Hack the Vote: The 2010 Elections

The Commission on Elections (COMELEC) held a pre-bidding conference last month of prospective election systems suppliers for the automation of the May 10, 2010 National and Local Elections.

According to COMELEC, ten firms have already secured the necessary bid documents, including the terms of reference from the COMELEC.

Smartmatic:

Smartmatic Corp. or Smartmatic International is a multinational corporations pecializes in the design and deployment of complex purpose-specific technology solutions including Electronic voting systems, integrated security systems, and biometric systems for people registration and authentication for government applications.

The Electronic Voting system of Smartmatic is calle SAES or Smartmatic Automated Elections Systems it's a direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting system comprising hardware (voting machines), the software operative in same, election management software, and canvassing software for a central location's servers.

SAES technology has been used in seven national elections in Venezuela, USA, Philippines (ARMM) and Curaçao.

The election results in Venezuela was however challenged as tainted with fraud because it showed that Chavez was consitently strong in parts of the country where he had weak support. A Venezuelan mathematican found a "very subtle algorithm" that appear to adjust the vote in Chavez's favor.




Sequoia:

In 2005 Smartmatic acquired Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the leading US companies in the Electronic voting industry.

This company was also controversial because of the March 2006 electoral fiasco in Chicago and Cook County in the United States, where a percentage of the machines involved were manufactured by Sequoia, and Sequoia provided technical assistance on the day. According to Sequoia the tabulation problems were due to human error, as a post-election check identified only 3 mechanical problems in 1000 machines checked. Election officials blamed poor training. A local alderman said the troubles could be due to an "international conspiracy".

BlackBoxvoting.org has reported several issues against Sequoia including: "Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach voting machines in Nov 2004" it reported that "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." and it has released a report that says "it has audited 70,000 manual errors and 100,000 computer errors of Sequoia Voting Machines in Palm Beach, FL 2004 Election. "Audit Shows Electronic Voting in Disarray, Thousands of Re-boots, Re-Calibrations Required Throughout Election." (wiki.cp-union.com, Comelec's AES Implementation)

AMA Group Holdings Corp.- Election Systems and Software International Inc.

Read the link and below and decide. ES&S has other issues including unverrifiable programming, undercounts and uncounted votes in US Elections

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/dan-rather-inve.html#previouspost

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