Travis County Commissioners Court
September 2, 2008
Citizens Communication
Good morning, let's call to order this voting session of the Travis County Commissioners court. I have no postponements yet. Citizens communication is first, this item gives residents an opportunity to address the Commissioners court on any matter not on the agenda for up to three minutes. Gus pena is first, followed by jenny clark.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners, gus pena. I'm here today, I shouldn't be here today. I'm not here looking for sympathy, but Saturday 9:15 a.m. Will forever stabbed in my memory. We were hit by a vehicle at about 60 miles an hour, nearly killed us. I want to thank the e.r. People, nurses, my doctor, I can't pronounce it. Anyway, slow down drivers you could have killed somebody. Please allocate more funding for mental health services, we have a lot of servants returning with mental health issues. We have a lot of kids, I will say it again, we have a lot of kids that have anger management problems. A lot of kids have anger management, I wanted to do something to that driver who should have done what they were supposed to do. Travis County mhmr services doing a great job of treating veterans, they have that mobile -- three hudnell vash, very disappointing, h.u.d. And vash, veterans supported assistant housing. I have spoken to you about it, judge. 150 vouchers were supposed to be allocated to Austin Travis County. We got 0. We have to fight for vouchers for homeless veterans and their families.
>> [indiscernible] and his staff are doing a darned good job of going to bat for the veterans. Something we should not have gone through. But nonetheless I just wanted to let you know I really let our congressional delegates know, also the secretary of h.u.d. And the veterans affairs know of lack of sensitivity to the Austin Travis County. Nobody wants a handout, just a hand up to help some people. Please identify more funding for mental health as I said before. Please ensure all employees get a fair and/or equitable pay raise. You know, I hear from -- from employees, I used to be with the union, also. I used to be with Travis County, state, city, federal county governments. And I do know when I was working here as a bailiff, I got $1,019 a month, which barely made the rent and fed the family. But I just wanted to let you all know that you all are doing a very good job, I appreciate you all very much. Keep up the good work. I know sometimes people get angry at you. Be advised sometimes it's sentiments and a need for help. Thank you all for what you are doing, continue the March, god bless you all.
>> thank you.
>> sandy clark and ms. Clark followed by Karen rennick. Good morning, judge, Commissioners, last week we were here to encourage you to not fund additional voting machines. At that time the judge requested new and different information. So I'm here to hopefully provide that to you. June 25th, the Texas house committee on elections, black box voting spoke about the failures of the state certification process. Dana debeauvoir relies on the state certification of the machines to justify their use. Here is how the state has failed in the certification process. In January of 2007, a report from the Texas state examiner james
>> [indiscernible] wrote, we agreed in advance to divide up the various tasks among the examiners. This allowed us to go into greater depth on each component, but also meant that -- that most results were not personally observed by everybody examiner. This explains why some examiners report finding problems and others do not. One of the examiners, kathryn carey, an employee of the Texas state attorney general's office, condemned the es and f system and said it should not be used. She said, yeah, if the ess system is not adding one plus one correctly, problems are not visible to all of the examiners, yet the machines are finally approved. This is a failure of the state certification process. On March 7th, 2008, kathryn carey reported that the hart e slate systems should not be recommended for certification due to specific concerns about its security features. Yet, the court last week, y'all approved funding for more of these machines. In may, we came to the court and presented to you a 45 page whistle blower lawsuit from william singer with heart intercivic. In that claim on page 30, item 77 c is a claim that has to do with the program called cervo, a tabulation recording component that has not been certified by the national association of state elections directors. Our expert, jim March, said it would be very easy to check and see whether or not again this uncertified software module was actually in the field and what the security implications about it are around it. The state certification people, the eac, no one bothered to take a look at this issue. He calls this criminal negligence. I would like to remind the court that if we were using a simple hand counted paper ballot voting system, we could avoid all of the complicated complications and failures of the state certification process. Also this letter and also a copy of the 2008 March 7 report from kathryn carey about her recommendation to not -- to not approve certification for hart. Thank you.
>> thank you.
>> thank you, ms. Clark. Ms. Rennick.
>> good morning, judge, Commissioners, I am going to be reading from a letter that we will be providing to you. This is in response to last week's meeting. Thank you for allowing time on the agenda last Tuesday, August 26th, 2008, to hear citizen comments about the purchase of yet more electronic voting systems. Clearly, many Travis County voters share our concerns. When it comes to the security analysis and testing of our voting systems, it is most unfortunate and irresponsible to your Travis County constituents that Commissioners eckhardt, Davis, Gomez and judge Biscoe have chosen to believe the word of a non-technical election official, dana debeauvoir, over an internationally renowned ph.d. In computer science, dr. Dan walllick of rice university who has thoroughly examined the hart intercivic e slate for california's top to bottom review of 2007 commissioned by the california secretary of state. In addition, doctor walllick has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the united states, mexico and the european unions and has served as an expert witness in a number of voting technology lawsuits. We were shocked and extremely disappointed in your making your funding decision in this margin. Even though -- in this manner. Even though we understand that you are not ready to totally pull the plug on these voting machines yet, surely the evidence we provided should warranty a decision to deny funding more machines for early voting. In our opinion this would have been the proper decision to uphold the fiduciary responsibility to the Travis County taxpayers. In the days after the June 25th, 2008 interim hearing on electronic voting technology at the Texas capitol, we urged dana on a conference call to allow a meeting to occur between her computer experts and our computer experts. After she said that her experts were assuring her that the machines are secure and that her testing protocols could detect attempts at hacking. Our experts in accordance with the government accountability office, the bren don justice center, missed, which is actually one of the groups dana states she relies on, studies commission by the ohio, colorado and colorado secretaries of state and countless other computer security experts, including dr. Dang wallick have been saying for years that "important security flaws will always escape any amount of testing." and that "currently deployed voting systems are susceptible to undetectable malicious attacks." as we have requested on that call, we are still very interested in setting up a meeting -- with dana, staff, her experts, our experts to clarify the issue of reliance on her three testing procedures.
>> the three testing procedures dana has relied on has test -- we will be asking dana to give us the names of the specific expert that's she relies upon in historic zoning setting up such a meeting. At the risk of repeating ourselves on this critical topic, the following are from dr. Dan wallick at rice university commenting directly on the three tests dana relies on. It does not protect upon machines tampered with in the field or outsiders in the office. Entirelily meaningless in the case of tampered voting machines. It's trivial for a machine to distinguish these these and thus the machine can behave correctly during the tests. Dana's parallel testing will not detect machines tampered in advance waiting for a secret knock that switches them from good mode to cheating mode. Likewise her parallel testing procedure does nothing for machines already in the field which might be tampered with while the election is ongoing. We would like to add that in Travis County and other counties in Texas, all of the hart intercivic e slates, judges booth control booth or jbc's as they are called are sent home with a precinct judge for several days just prior to the election. These sleepovers as they are called allow unfettered access to this crucial part of the voting equipment. The jbc's, about the size of an older model vcr, are the computers that actually run and record the electronic election in each polling place. Continuing with dan wallick's comments, I don't know how they would deal with corruption of her central tab later system if that were to occur, either as a consequence of an insider attack or ... Hart systems are notably weak in this regard. You asked us to provide any evidence that hacks have occurred in e slates in Travis County. We believe that the preponderance of evidence from true experts in computer programming and security clearly indicate how simple it is to undetectably hack these machines and manipulate vote totals. Without anyone knowing. So we ask you, our elected officials, can you or can dana debeauvoir prove to us that hacking has not occurred and can anyone prove that even one vote in Travis County has been counted as cast. We already know that the answer to both of these questions is no. And that should be enough reason in -- to our thinking to take these machines immediately out of use and to demand a refund from hart intercivic for our hard earned taxpayer dollars, whether through hava or through county taxes they are still our taxpayer dollars.
>> thank you, anybody else for citizens communication? Whether you signed in or not.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Tuesday, September 2, 2008 6:42 PM