EFF: Sham Recount Process on Diebold E-voting Machines

This is remarkable.

"California law guarantees every voter the right to a recount and requires election officials to produce for public review all materials relevant to that recount," said Gregory Luke, attorney at the Santa Monica firm of Strumwasser & Woocher, which represents the plaintiffs Americans for Safe Access, and three individual Berkeley voters. "Because the Diebold machines purchased by Alameda County do not retain any ballots for the purpose of a recount, election officials must, at the very least, look at the information produced by the system's existing security features to give voters some circumstantial evidence that the machines performed properly and that vote data was not damaged or altered. Alameda County's refusal to allow the public to examine the audit logs and redundant memory renders the so-called 'recount' they conducted utterly meaningless." [...]

"Recounts are one of the most important ways we detect vote fraud and error," said Matt Zimmerman, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is consulting on the case. "Even after Californians have voter-verified paper trails in 2006, it will be important to ensure that audit logs, redundant memory, and other security measures are checked during a recount, along with the paper trails. Banks and credit card issuers use these measures to make sure our financial transactions are safe. Our votes deserve at least as much protection."

Something that I've heard that will likely come out in litigation is that Alameda Co. took absentee ballots that were unreadable by their optical scan machines and had election workers fill out new ballots attempting to decipher how each voter had voted. Not only that, but, on information and belief, they then threw away the original ballots and mixed in the copied ballots with the larger pool of absentee ballots.

If this is true and the amount of unreadible ballots is close to the margin of victory, this litigation could result in the election being redone. With all the complexity and angles of attack (intentional or misfunctional) it's truly amazing sometimes that we can trust the results of any given election, not just these close ones.