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ALTERNET
What 6 Top Election Experts Are Saying About the Next Big Step in the 2016 Recount
Wisconsin judge likes hand counts, but won't order it under state law.
November 29, 2016
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet
A half-dozen of the nation's top computer scientists who have spent years analyzing how electronic voting machines can malfunction or be hacked to alter vote counts have filed affidavits in the Wisconsin presidential recount in support of hand-counting the ballots.
The scientists have collectively spent decades advising top state election officials and the federal government’s election oversight panels on computer security and preventing inaccurate or tampered vote counts. Their affidavits support the idea that the Wisconsin Elections Commission should order the state’s counties to recount all paper ballots by hand, ...
These assertions are unprecedented in a federal election recount and strongly bolster the Green Party’s argument that the states conducting a presidential recount should conduct the most comprehensive recount possible, ...
A Wisconsin court began hearing testimony Tuesday afternoon on the Green Party's suit to force a manual recount. The court ruled against the Green Party, with Dane County circuit judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn saying the Greens fell short of the legal requirements to order a hand count, even though the judge personally thinks a hand count is a good idea.
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What follows are excerpts from the court filings by the six computer scientists supporting a manual recount.
1. Harry Hursti. In 2005, Hursti, who is based in Finland, developed a series of tests showing that the vote count by Diebold voting machines could be altered. ...
Wisconsin uses the same optical scanning systems that studies he conducted in other states have found are vulnerable, he said, ...
2. Douglas W. Jones. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, has been studying electronic voting systems since 1994. He has served on numerous federal panels and advised Congress and states about the technicalities of conducting reliable, verifiable and transparent elections.
His affidavit said optical scanning systems reading ballots routinely make errors. “No optical scan technology, including that used in Wisconsin, is capable of perfectly uniform and reliable scanning and electronic tabulation of voter marked ballots… The potential for different interpretations by genuinely impartial scanners is even greater when ballots are initially scanned one machine and recounted on another.” He went on to describe, “for various reasons,” why machines can’t correct these problems, but that a hand count of the ballots could.
3. Ronald L. Rivest. Rivest has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1974 ...
“We have learned the hard way that almost any computer system can be broken into by a sufficiently determined, skillful and persistent adversary. There is nothing special about voting systems that magically provides protection against attack,” he said, ...
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4. Philip B. Stark. Stark is a UC Berkeley professor and dean and director of several mathematics and statistical computing programs and research institutes. ...
“As of this writing, the margin between the president-elect and the second-place candidate in Wisconsin is 22,525 votes in more than 2,939,490 ballots cast. Hence, errors in the interpretation or tabulation of less than 0.38 percent of the ballots could have caused a tie to appear to be a win,” ...
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5. Poori L. Vora. Vora is a George Washington University professor of computer science ...
“Software-based voting systems are very complex and may consist of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It is not possible to find all bugs in voting system software; ..."
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6. Dan S. Wallach. Wallach is a computer science professor at Rice University ...
“My main message is that our election systems face credible cyber-threats generally, and in this election year those threats are magnified in light of the persuasive evidence of state-sponsored attacks against our elections,” he wrote. ...
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Wallach said the best way to go forward was a manual recount of all the paper records.
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