Judge Finds in Favor of Voter Lawsuit Against
E-Voting Systems in Colorado

Bradblog - 9/22/06

I just received a phone call from Holly Jacobson of VoterAction.org, the group that has supported voter lawsuits attempting to decertify e-voting machines in Colorado, California, Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

She called us from Colorado just after leaving the courtroom, where the case in that state against the use and purchase of e-voting systems made by Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart InterCivic was being heard yesterday. She called and said: "We won!"

[...] Jacobson explained that, though the judge allowed the state of Colorado to use the machines for this November, they would have to do so with new strict security guidelines to be written by the VoterAction folks.

She explained that they had expected something like that since the case was being heard just weeks from the November elections, without enough time for a complete overhaul to be made to the system now in place in Colorado.

Nonetheless, they are all "popping champagne and celebrating," according to Jacobson because the biggest victory, apparently, comes in that the Judge has found that Colorado must completely start over in their certification process for these systems immediately after the upcoming election. Apparently, she says, he found that the state's process for certifying the systems was enormously flawed. (See our previous report about the "expert" in charge of certifying voting systems for the state, who was revealed during his deposition to have had no formal computer science education, and to have not even bothered to have performed any actual tests of the systems before certifying them!)

Jacobson also reports that Lowell Finley, the group's lead attorney, has characterized the Judge's mandate for new certification procedures to be so strict the state simply "won't be able to certify any DRE [touch-screen] voting systems" under the new procedures.

Sounds good to us.

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