Our Opinion: Pima County must resolve vote-counting security issues
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It is somewhat comforting to know that there apparently was no outright fraud in last year's Regional Transportation Authority election.
But an investigation that found "serious concerns about election security" must lead Pima County to make changes in the way it counts votes.
The Board of Supervisors must take up the topic immediately, allocating the resources needed to ensure election security.
Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard examined vote counting in the May 2006 RTA election after the Pima County Democratic Party complained. The complaint was wide-ranging, including the possibility that votes were "flipped" - that the wrong side was announced as the winner.
In the election, voters approved the RTA plan and a 20-year, half-cent sales tax to pay for the plan.
Goddard's office hired a software-testing company to look at Pima County's vote-counting equipment.
The results were not comforting.
The software used by the county "exhibits fundamental security flaws that make definitive validation of data impossible due to the ease of data and log manipulation from outside" the software, the experts concluded.
In several instances, the company found no proof that there had been manipulation of voting data. But in all instances, the company found that manipulation was possible.
Concerns about vote security were raised because reports showing early vote totals were printed by the county Division of Elections five days before the election.
County officials said that was done only to ensure optical scanners were operating correctly. The county said those reports were shredded and the totals not communicated to anyone.
The software consultant hired by Goddard said that probably was true. However, that conclusion was reached not because of evidence, but because anyone who knew how to manipulate the data would probably have used that knowledge to hide the manipulation, the consultant concluded.
That's hardly the kind of thing we want to hear about the people and equipment Pima County entrusts with counting our votes.
From all of the available evidence, county elections officials have done nothing wrong. But it also is clear that the potential exists for wrongdoing. A skilled but dishonest computer programmer would be able to get into the vote-counting system, make changes and leave no electronic trail.
That's not good. At the very least, the county should upgrade or replace its software so that the "fundamental security flaws" no longer exist.
Consider this a needed and valuable warning from the Attorney General's Office. The county must fix the shortcomings before someone takes advantage of the identified security flaws.
Read another editorial: A vote of confidence in downtown
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"Test 2 – The date and time stamp checks of the files did turn up what appeared to be evidence of tampering as the files pertinent to the investigation showed a pattern of irregularities in either the date/time created or modified. John Moffatt did some investigation on his end and discovered that there were some issues in the backup, installation, and recovery of data during a July 20th 2006 GEMS system update followed by the normal copy and cleanup process on July 27th. This explained the oddities discovered in the file timestamps."
"This test can be defeated by altering the date/time stamp data for the files. There are utilities which will do this, but it appears that this was not done because the files still exhibit non-uniform dates/times. It is unlikely that defeat was performed because if one of these utilities would have been used, there would have been no alert as all of the date/time stamps would have been sequential to the event - leaving no clue that the files had been altered or replaced."
Let's review: according to Pima County Elections, the file date/time stamps got accidentally "mangled" when the servers were swapped in July '06. Bull, Not True!! We took a "snapshot" of the entire File Allocation Table of both servers as of early Dec 19th 2006. These were text files as created by the commands: we took these files and placed then in MS Excel and sorted then by election. The RTA had 55 databases backup up files
Result: as of Dec 19, 2006 the files with their date/time stamps perfectly match the RTA audit log.
Conclusion: Fact is somewhere between the Dec 19th directory listing public records responses and the iBeta testing, somebody altered the files.
This all spells out WHITEWASH is being done! We can prove this with the Dec 19th Directories.
We must demand that Terry Goddard reopen the investigation and appoint a special prosecutor.
If the RTA vote paper ballots still
exist we need to have the investigation
teams and/or a judge to order a manual
verification count of the ballots.
If the verification count is not
performed this problematic issue will
fade away.
Good Luck,
Frank Henry