Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The votes were put in and they started to run, and at that point we were told that it would take several hours ... [A couple of hours later] we went back to see if the test scripts had finished running, but they hadn't. So at that point we broke for lunch and we were going to come back to get the results.
I saw several people standing with Mischelle Townsend, and they were signing this piece of paper. At that point, I didn't know what was on the piece of paper; otherwise I would have said something right then and there. I thought it was a type of roll sheet. [Actually, the sheet certified that the observers had seen the test and believed that everything looked aboveboard. The form, which Akin refused to sign, said: "We the undersigned declare that we observed the process of logic and accuracy testing of voting equipment performed by the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, as required by law and that all tests performed resulted in accurate voting of all units tested, including both touch screen and absentee systems."]
Mischelle Townsend told Salon that she disagreed with you about people signing off on these tests before they'd seen the results. She said that people saw the results and they had hard copies of the results, and they signed off on it after that.
I saw people signing this paper before that.
Townsend also said that the document was not any kind of "rigorous legal" form; it's just an official roster to say you were there.
But the document doesn't say it's a roll call. It says that the people watched the entire test and observed the results.
So at that point I left, went home for lunch, and came back around 2:30. Nobody else was there. Brian Foss [the county's information technology manager] and I went to the machines to take the cartridges out -- but we found that they had already been taken out and the machines had been sealed shut.
OK, so you went to the machines, and the cartridges that store the ballots weren't there in the machines?
Yeah. And Brian Foss asked the guy from Sequoia who was there what happened to the cartridges, and he said that they'd been pulled out.
[Eventually], Brian Foss pulled up one -- but I'm not sure if it was part of the test or not. He went over to the software that tallies the votes. He puts the card into the card-reading slot and starts up the software, which I think is called WinEDS. And I immediately notice it's running on Windows XP. This caught me off guard -- I'm like, hold on a second, because throughout the day we were told by Brian Foss and Mischelle Townsend that Sequoia Voting Systems did not use Microsoft software.
But it turns out that if you go to Sequoia's Web site they're very careful about how they phrase it: They say that the Sequoia voting kiosks don't use Microsoft Windows but the tallying machine does. But the way Mischelle Townsend and Brian Foss said it, they said the whole thing didn't use Microsoft Windows. So I asked Brian Foss how come he didn't mention that the software uses Microsoft Windows, when earlier in the day they talked about how systems based on Microsoft Windows are not secure.
And he didn't answer me. I asked him several times, and each time I asked him I tried to make eye contact with him and he wouldn't make eye contact with me.
Now, since the WinEDS program runs on top of Microsoft, there's room for -- well, basically it calls some Microsoft APIs [application programming interfaces], and if those are modified in any way a modification of the system could happen that wouldn't be detectable in the type of code review and security tests that Sequoia's software is subject to.
So you mean people could just make changes to the computer on which the voting software is running -- and the Sequoia system could be altered in some way?
Yes ... Well, so he printed out the results from one card that he'd put in there, and he also printed out results from four other cartridges that he said had been part of the test, but I don't even know where they came from.
He gave you this printout of what came out of the machines, but did he show you what was on the script that was run on the machines? So you could sort of compare what votes were put in to what came out?
No, at the beginning we were given sheets of paper and we were told, this is what the script is going to test for. But we have no idea what was on the card that they stuck in.
Also, this is very important -- I noticed that the vote-tallying software has three different modes. A pre-election mode, an election mode, and what they call the post-election "verification" mode. These tests were only run in the pre-election mode. And to a programmer who's had software go through QA testing that seems really weird, because the software wasn't tested in production mode.
There are times when you need a testing mode for software. For example, if you're doing credit-card-processing software you need a testing mode, because you don't want to constantly use your actual card to test the system. But testing always goes through a production test, too [in which real cards are used].
Is there any indication to you what the difference is between the different modes?
The only thing that I've heard about this is that they needed the pre-election mode to make sure that the test didn't leave any votes in the system that would be counted during the election. And this seems really weird to me ... I can see why a company might have a testing mode, but I do not understand why a company wouldn't test something in production mode. And you can ask any QA person about this and they're going to tell you the same thing, that it's not a thorough test if it's not tested in production mode.
I also wanted to talk to you about this paper-trail issue. The elections officials told you that the machines they used produced a paper trail, but they didn't mean the same thing that the critics mean when they ask for a paper trail.
Yeah. The way Mischelle said, it was that the computer science community asked for paper trails but they don't understand that there already are paper trails. But what people in the computer science community asked for was a voter-verified paper trail. What's demanded is a piece of physical evidence that the voter verifies after the vote. [The Sequoia machines used in Riverside print out a record of all the votes cast on each machine during an election. This "paper trail" doesn't address concerns that the machines might incorrectly record the votes in the first place.]
Mischelle also stated that there's no real reason for a voter-verified paper trail. She said that the paper trail wasn't possible because printers would jam up during an election. The woman from the Libertarian party said that she gets receipts all the time when she goes to stores so she didn't understand why they couldn't make a printer that would work reliably. Then Mischelle said there's no reason to make a paper trail because it would do exactly what the machines are doing. It would be wasted effort. Which is a kind of a silly argument. There's a bunch of different reasons why you need a paper trail.
Did you vote in Riverside County on Oct. 7?
Yeah, I voted absentee. Because even though no system is perfect at least absentee has a paper trail.
Do you have any thoughts on how the election went that day?
Well, apparently there was a pretty large margin, so I don't think people are going to pay attention to it. [In Riverside County 70 percent of the voters were in favor of recalling Gray Davis, and 61 percent voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger.]
But if something bad happened, people might not know about it?
Yeah, exactly: Without a paper trail there's no way to know that. They say there's no known instance of fraud, but they make it so you can't tell if there's an instance of fraud, so that claim doesn't say very much.
Mischelle Townsend told Salon that you were "a young man who had a chip on his shoulder when he came in here." She said that you came into the test with a "closed-minded" attitude and that you didn't want to "listen to the facts."
This is exactly what I expect from her. Instead of responding to my arguments she'll just try to paint me in a bad light. I'm sure she didn't say anything about the fact that the voting kiosks rely on a Windows operating system in order for the results to be read, even though Sequoia and Mischelle Townsend said that one of the benefits of their system is that the results don't rely on Windows.
I fully expect Mischelle to not really address anything I say in my report. I expect her to say I have a chip on my shoulder or I don't listen to facts. I've never seen her deal with anyone who's technically literate in any other way.
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