Smoking guns and broken voting machines

My last post about Sequoia Voting Systems and its painfully stupid e-voting machines inspired both cheers and jeers from the Cringe faithful.

Cringester E. N. believes we should all just grow up and accept that mistakes happen (though he seems to also believe the Clintons are involved):

There will always be mistakes in voting because people are people, whether they are voting or create software and hardware to facilitate voting.  The chicanery comes not from the manufacturer, but those on the ballot who cry “Foul!” if the electorate doesn’t vote the way the loser wanted them to. 

Except that in this case, it’s the election officials who are calling for an investigation, not the losers, and its the manufacturer who’s balking, not the winning candidate.

Reader D. S. notes that slot machines in Vegas use proprietary code yet undergo government inspections, so why not voting machines? (A cynic might answer, yes, but in Vegas the machines aren’t rigged.)

And Cringe fan S. S. is positively outraged:

This is the kind of nonsense that goes way beyond giving IT a bad name…. This is messing with the rights of the people; this is akin to changing the bill of rights. …Changing even one vote through a mistake is keeping someone from their absolute right to vote.

Meanwhile, Sequoia has responded to public pressure, kinda sorta, announcing it has submitted the broken voting machines used in New Jersey to third-party testing (though only its own, hand-picked testers, of course). Strangely, Sequoia parceled out its machines’ source code to an unknown company called Kwaidan Consulting Services of Houston, leading some bloggers to ask, Who the hell is Kwaidan Consulting Services?

Looking up KwaidanConsulting.com doesn’t inspire much confidence. My browser was immediately redirected to bnmq.com, which Spy Sweeper warned me was not a nice place to be. (According to McAfee SiteAdvisor, bnmq is guilty of extreme spammishness.)

The Kwaidan domain is registered by a company called Prime Directive Inc. Calls to Prime Directive’s number went unanswered, as did email. But a Texas corporate records search traces PDI to one Raymond Michael Gibbons, aka Mike. 

Mike Gibbons has a solid geek pedigree — an engineer and executive at K*Tec Electronics, later subsumed into Suntron, a contract manufacturer based in Phoenix. Suntron makes the eSlate voting machines for Hart InterCivic, one of the few e-voting companies that rarely makes the news.

(If there’s a smoking gun connection between Suntron and Sequoia, I haven’t found it. But all you out there in Cringeville are welcome to try).

Gibbons has a MySpace page (which is several orders of magnitude less exciting than Ashley Alexandra Dupre’s MySpace page),where he lists his occupation as “Consulting exclusively to the automated election services industry the cornerstone of democracy.” Turns out he’s a big fan of Japanese cinema, God, the theory of relativity, and the Bush family. In fact, his profile picture shows him shaking hands with the elder Bush. And Kwaidan is apparently Japanese for ‘ghost stories,’ which seems fitting, given the ephemeral nature of the firm.

The bottom line: Once again, rather than truly open itself up to public scrutiny, Sequoia shops for friendly test firms who answer only to them. Gibbons might be qualified for the job. But’s he’s not Ed Felten of Princeton, or Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins, or David Dill of Stanford, or Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon — a nationally known expert on e-voting who might be critical of Sequoia and its comically crippled machines.

Fair and open elections demand fair and open voting machines. Many of us have come to that realization already. Maybe one day the people responsible for running our democracy will realize that too.

Got hot tips or methods for hacking voting machines?  Post them below or send email to cringe (at) infoworld (dot) com. If I quote you in my blog, I’ll send you swag for your pains.