Voting system testing begets controversy

By Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 7, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Matt Mcclain / The Rocky

Secretary of State Mike Coffman listens as Claudia Kuhns criticizes the Sequoia Voting System in February.

Secretary of State Mike Coffman calls Colorado's testing process for e-voting equipment one of the most rigorous in the country, and national voting system experts agree.

Most states accept certification of machines done by a volunteer national organization. Colorado is among a handful of states that have recently started doing their own testing.

The outcome of the state testing, however, has engendered its own controversies.

* The company that got Coffman's stamp of approval from the beginning - Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold - had employed a lobbyist that also worked as Coffman's campaign manager in his current bid for Congress.

A November 2007 e-mail from Coffman's office obtained by the Rocky Mountain News through an open-records request said the Premier machines had more than 70 deficiencies, including the inability to detect security breaches and to transmit electronic data securely - the same flaws that caused other machines to be decertified initially. Those problems did not appear on a public report issued later.

Warren Stewart, senior project director of a national group called Verified Voting Foundation, said he reviewed Coffman's certification process at the request of Common Cause. He called Coffman's approval of the Premier machines "confusing" because other states, such as California and Ohio, had discovered the same flaws and severely restricted the use of the machines.

Coffman declined to be interviewed but said in an e-mail Friday that he approved Premier's machines "because their deficiencies could be corrected by mandating conditions on how the equipment could be used."

* Coffman said he would make public all of the testing documentation. But six months later, that has not happened.

Coffman responded that his office is trying to be careful to avoid lawsuits or security breaches and that the sheer volume of documents - more than 120,000 pages and more than 3,200 hours of video - "has made the process a difficult one." He said his office and the manufacturers disagree over what information should be made public.

* With the help of new legislation giving him more flexibility, Coffman reversed his decertification decisions and approved all the machines for use this year. The machines were not materially changed, although Coffman imposed numerous restrictions and conditions on their use.

Lawrence Norden, director of the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center for Justice, said Coffman's decision to recertify appeared to be based on political expediency.

But he also acknowledged that "it may have also been a lack of decent alternatives."

Stewart said Colorado clerks made a powerful push to keep the machines.

"My perception from the outside is that Coffman eventually caved to that," he said.

Coffman disputed those opinions.

"I am not motivated by politics but by following the law in addressing the challenges of holding a 2008 presidential election with equipment that is secure and can accurately count every vote," he wrote in an e- mail.

E-mails obtained through an open-records request indicate Coffman's office quickly looked for ways around the flaws so the machines could be reapproved.

Three days after the the initial decertification announcement, testing manager John Gardner wrote an e-mail to another tester about a "potential lame workaround" for one voting machine that was decertified. In that e-mail, Gardner wrote:

"Can you tell there's a rush to have these events take place? . . . No pressure on me . . . I'm supposed to be on vacation."

Coffman's spokesman, Richard Coolidge, said the Gardner e-mail expressed frustration at being told to continue working when he was supposed to be finished and did not reflect department policy.

Claudia Kuhns is a voting activist who has spent the past four years studying voting systems and law and served as the chief researcher for the 2006 suit, known as Conroy vs. Dennis. The result of that lawsuit, against then-Secretary of State Gigi Dennis, was the more rigid testing process undertaken by Coffman.

She and lawyer Paul Hultin, who also worked on Conroy vs. Dennis, contend that Coffman violated law by reapproving the machines and that the original plaintiffs are considering another lawsuit.

Coolidge said the state spent $827,000 on the latest certification process.

• June 9, 2008

  11:40 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  scotem writes:

  Everyone should vote by paper absentee ballot. At least there is a paper trail that is harder to destroy when covering up election fraud.

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