Can we Trust the Iowa Straw Poll Results?

"It is very concerning that there will be no checks and balances into the accuracy of this election," said a Ron Paul Meetup representative.

A recent "Red Team" report from the University of California found serious security vulnerabilities within the Optical Scan election system manufactured by Diebold, which is the same system to be used in the Iowa Straw Poll.  The team's findings included:

I.  The ability to "alter vote totals in order to change the vote results on the optical scan unit."

II. Two different means for gaining unauthorized access to the [GEMS] server that collects and tallies all of the votes collected from the optical scan units used on Election Day.  This included "a remotely-accessible Windows account that can be accessed without the need to supply a password," allowing an outsider to log-in to the server.

III.  The team was then able to use this unauthorized "access on the server to manipulate and corrupt GEMS databases [i.e. election results]."

All of the voting systems studied contained serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities, which attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," California Secretary of State Bowen said.

The Florida report added, "While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed."

In light of this recent study and decision in California as well as similar findings by Florida, it would seem prudent that Iowans would demand a manual count, which is a standard check that can independently confirm the accuracy of the electronic machine count, ensuring the integrity and the transparency of the upcoming Straw Poll.

Ron Paul Online spoke to an election industry expert and was provided with the following list of election "assets" that should be requested and reviewed in order to help insure election accuracy:

i) Electronic dump of the internal (flash) memory of each Optical Scan machine immediately after the election.  This is the raw data in each machine and can be checked against other machine tallies.

ii) Ensure that the option to "Notify on Rejected Ballot" is set to ON for each optical scan machine. By default it is OFF.  If this setting is OFF then optical scan ballots with undervotes, overvotes and stray marks may be accepted but later not counted.

iii) Obtain electronic copies of the Ballot Definition Files (BDFs) used on all machines.  This will insure the integrity of the ballot design, so that an outsider can confirm that each ballot position correlates correctly with the appropriate candidate's name in the GEMS database.

iv) End of day paper summaries from each machine will reveal the votes counted by each optical scan machine and can be compared to electronic votes tallies later produced by the GEMS server.

v) Voter signature books can be compared to the optical scanner unit's protected counter start and finish numbers as well as the public counter.

Of course, said our election industry expert, "the best way to confirm the accuracy of the tally is to conduct a 100% manual count of the paper ballots with independent observers as monitors."