Mainly responsible for this years election is ES&S.
ES&S has eight different tabulation products: www.essvote.com/index.php...tnav=about
Electronic Ballot, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting Systems - The iVotronic, Votronic® and V-2000 are decentralized touch screen / touch-panel voting systems that count and tabulate electronic ballots at the polling place, as votes are cast.
Paper Ballot, Optical Mark Read (OMR) Systems - These are systems that read voters' marks on paper ballots. The ES&S Model 100 and Optech 3P Eagle are decentralized OMR systems where ballots are counted and tabulated as they are cast, right at the polling place. The ES&S Model 650, Model 150, Model 550, and Optech 4C are centralized OMR systems that count and tabulate ballots at a central or regional location.
Punch Card Ballot, Punch Card Reader Systems - The PBC-2100 is a decentralized system that counts and tabulates punch card ballots at the polling place, as they are cast. ES&S also supports high-speed central card reading systems.
www.essvote.com/index.php...tnav=about
Internationally, ES&S has installations in the Republic of Venezuela, Guam, Republic of Palau, Canada, Saipan, and the ARMM region of the Philippines.
ES&S products are tested by Wyle Laboratories in Huntsville, Alabama, an Independent Testing Authority
The patented iVotronicTM Touch Screen Voting System is the newest ES&S voting solution for jurisdictions who prefer paperless voting. Available with a 12.1” or 15” full-color display, the iVotronic is wireless, multilingual, and ADA-compliant. Voters securely cast their vote for each race and/or ballot proposition simply through the touch of the screen. Its Audio Ballot feature easily assists those voters who are visually impaired. Weighing only 9.75 pounds, the iVotronic is the most portable system in the industry enabling curbside voting and wheelchair access, and it is powered either by 120-volt AC current or a rechargeable battery cartridge. To ensure voter intent and ballot correctness, the iVotronic prevents the voter from over-voting and alerts the voter of under-voted races.
The iVotronic is the first touch screen voting device officially certified for use in the State of Florida, and its innovative technology enables all voters—especially those visually impaired—to easily and correctly cast their vote in complete privacy.
About the profile of the company ES&S:
www.essvote.com/index.php..._exec_id=1
William F. Welsh II Chairman had "ten years management experience with GE." and was "six years as President and CEO of Valmont Industries"
He "structured the newly formed ES&S"
Before joining ES&S, Aldo served as president of First Data Resources, a unit of First Data Corporation, the world's largest third-party credit card processing company.
He managed the installation of comprehensive systems for Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon; Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas; Travis County (Austin), Texas; Dallas County (Dallas), Texas; and the state of Hawaii.
Urosevich established the ES&S Election Management Training Center (EMTC) school, a state of the art facility for new and existing users of ES&S products.
NOTE:
Maybe William F. Welsh is the most interesting character,
because he worked for General Electric, then comes Urosevich, who seems to be the technical supervisor.
ES&S f**ed up before-in 1999
===================================
In 1999 ES&S had already at least once "problems" with their systems in Hawaii. www.state.hi.us/elections/review98.html
March 15, 1999
Statement by Marion Higa, State Auditor, and Chair of Elections Oversight Committee
"...There was an obvious problem with seven voting units from Election Systems and Software -- out of 361 units used on Election Day...
...Five units had lens occlusion
One unit had a defective cable
One unit had a defective "read head"
To its credit, ES&S admitted its problem and worked with the state to fix the problems created by its equipment. As a result of the problems, the integrity of the election was called into question. The controversy was compounded by close races which led to charges made - but with no proof offered - of all kinds of voting irregularities.
This led to the Legislature calling for a statewide elections review - the first of its kind in the history of Hawaii and the first in the history of the U.S. as far as we know.
...I want to give Mr. Todd Urosevich time to talk about ES&S's failures and then successes in this process...."
Lightfinger
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 10:10 am) Reply
Todd...
Todd is the ES&S rep that sticks around his hometown on national election days. You are correct, he is the head of the programmers, or so it seems. Their top programmer is named Darwin, and I do believe he's sitting in Broward county today.
I have two friends that work for ES&S...one is in Tallahassee, the other in Des Moines today. ES&S also hires part time people that know their machines for election day...I know one of them is in Jackson, Mississippi and the other up in South Dakota today.
ewing2001 Registered User
Posts: 3
(11/5/02 10:17 am) Reply
Re: Todd...
Thanks Lightfinger for this helpful information.
I'm especially interested in possible manipulations of the customization of these machines.
PS:
Albanian and Russian observers sent to monitor American elections
"...The joke, during the endless presidential election recounts in Florida two years ago, was that Russia and Albania would send poll monitors to help the United States with its unexpected bump on the road to democracy. Now, the joke has become reality.
A high-level delegation of European and North American election observers – including members from Russia and Albania – arrived yesterday for a week-long mission to watch Florida's mid-term elections, which take place on Tuesday.
By the 2004 vote, states will be required to provide provisional ballots to voters whose names do not appear on voter rolls. Those provisional ballots would counted once valid registration is verified.
For 2006 balloting, states will be required to maintain computerized, statewide voter registration lists linked to their driver's license databases. States will also be required to have voting machines that allow voters to confirm the way they marked their ballot — and, if necessary, change their votes — before they are finally cast.
Such voting software was tested in one jurisdiction in the 2001 Virginia gubernatorial election. The Century Foundation, which reviewed the results, found that the ``lost vote'' rate went from between 600-700 votes in the 2000 election to just one vote in 2001, said Tova Andrea Wang, a staffer to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform who later oversaw the foundation's study..."
webpunk69
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 4:21 pm) Reply
The rothschilds are part owners of voting machines.
These infamous international private bank are only by chance involved in this? Just like they were by chance involved in enron?
"Even after Enron foundered, respect for Wakeham was such that when he finally decided to quit the PCC, temporarily, "as a matter of honour", his departure was attended by as many Sun-style accolades as questions about the kind of "honour" that can only operate on a full, but partly unearned salary, or demands for a new royal commission, to replace the one produced by this loyal servant of Enron, Rothschild, and the company Enron acquired on the advice of Rothschild, Essex Water. But then the press had much to be grateful for. By the time Wakeham did the honourable thing, his ability to deflect complaints and willingness to excuse tabloid invasions of privacy - unless royal princes were concerned - had become legendary."
www.enron.com/corp/pressr...ering.html
AZURIX CORP. INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING PRICED AT $19 PER SHARE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, June 09, 1999
HOUSTON – Azurix Corp., an affiliate of Enron Corp., announced that the initial public offering of 36.6 million shares of its common stock was priced today at $19 per share. The stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “AZX.”
The managing underwriters are Merrill Lynch & Co.; Credit Suisse First Boston; Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette; PaineWebber Incorporated; Banc of America Securities LLC; Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown;
ABN AMRO Rothschild;
and HSBC Investment Banking. The underwriters have been granted an over-allotment option for an additional 5.49 million shares of common stock.
The World Bank - IMF is owned and controlled by NM Rothschild and 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planed to take the world over through money. The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired recently. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank got involved in ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and sometimes in flames with riots. Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank would not comment on his dismissal.
webpunk69
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 8:46 pm) Reply
two machines, only one being used
The concept of being able to vote in a timely fashion goes hand-in-hand with a concept called COMMON SENSE. Is that too lofty a concept for some of you holier-than-thou "voters"?
Read this carefully. THERE WERE TWO MACHINES. ONE WAS BEING UNDERUTILIZED.
This has nothing to do with Wendy's, and fast food, and whining, and bellyaching, and everything to do with LEGITIMATE COMPLAINTS. There obviously was no accountability at this polling place, or the original poster would have had an ANSWER TO THE QUESTION "Why are one of these machines not being used?"
You assume way too much. There should be way more accountability than what you saw here. Period.
Of course, if there _were_ ANY accountability WHATSOEVER in our 'voting' process, we would have paper ballots, and not this questionable computerized bullshit. Talk about wanting this to work like 'Wendy's'?! I dare say some of you lemmings that bitched at the original poster would be hard-pressed to wait in line long enough to fill out a PAPER BALLOT that can be VERIFIED, let alone have the brain capacity to fill one out correctly.
Sure, I'll stand in line as long as it takes, as long as VNS isn't counting the 'votes' (again) ....
Tell us, lemmings, if you can't get the election results before you go to bed tonight, does that mean there's something 'wrong' with the 'system'? You think that by having an election signed, sealed, and delivered by the time the 1100 news signs on, it means that you have 'legitimate government'?
Put your collective heads up your collective asses, and go back to sleep. We'll wake you when the dictatorship moves in...
Re: Background Stories about ES&S Voting Machines
ewing2001 or lightfinger,
Would you be available to speak to VoteWatch privately & confidentially.
email us at: feedback@votewatch.us
BenedictLarge
Unregistered User
(1/2/03 12:37 pm) Reply
ES&S, Wyle Labs, and LTS Holdings
Per ES&S web site, their machines are tested to meet Federal Election Commission (FEC) standards by a company called Wyle Labs. The Wyle labs web site doesn't have any specifics on the nature of this testing. A pass thru that site indicates that they are focused on electro-mechanical systems testing rather than on software testing, but I couldn't determine with any certainty where that is actually the case. Obviously, if this is the case, than ES&S is pretty much in control of all of its software testing, since they provide on-site reps to hand-hold anyone using their systems. None of this goes to prove anything, but one again, it doesn't disprove anything either.
Curiously, Wyle Labs comes listed in Google under public companies but happens to be privately-owned. This suggests to me that Wyle was once public but was taken private. This would have happened prior to 4/2001, when some preferred stock was sold back to Wyle's current owner, LTS Holdings, Inc. Apparently, there was some sort of leveraged buy-out of Wyle, and I would suspect that the preferred stock was issued to secure funding of that buyout.
LTS Holdings, Inc. is a private investment company located in BRUNEI DARUSSALAM, a small country on the South China Sea whose official state religion is Islam. LTS has a single page web presence in the business directory of BRUNEI DARUSSALAM. That page lists nothing even remotely suggestive of its Wyle ownership or an ownership of anything even remotely akin to Wyle, but then again, that page doesn't say much to begin with beyond core businesses and contact info.
jimmynochad
Unregistered User
(1/30/03 2:19 pm) Reply
It describes how a US Senator owned a piece of ESS. ESS machines tallied all of his votes.
Someone who knows
Unregistered User
(2/13/03 10:19 am) Reply
ES&S, WYLIE LABS, AND LTS HOLDINGS
The FEC requires ALL voting equipment and software to be certified by Wylie. That means every vendor of the products MUST be certified by Wylie. The National Association of State Election Directors require Wylie certification before it will certify equipment and software.
Most state require either or both certifications before they will certify.
jimmynochad
Unregistered User
(2/13/03 12:04 pm) Reply
if you really know
then you also know that Systest also can now test hardware. Don't forget that Ciber and Systest are also software testers...
Cover Memorandum & Summary of the OIG's Final Report of the Miami-Dade County Voting Systems Contract RFP No. 326, dated May 20, 2003.
The OIG FINAL REPORT, May 20, 2003.
votenet
Unregistered User
(6/15/03 10:19 am) Reply
Read this report
Go to Miami Dade Office of the Inspector General - ES&S is selling a 386 chip basd voting system runing under DOS. Sales people are fabracating sales information Miami Dade has uncovered the scheme. Law suits will follow.
You forgot to mention Senator Chuch Hagel from Nebraska as being one of the owners of EC&S.
And the fact that machines made by EC&S were used in his last election. That he failed to report his stake in EC&S to the Senate's ethics commitee. Of course that is controlled by republicans so nothing has happened and little or no reporting has been done on this situation. This situation is Disgraceful, gives you and idea how much the corporate media cares about democracy. Biggest conflict of interest I think that I've ever seen. Chuck Hagel should be kicked out of office.
You also didn't mention that EC&S is providing machines that use proprietary software and don't have a voter verifiable paper trail. We have the technology to do this and there is at least one company that I know of that can provide a machine that generates a paper trail.
Instead of touting EC&S, why don't you help us get a voting system that we can trust. So that we can be reasonably assured that our votes count and that we actually have a democracy in this country. Because the way I see it, the republicans talk and talk about freedom and democracy every chance they get, and every chance they get, they take away those freedoms. Maybe they are talking about the freedom of large corporations and the rich to make more and more money and screw everyone else.
In the news today, a federal court has ruled that it is okay to arrest people, deny them lawyers, without charge and not make the arrest public. They have arrested people and put them in prison for as long as eight month's without charging them with any crime. This isn't freedom. This is Facism.
"The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever recieve either." Benjamin Franklin.
Using these new voting machines is no different than letting these private companys like EC&S take home the ballot box overnight to count the votes any way they see fit. Why don't we just give the ballot boxes to Chuck Hagel, at least we could save some money.
There are over three hundred computer scientists from very prestigious universities that have endorsed David Dill's open letter that explains why we should be very concerned about these new voting machines. Scientists from MIT, Stanford, Rice University, NASA, and on and on and on that have endorsed his letter. Why don't we listen to the scientists? The ones that have nothing to gain instead of the ones that work for the voting machine companies.
And why should we accept anything less than 100 percent accuracy with these machines? Would you accept less than that from your bank? There is no excuse for all these glitches. No excuse at all, and only makes it more important that we have a paper trail. So if there is a glitch, there is a back up.
Rush Holt has a bill in the House that would go a long way to fix this mess. Why don't you help him clean up this mess and support his bill. "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibilty Act of 2003."
ES&S Top Brass Should Be In Jail
The Miami Dade County Inspector General said: We urge the County, in light of the most recent certification failure and the experiences learned by Project Manager Alvarez during the November 2002 election, to act immediately without further delay. The 2003 fall elections must be planned around the same known limitations and waiting an additional sixty (60) days for a possible 7.5 (7.5.1) resubmission is unacceptable. Moreover, at this time, any reliance on ES&S’s marketed firmware Version 8.0 is not only unwise but foolhardy.
The following provides you with a summation of our final conclusions and recommendations.
1. The structure of the County’s performance bond was tied to three absolute milestones of acceptance testing and the certification of the primary and general election results by the Department of State. Had the County structured the bond’s duration and reduction schedule in line with the vendor’s proposal, there would likely be a portion of the performance bond balance remaining. The County may have saved money by foregoing the premium costs of a longer performance bond, but it also sacrificed the added protections afforded by a more graduated bond reduction schedule. Read this tell all report at the web site of the Dade Inspector General
banking
The world's most powerful bank in an anonymous office above a chocolate shop in Basel, Switzerland.
www.bilderberg.org/
hockeytown4ever
Unregistered User
(7/31/03 8:22 pm) Reply
ES&S Mention in Johns Hopkins Study
Check out what the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins had to say about electronic voting and your favorite company.
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This manufacturer’s systems were used in Georgia’s state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver touch screen voting systems.
This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.
We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.
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