Black Box Voting finds anomalies in electronic voting logs of 2004 U.S. election

March 4, 2006

Last June, Black Box Voting successfully sued Palm Beach county, Florida for their audit record of the 2004 presidential election. The organization, which opposes most current electronic voting initiatives, examined the machines logs and recently released a report of their findings.

Black Box Voting claims that "The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night [after the Logic & Accuracy tests but before the election]."

Such access, they claim, requires "a high degree of inside access", but represents a "hasty or clumsy" intrusion. The Hursti experiments have demonstrated that such access need not leave any trace if done carefully.

The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, has responded that his staff investigated the problem and found the votes to be normal, but that "the dates somehow changed." Jeff Darter, an IT official for Palm Beach County, has declined a request, by a member of the Palm Beach County electronic voting technical committee, for the identities of the individuals who had access to the machines.

Black Box Voting also claims that the logs provide support for claims by some voters that the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote. In addition, there appear to be numerous operator errors resulting in date, or other, inconsistencies.