount chosen to audit, do not comply with the recommendations of the Brennan Report.  This leaves the vulnerabilities essentially unchanged.

There will be an audit on this November’s election.  However, once again it is far smaller than the recommendation.  And it will only be on one or two races, leaving all the other races completely vulnerable.

To make it clear, these vulnerabilities indicate that an employee at Diebold (who changed their name to Premier Election Systems) or LHS, the distributor for Diebold, could easily pre-program the memory cards for an election to change the results.  They could do this before the election takes place, when all the memory cards are held in a central location.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I don’t accuse them of doing this.  But the problem I see is simply that it could be done.  That alone is something that needs to be mitigated.  And while I’m not a conspiracy theorist, it should be noted that the President of Diebold once promised to help George Bush get re-elected, and they do have some people on their staff who have been convicted of computer fraud already.

The stakes couldn’t be higher in the election next week.  At this point we can only hope that our votes are being counted properly.

Jim Condos told me that if he is elected he will conduct more (and better) audits than Deb Markowitz is doing now.  Let’s hope that happens.

Regards,

Gary Beckwith

Vermonters for Voting Integrity

http://vtvoters.org