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The Long Road to Democracy The Election Fraud News Weekly Collection
Most of these news items are gathered from the Election Reform, Fraud, & News produced daily on the Election Reform forum of DemocraticUnderground.Com. This news thread of 15 to 30 stories has been produced seven days a week since well before the 2004. Current DU users who produce these threads include: SFExpat2000, rumpel, FreedomFries, livvy, kpete, Melissa G, & autorank, Special acknowledgement to DUer philb for the excellent summaries from the flcv election files. 1. Weekly Comment on Key News in the Public Media 2. Featured Links to Articles & Resources Featured Stories: Featuring MICHAEL RICHARDSON By Michael Richardson 15 Jan 2007 Banned Last week Christopher Drew of the New York Times informed a shocked nation that the leading independent testing authority of electronic voting machines, Ciber, Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colorado had not been following its own quality-control procedures and could not document that it completed required tests for reliability and security. The federal Election Assistance Commission, which certified the Ciber testing lab, secretly pulled its certification last year, without informing the public or election officials relying on Ciber's results. Independent testing centers, including Ciber, are not really independent at all and are funded by voting machine vendors to whom they issue their testing reports and only recently have come under federal scrutiny. The EAC has yet to explain why it withheld the decertification of Ciber from the voting public and the omission has entangled the controversial election oversight panel in the growing national distrust of electronic voting machines and may threaten its continued existence. How many voting machines might be affected by the lax security inspections of Ciber? Snip [Permission granted to reprint] EAC ban on Ciber puts Wyle lab partnership question By Michael Richardson 18 Jan 2007 Merger despite ban The efforts of the Election Assistance Commission to accredit test laboratories for the nation's electronic voting machines have left the country with only two labs, SysTest and Wyle, operating on interim approval; and one laboratory, Ciber, left unaccredited since the National Association of State Election Directors got out of the certification business last year. Published reports indicate the Ciber lab was denied interim accreditation last summer for a history of inadequate quality assurance and inability to document that critical tests were performed. The EAC is saying little about the matter to the media and has now been requested by Senator Diane Feinstein to explain why Ciber was not accredited and why disclosure of that fact was kept from election officials around the nation. EAC regulatory staff might just want to peek at Ciber's website where they will discover that the banned Ciber lab has merged its testing division with EAC approved Wyle lab. Ciber boasts, "The CIBER-Wyle team is your single source for independent voting machine testing." [Permission granted to reprint] Two NASED approved voting machine test labs fail to gain a NIST recommendation to EAC By Michael Richardson 19 Jan 2007 NIST says NO Two of the three electronic voting machine test labs certified by the National Association of State Election Directors, Ciber and Wyle, have failed to gain a favorable recommendation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for accreditation by the Election Assistance Commission. When the EAC took over accreditation of the test laboratories from NASED last year under terms of the Help America Vote Act, the EAC did not grant interim accreditation to the nation's largest voting machine test lab, Ciber, because of poor quality assurance and failure to document testing. Ciber certified electronic voting machines used by 68.5% of the registered voters in 2006. Failure of the EAC to alert election officials around the nation that the Ciber lab had not been accredited has been sharply criticized and Senator Diane Feinstein has asked the beleaguered commission to explain why Ciber was not accredited and why there was not timely notice of the action to election officials. Snip Information on actual testing of electronic voting machines is secret. It is nearly impossible for the public to know who tested what when. The two excuses made for the secrecy are a need to maintain security and the protection of proprietary software. Meanwhile, the 18,000 "undervotes" in Sarasota go unexplained. [Permission to reprint granted Insider trading stock sell-off by Ciber execs during EAC secrecy over voting machine test lab ban By Michael Richardson 23 Jan. 2007 Insider trading Although the public was not informed by the Election Assistance Commission about its decision to not issue interim accreditation to Ciber, Inc., one of the nation's three previously certified test laboratories for electronic voting machines, the company executives were very aware they had lost a hold on the lucrative testing business. While unknowing election officials around America continued to incorrectly claim their voting machines were properly tested and certified in the months leading up to the November 2006 elections several Ciber honchos quietly began a stock sell-off. Snip Meanwhile, Ciber director and founder Bobby G. Stevenson began a quiet stock sell-off on August 2, 2006, of 25,000 shares every two weeks. During the EAC news blackout on Ciber's non-accreditation until the New York Times article was published, Stevenson was able to unload 262,500 shares of Ciber stock for a tidy $1,609,384 according to reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. [Permission granted to reprint] EAC's "New York Brother" and "Sis" responsible for NASED's certification of banned test lab Ciber, Inc. By Michael Richardson 25 Jan 2007 EAC Brother - Sister Act Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Thomas Wilkey moved to the EAC after serving on the National Association of State Election Directors Voting System Board, which he chaired. Wilkey's current boss at the EAC is Donetta Davidson, Chair of the federal commission. Davidson is a former president of NASED and served with Wilkey on the Voting System Board, which was tasked with certifying "independent testing authorities" to perform tests on electronic voting machines used throughout America. Snip Can EAC Chair Davidson be counted on to properly supervise her new subordinate? Maybe not, according to emails obtained by BlackBoxVoting from 2004 when both served on the NASED certification panel. Email traffic between the pair raise questions about their relationship. On July 15, 2004 at 2:21 pm, Wilkey emailed Davidson: "You are actually reading your emails…WOW!!! Yes I will see you on Saturday. I get in about 9 pm so we will have a nightcap if you are not out partying on Bourbon Street. Love, Your New York Brother." Two weeks later on July 29, 2004, after the nightcaps in New Orleans, Davidson sent Wilkey an email: "My Dearest Brother, Life has not slowed down, but I am staying out of trouble. Hope to talk to you soon, on the PHONE. That way I get to hear your voice. Love your Sis." Now the cozy relationship between the two former NASED regulators can blossom at EAC where Wilkey reports to Davidson. Now "New York Brother" and "Sis" are tasked with protecting the voting machine security for the entire nation. The earlier role of the two EAC leaders in oversight of Ciber's lax work that led to non-accreditation may well be the subject of Congressional hearings before the year is out. EAC secret reports reveal sloppy, incomplete and non-existent testing by Ciber test lab By Michael Richardson 30 Jan 2007 Sloppy testing Hours after our earlier report on threatened subpoenas against the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and its banned voting machine test laboratory, Ciber, Inc. by the New York State Board of Elections, the company supplied information concerning its lack of accreditation to New York officials. Commissioner Doug Kellner called the secret reports "soiled laundry" that both the company and EAC were trying to hide. Yesterday, the EAC reacted to the disclosure by Ciber of confidential EAC documents by releasing the assessment reports upon which last summer's non-accreditation decision was based. The documents, kept secret by the EAC for half a year, reveal a shocking level of incompetence and negligence by the "independent testing authority" (ITA) which tested electronic voting machines used by 68.5% of the registered voters in the November 2006 election. The EAC assessment report from July 2006 of the Ciber test lab in Huntsville, Alabama found, "critical processes were not implemented nor procedures followed." The EAC inspector wrote, "CIBER is unable to follow their own defined processes and procedures to ensure the quality of their work." CIBER Voting Machine Test Lab Failures is 'Old News' Known by Top Election Officials for Years Michael Richardson (appeared originally here) 02 Feb 2007 CIBER failures old news CIBER, Inc., the nation's largest so-called "independent test authority" (ITA) of electronic voting machines, is at the center of a growing scandal about lax testing of voting equipment. The recent release of a long-kept secret assessment of the company by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) detailing a shocking record of sloppy, incomplete or non-existent testing by CIBER led the test lab's CEO, Mac Slingerlend, to call the report "old news" in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News. While CIBER's shortcomings may be "old news" to Slingerlend, unaware election officials around the nation are angered at not being informed by the EAC prior to the November 2006 elections about voting machine models "tested" by CIBER in use by 68.5% of the registered voters in the country. In 2003, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had independent studies conducted of the state's ITA certified voting machines. Compuware Corporation reviewed both software and hardware of the state's four voting machine vendors, after CIBER had approved vendor software, and discovered 57 security risks in the four systems including high risk flaws. BlackBoxVoting.org was able to obtain copies of CIBER's test reports to NASED from 2003 for Diebold and VoteHere voting machines, which admit, "Penetration Analysis not reviewed by software ITA." Despite the blatant admission of security non-testing of the software, the machines were certified for use by voters. Of course, the CIBER report was marked "Proprietary" and not released to the general public in a timely manner. Snip Stay tuned..
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