August 28, 2007
Talk Nation Radio preview from host and producer Dori Smith.
Several Talk Nation Radio stories from 2006 have prompted action from State election officials. The state is drafting new protocols designed to improve security at elections where Diebold’s AccuVote Optical Scan Voting Terminals are used. The changes will be made in light of interviews we conducted at the polls during the 2006 election and the recount of the 2nd Congressional District.
The relevant interviews were with staff members of LHS Associates, the vendor for the new machines as well as poll workers, election moderators, and various registrars of voter.
In our overviews of the story we pointed to the complete lack of willingness displayed by LHS staff members who said they had seen earlier state protocols and would not be adhering to them. This decision was relayed to us in taped interviews which we aired.
Poll workers were left in a quandry since the machines were new to them and it was their understanding in some cases that LHS workers had the authority to open machines, remove memory cards, and make replacements. They were under the impression that the LHS workers were machine technicians, something which they said repeatedly, and that they were trained to safely handle machines under authority of the Secretary of State. In reality, the LHS staff were familiar with machines because of their work over the years but were salesmen, not technicians.
We have also addressed the problem created where companies like LHS receive multi-million dollar contracts to deliver Diebold voting machines, then are trusted to help carry out voting procedures at the polls with them. Thanks to ctnewsjunkie.com and various blogs such as myleftnutmeg.org and CTVotersCount.org Connecticut voters have been able to learn more about this problem.
All state polling sites were evidently in receipt of new protocols prior to the election which made it clear that LHS staff members were not to handle machines, that they should merely offer advice on any paper ballot jam type situations. This was the first recommendation made by a new Unniversity of Connecticut voting security team under State contract.
As we pointed out three LHS staffers said they had seen the quick update to machine handling protocols faxed to their office by Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz. All three explained that they nevertheless intended to follow protocols set up for other states where machines and memory card swaps are made during elections.
After learning of the security breach we contacted the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State to inform them that LHS staff refused to follow their protocols. The State has clearly followed up on our discussions, interviews, and detailed letters which we will post here soon.
We ultimately learned that memory cards were switched during the 2nd district recount in 2006. This memory card switch does not appear to have changed the results in a tight race that was ultimately decided on less than 100 votes. Yet, LHS President John Silvestro has admitted to us that the switches of the cards were made and said mistakes were indeed made. You can hear his admissions and more on the State’s new protocols during a soon-to-be-aired interview with Dori Smith.
Preview
John Silvestro: “This was the first election and the first recount we had in Connecticut and we learned from it and we will make the proper adjustments in the future to make sure that the things that may have been improperly, I don’t even want to, I don’t want to use the word improperly–things that were not understood correctly in last November (sic last November’s election)–will be understood correctly in the future and will be handled properly and the protocols will be read, signed off on, and enforced, and adhered to.”
As you will hear August 29th, Silvestro said he blamed his staff’s improper behavior on ‘errors’. He further told us that any ‘errors’ or misunderstandings were caused by the fact that LHS Associates has been providing election services and voting machines to five states in New England over many years. We find this ironic given that the broad experience of LHS Associates in various states in New England has been a selling point of theirs.
Ironically, the State’s Managing Attorney, Michael Kozik mentioned this multi-state experience as part of his own defense of State of Connecticut voting security recently in an interview published on the Meriden Record Journal’s web page.
Meriden Record Journal:‘LHS performs the same service for five New England states and has been in business 20 years, Kozik said. “It’s their livelihood,†he said. “In terms of security after it leaves their facility, it is shipped to the registrar in tamper-evident packaging. If something has been done to the card, it will be obvious once it has reached the town.‒
We do not share Mr. Kozik’s certainty. Had we not been present at the polls and then followed up no one would have been aware of this problem. Memory card switches would not have been picked up during any random audit of the voting machines used in Montville, and they were not picked up during the State’s follow up evaluation conducted there after the election.
We will repost our previous Talk Nation interview transcripts throughout the week.
Our heartfelt thanks go to voting rights activists with True Vote Connecticut. We would also like to thank the various residents of Bolton, Ashford, Mansfield, Montville, and other towns, who spoke openly with us about events at the polls where they were working.
Voting rights activists working at the national level helped us understand what was happening in our area during the 2006 election with the Diebold machines. Professor Alex Shvartsman provided interviews that helped establish that LHS Associates acted improperly with regard to memory card handling at the polls during election procedures.
We are delighted that the combination of concerned voters and activists helped bring about change, and that our role has helped in prompting an important re-drawing of security protocols. But the fact that we discovered the discrepancy, not state officials, leaves us uneasy. The updates to protocols come very late in our opinion and we fail to understand the lack of any clear consequences to LHS staff for their refusal to adhere to Connecticut protocols. During the time that I visited the polls with my husband Joseph G. Smith to tape interviews we were very impressed by the energy people were putting into the task of counting Connecticut’s vote. We look forward to visiting them again.
The protocols were a concern for voting rights activists at True Vote Connecticut right from the start. They pointed out potential problems to Secretary Bysiewicz. She had already heeded their advice on the importance of providing paper ballots. But for whatever reason there was a delay at this highest office for voting security when it came to updating the key protocols.
What we do want to stress is that we are two months away from the 2007 election and a malicious insider could still swap a memory card in order to change the results of a Connecticut election. This vulnerability will be an ongoing problem for these machines until the new protocols are intact and all employees at the polls understand them.
You can read more about the vulnerability here.
This is a portion of an interview with Lorraine Elliott who is moderator for the town of Montville, CT. We spoke with her in Montville at her office shortly after the State’s meeting to evaluate their new voting machines post 2006 election. Again, she soon realized the seriousness of what had occurred. We are in her debt for her willingness to discuss what she witnessed.
The subject of memory cards was not raised by State officials present at the evaluation in Montville, CT., and Moderator Elliott did not realize that security had been violated prior to our interview with her.
The State confirmed August 27th that there will be no consequences against any LHS staff or against the company for their 2006 violation of the State’s protocols. The Secretary of State’s Managing Attorney for elections Michael Kozik said he did not wish to speculate on any consequences should the updated protocols be violated too during the 2007 and 2008 elections.
As you can see the cards were not only handled in 2006 in Montville they were clearly also switched. Voters should note that this switch took place during the recount of the 2nd District where the election was less than 100 votes apart.
We asked Michael Kozik if last week’s meeting to review and rewrite security protocols were prompted by our reports. “In part,” he said, “We had a number of issues that we needed to address. The issue you raised is certainly one of them. We’re developing protocols for added situations.”
Those present at last week’s meeting included state officials and LHS President John Silvestro as well as Uconn Computer Scientist Alexander Shvartsman. We are told that when the new protocols are complete we will receive a copy of them. We will of course post them. Meanwhile we will be providing more for voters here to stress the importance of citizen involvement in monitoring elections. Stay tuned to WHUS in Storrs, Connecticut, a Pacifica Affiliate station.
(This interview with Lorraine Elliot of Montville, CT took place at her office shortly after an evaluation session on the 2006 performance of the new voting technology. The topic of memory cards did not come up. Concerned about voting machine safety we decided to speak with Moderator, Lorraine Elliot to make certain that no memory card swaps had been made.)
Dori Smith: In some of the other towns where I interviewed voting officials, moderators and sometimes registrars, there was a lot of confusion about who would be able to handle the voting machine if a problem were to come up like the machine were to malfunction, the memory card or the machine itself malfunction. People in some cases were pretty willing to turn the whole thing over to LHS. Would you have a problem with doing that?
Lorraine Elliot: On the recount we had two memory cards that failed and they replaced it with their LHS one. (sic)
Dori Smith: Can you just explain what happened. So during the recount how did the memory cards fail? How did you know they were failing?
Lorraine Elliot: We had set up a new machine and we put the memory card in and it didn’t work. It didn’t print anything out. So we took that one out and put another one in and the same thing with the second one. It didn’t print. I don’t know how the memory card actually works but the little prongs I guess sometimes they don’t actually touch the inside? So the third card that we got from LHS worked fine.
Dori Smith: Did you test that one? Did you run the test cards through it first?
Lorraine Elliot: We did yes.
Dori Smith: Are you assured that running those test cards through that memory card provides a perfectly secure memory card?
Lorraine Elliot: Yes because you do a hand count first and you put all your figures down on paper and then you run them through the machine and you match the machine tally with the hand count. That’s how you test vote the machine.
Dori Smith: Now the University of Connecticut has a voting office now. They’ve been contracted by the Secretary of State’s office to evaluate machine security. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to find that the one area that they found some concerns with would be the memory cards. The gentleman who is running that, we interviewed, Alex Shvartsman did have a problem with LHS saying that they would be swapping out memory cards and handling them during this kind of a situation.
It was his concern that memory cards and machines should be intact ready to go at the time that any counting or recounting is being done. So that might be an area too where the state could reflect and come up with some new protocols do you think?
Lorraine Elliot: Yes. I don’t like taking the cards out. I don’t think that’s good protocol. I think you need to swap the whole entire machine and leave the cards sealed inside until the counts have been done.
Dori Smith: It would require having more technology available.
Lorraine Elliot: Like I said I was under the impression that we were getting extra machines and we did not get them. So if she has enough money left over maybe that will happen but right now..
Dori Smith: You didn’t have a choice because you didn’t have enough machines so you had to use the memory card provided by LHS?
Lorraine Elliot: Yes. LHS is a good company and I think they do a really good job. My whole thing with them is that I don’t the people were trained really well for this election. I mean I think there was just too short a time to do what really needed to be done.
Listeners will be able to hear this segment and portions of other interviews with Ken Hajji, Mike Carlson, Tom Burge, and LHS President John Silvestro, Wed. at 5 PM on FM 91.7 or online at WHUS.org.
Due to Mr. Silvestro’s concerns that he would be misunderstood if we aired only sound bites we will be posting the transcript of our most recent interview with him at this web site soon. (update, please note this transcript has now been published unedited per his indication that he wanted it to be.)
Transcript of August 2007 interview with John Silvestro, President of LHS
CT towns using LHS during 2006 election
Is Connecticut Outsourcing Elections to LHS Associates?
Diebold’s TSX Voting Terminal Fails UCONN’s Integrity Test Friday 20 July 2007 Inerview with Alexander Shvartsman, UConn’s Voting Technology Research Center. He found that another Diebold machine, their TSx voting terminal submitted to the state during a legal applications process in 2006 was easily hacked. Their report was forwarded to the Secretary of State’s office in California where Diebold’s TSX has also been evaluated. California’s report established the case for hacking and decertified the machine. At the LHS web site you can still purchase a TSX voting machine. John Silvestro told us he would also be glad to sell you one…
August 2007 jut prior to State meetings set up to reevaluate voting machine security protocols..
This is Dori Smith. I’m a radio reporter and I’ve been doing a story about the new voting machines that the state will be using in upcoming elections provided by LHS.
John Silvestro: Mhmmm.
Dori Smith: I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions. We’ve been doing reports on this and would like to share your thoughts with our listeners.
John Silvestro: Sure.
Dori Smith: OK. Now I’m taping is that all right?
John Silvestro: Well I’d rather do this in person as opposed to on the telephone.
Dori Smith: Well I mean you have the right to tell me that something is off the record and it will be so.
John Silvestro: OK.
Dori Smith: Now we are working on a story that has to do with both the machine technology and protocols for using it and we’ve been in touch with the University of Connecticut’s Professor Alexander Shvartsman who talked with us about all that. I just wanted to go over with you the role first that LHS might play in the upcoming elections in the State of Connecticut. I know some of your staff played a role last time.
John Silvestro: Let me ask you a question. I saw that you sent an email off to Leslie Mara (Deputy Secretary of State) and rather than supercede your questions to Leslie and me answer them I would like I guess seeing as Leslie is the contact person in Connecticut at in the Secretary of State’s office. You kind of asked her the questions and now you are asking me the same questions as opposed to getting her to get my answers from me and routing them to you.
Dori Smith: I think that’s one way of looking at it. When did you get a copy of my letter to her?
John Silvestro: Well you sent a letter asking questions about the voting equipment and you know I don’t have a problem. It’s just that there is a protocol on how they should be responded to as opposed to arbitrarily me answering them when you asked her those.
Dori Smith: Well I must say that your company granted me interviews in the past.
John Silvestro: Yeah and I’ll tell you what LHS does. LHS is a, we are a service provider, that’s what we do. We provide services and the service we provide mainly is to municipalities. We do a number of things. We started out doing (cox?)…billing many years ago and then we got away from cox billing and we started doing census processing in Massachusetts. And that led into voter registration back computers were not readily accessible. We’ve been in business since 1972 I believe, we’re in our 35th year, and to a progression of what we were doing. We ended up in the election services business. We started selling optical scan machines in New England in 1985. Since 1985 we’ve just been selling optical scans. We at first were a representative of a company called Business Records Corporate which currently I guess would have morphed into ESS.
We were a distributor for Sequoia Pacifica which now is Sequoia Voting Systems and we were a distributor for them for I don’t know six or seven years, in the punch card business. And then in 1991 we signed on with global election systems and have been selling the Accuvote since 1992 and we currently have, I’m going to say approximately 600 cities, towns, school districts, unions, who use our services and our services are to code the memory cards and we provide ballots. We also provide the support services of repairing equipment if the equipment malfunctions. And that’s kind of like what we do and that’s what election day is all about here.
All we do is we do the coding and prepare the memory cards. We have nothing to do with the pre-election testing. That’s all the responsibility of the local election officials be it the registrars or the town clerks in Connecticut. We print the ballots and we send those off and we have nothing to do then with the pre-election testing. We don’t pre code ballots to a predetermined count or anything like that. They are all blank.
The clerks or the registrars in Connecticut then mark up the ballots and do logic and accuracy testing to insure that the equipment is performing the way it should and the logic and accuracy test is to mark the ballots, hand count them, put them through the machine in all different variations, face up, face down, head first, foot first; print the results and then validate them to the hand count. Once you have done that, and that’s a prescribed protocol by the Secretary of State’s office. Once you have done that you seal the memory card in the machine and then you seal the machine in the bag. So you put the two zipper ends together which have grommet holes in them and then you put a number seal and that’s prescribed with the recommendations from Professor Shvartsman from the University of Connecticut.
Dori Smith: I guess the question we’ve been raising has to do with what if something goes wrong, you know during an election or any other procedure having to do with elections where…
John Silvestro: …Yeah but the beauty of the optical scan machine I mean from the perspective of what is, you know, what does an optical scan machine do for you that you don’t get in any other thing. Well an optical scan machine is just an automated way of hand counting paper ballots. And the beauty of the optical scan machine is that you have the paper ballots in the ballot box and at any time you can go back and recreate the election from the first voter who showed up at six in the morning to the last voter who showed up at eight o’clock at night. You have checks and balances through the system of the check in total, the check out total, the number of ballots used, and the number of ballots that are deposited through the scanner which is you know a number that comes up. Now you know that being said these are hardware, they are equipment; there are things that happen on election day. And throughout twenty years of doing this I mean we’ve probably encountered just about every situation that you can come up with. Every state has its different set of protocols. What do you do when something happens, if the machine stops taking ballots. Some states allow us you know as a service to bring a back up piece of equipment to the site, and this saves the communities money because they don’t have to buy their own back up equipment. They take the memory cards with the number of ballots that were cast through it, and you have to understand the whole process. The whole process of what goes on in a machine, and you know I’m not a technical person by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m not a computer science expert. I’m the President of a computer services company that provides services.
We don’t do software development here? None of my employees have computer science degrees, graduates, graduate students or anything like that. We’re just people who do a job based on a software that we have that allows us to code an election and create that coding on a memory card. And it’s really a fill in the blanks. What’s the date of the election, what type of an election is it, what’s the ratio coding, what are the names of the people, and you fill in the blanks and the number to vote for, number of write ins. It’s a parameter driven software that the end result is you create a memory card which then has to match the configuration of the ballots and count. So if you look at an optical scan system you need a memory device, whether it be a memory card or a memory pack. You need an optical scan machine which can read ballots. You need a ballot box to deposit the ballots in and you need the (paper) ballots themselves.
Now the memory card is no good without the machine. The ballot box is no good without the machine and the memory card. And the machine is no good without either one. The only thing that’s good through the whole process which stands unto itself is the ballots. The ballots can run an election with or without a machine. So that being said we do encounter a lot of things. Some states do allow us to, you know if a memory card has a malfunction on election day where it just won’t take any ballots and it just stops, some states allow us to recreate from the coded data base a memory card, take it to the jurisdiction, it requires the jurisdiction to run a pre-election logic and accuracy test again on that memory card; and once it passes that logic and accuracy test it’s allowed to be put in the field. All of those jurisdictions, whether it’s Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Massachusetts or Connecticut; nothing can be done without talking to the Secretary of State’s office. So they are in the loop and they know what’s going on throughout the day.
Dori Smith: Was that the case in 2006 as well?
John Silvestro: Yes. I was actually the person who was the coverage person in Middletown and I was in contact with the project manager at the Secretary of State’s office all day.
Dori Smith: So how many, I know there was a memory card replacement made in Montville and that’s because the one failed in the machine and then one failed that was on site and so LHS on site in Montville provided one according to the moderator there. And I just wondered, first of all…
John Silvestro: That was during the recount wasn’t it? That wasn’t on election day.
Dori Smith: Yeah, so you are saying…
John Silvestro: That wasn’t election day, that was just the recount. That wasn’t election day. That was the recount. I mean I think you know I’ve read some of your reports and I think you are a little confused about what went on on election day versus what happened on election day.
Dori Smith: No I don’t think so sir. I mean I don’t think I’m confused. I will say that when you do a recount you are still waiting for an election result…
John Silvestro: No no no…
Dori Smith: You are still under an election condition.
John Silvestro: No I understand that, I understand that. And you know I’m not confronting you and please don’t get defensive.
Dori Smith: No I’m not defensive but I’m protecting my integrity as a reporter and I spent lengthy time with your representatives getting their point of view and that’s what I’m doing in this case too. I just wondered, you said you were in touch with the Secretary of State’s office so were you in touch with the Secretary of State’s office prior to that switch that was made in Montville.
John Silvestro: I was not but I was told that the Secretary of State was informed at the count or at the time.
Dori Smith: OK.
John Silvestro: That’s what I was told so I…
Dori Smith: And how many of those had to be made, I mean during the recount or the election?
John Silvestro: If it happened in Montville then it’s the only one…I believe..no there was another situation where a second memory card was used but I don’t remember which town it was in and I remember reading the report about it because the, during the recount when they were putting the ballots through the machine they dropped a patch of ballots and they fell into the counted bucket as opposed to the uncounted bucket and they didn’t know what had been through the machine and what didn’t so rather than zero out that memory card and start again they started with a new memory card.
Dori Smith: OK, well anything that you could provide me with. I can give you my address and anything you can provide me with as far as records on this would be greatly appreciated because what we are trying to do is help voters maintain some transparency about elections. And obviously this is because of what has happened in not just Connecticut but in various settings all over the country.
John Silvestro: You know and I agree with that and one of the things that I agree with wholeheartedly and I’ve been very encouraged by the State of Connecticut doing it. I reinforce any Secretary of State who does it. I think the random auditing of ballots is a superior method of instilling voter confidence whether it’s 2% in Vermont or 10% in Connecticut and you know we are going to have some meetings prior to the September and November elections to put together a formalized plan for how we process, handle, any unforeseen circumstances that arise on election day and we will try to think of every one of them. But you know I think Connecticut has basically taken the lead, and I mean they are not the only ones, but they have actually passed legislation which is ahead of the Holt Bill, whether you agree with the Holt Bill and all of it’s components or you don’t, the Holt Bill does contain a post election audit piece that I think needs to be done. I mean it just needs to be done and I think the industry needs it as far as the people who are in the business like myself and I think the voters need it and you know I think it really will help provide that level of confidence in no matter which voting machine or system you are using and the people who are running your elections.
Dori Smith: Mr. Silvestro can I ask a question too, I know as you are aware probably, Professor Shvartsman and others at Uconn have just released their report on Diebold’s machine. Of course the last time we spoke with members of your staff it was because of their report on the memory cards as the vulnerability, the chief vulnerability that they could identify with the AccuVote machine made by Diebold, (in use in 25 towns in Connecticut during 2006) but their most recent report is about another machine that I believe you provide?
John Silvestro: No I don’t sell those. I mean Diebold does but I don’t.
Dori Smith: Oh. OK. I just.
John Silvestro: I have never sold a TSX machine or a touch screen machine in our existence as a company. We don’t sell them. We could have. But we have not sold one. We don’t support any. You know we run, occasionally we will do a union election if someone would give them a choice of whether they want paper ballots or electronic but there are no touch screen machines that LHS supports used in the field for municipal elections.
Dori Smith: Now you know when you go to your web site there is a product list. It says, ‘chose a product’ OK?
John Silvestro: Mmhmm.
Dori Smith: …And there is a drop down list and the second…
John Silvestro: We sell them. But we have never sold one.
Dori Smith: OK. So it says Accuvote TSX?
John Silvestro: Right. We have them available for sale but they are not certified in any state in our region so we can’t sell them.
Dori Smith: I see.
John Silvestro: And I mean I can tell you. You know I mean what I can tell you is a few other things, I can tell you about the intitial report about the Accuvote OS and I can tell you about what is available today versus what was provided two years ago or eighteen months ago or whenever it was when we took it down to Uconn. I mean there is a new certified version of the software and firmware which has a digitally signed encrypted memory card on the Accuvote OS and Professor Shvartsman will reinforce this. They have that. They are doing their research on it. And hopefully we think it will pass, hopefully it will pass muster with them and then that will be installed in the machines in Connecticut. But you know that’s down the road.
Dori Smith: I see. And as far as the TSX you, do you have any plans to discontinue selling it?
John Silvestro: No. I mean I can’t sell it if nobody certifies it in New England. It’s really, I’m a Diebold dealer and it’s a Diebold product but I can’t sell it unless somebody certifies it and Massachusetts has not. Actually they conditionally certified it but I don’t think I’m going to sell any because everybody purchased the Automark? And Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have not certified it and Connecticut didn’t. I can’t see myself selling any.
Dori Smith: You say you are a Diebold dealer. The contract that Connecticut wrote. I guess it’s like a twenty year contract?
That’s with Diebold?
John Silvestro: That’s correct.
Dori Smith: And what kind of contract do they have with LHS. Is it going to be to help on site again?
John Silvestro: LHS doesn’t really help on site. In the contract that the state signed with Diebold there is a requirement for us to train what use to be, every town needs to have an on site coverage person for two elections. OK? And when we do the training we actually, when we did the training last year and its in the training material, I mean it actually says that although you are being reimbursed for your time by LHS Associates you are actually an employee of the registrar. They are not really our employees. They are to report at 6:00 oclock in the morning and they are to leave when the registrars tell them it’s ok to go home. And for the entire day they work at the discretion of the registrars. They are under their direction. If there is a problem, and they are trained on how to solve minor problems that they don’t know how to solve or even if they do know how to solve; all problems have to be called in so we can keep a record and a log of what’s going on. Any issues that come up. Broken locks. You know anything that happens. And their job really is to serve at the direction of the registrars. So although they are reimbursed that’s part of the contract?
Now most of the people who worked last November were actually residents of Connecticut, citizens of Connecticut, there were, I think there when I looked at the list there was, during the election not the recounts, during the actual election day there were twenty five people and I think five of them were employees of LHS and twenty of them are actually Connecticut residents who we had, either former mechanics in the towns they came from where they use to maintain the lever machines and their names were given to us by the registrars when we trained them on how to handle and how to you know put ribbons in and how to take out the paper tapes, change the paper tapes when printing the reports, how the ballot boxes work, how the connections work to separate the write ins; we gave them a two and a half hour training session at the State House lobby room, not lobby room I think the Legislative Office Building.
And you know gave them all of that stuff and sent them on their way and they called in the morning when they got there and they called in at night when they went home and there were a number of them that we never heard from throughout the day because there were no issues in their locations. In some of them there were.
Dori Smith: Now did you guys provide training for election procedures in Connecticut after that?
John Silvestro: After that?
Dori Smith: I mean have…
John Silvestro: Well there is more training coming up, there is more training scheduled.
Dori Smith: I see.
John Silvestro: For the September and November elections, municipal elections, there is more training being scheduled as we speak.
Dori Smith: Now when, I know that LHS was represented at the audit that was held at 2006?
John Silvestro: Mmhmm. .I don’t know if we were there. I don’t believe so. We had nothing to do with the audit.
Dori Smith: Well someone told me that there were LHS people there. I just wondered if they were like being asked questions or if they were working again for the state?
John Silvestro: No they were not working. They weren’t. As a matter of fact for the recount we were not working for the state. We were asked to attend the recount, you know having people at the recount is not part of the contract. It was done because we were requested to please provide somebody because it’s the first time we’ve gone through this. So we didn’t charge anybody for that. We did it because we felt that the state requested it and we responded and said we would. That’s the only reason people were there was to answer questions.
Dori Smith: Now could you sell, like if someone for example, wanted to look at a machine, could you sell them one of Diebold’s voting machines?
John Silvestro: No.
Dori Smith: They have to be sold to a state official?
John Silvestro: They have to be sold to a municipality that’s licensed.
Dori Smith: I see. Has it made you wonder about, I mean you say you still have the TSX available were it certified federally and also… it is federally certified right?
John Silvestro: Yes it is.
Dori Smith: So then it would have to be certified in each state, um if I understand correctly the reason that Connecticut’s computer scientists found these flaws had to do with the fact that that particular machine was submitted for as part of an official process of legal procurement?
John Silvestro: There was an ADA component of the RFP to provide handicapped accessible voting equipment. Specifically visually impaired voters would be allowed to vote from an audio ballot that was supplied as the response to that request.
Dori Smith: So that was a consideration as an additional machine that was available?
John Silvestro: It was.
Dori Smith: Oh OK. Now again given that…
John Silvestro: The state chose the IBS voting system which is the fax back voting system. That’s what they chose in replacement to that.
Dori Smith: It’s able to be faxed?
John Silvestro: Do you know what the IBS voting system is?
Dori Smith: No I don’t.
John Silvestro: Well, I mean, the State of Connecticut has a telephone voting system that they use for visually impaired voters and handicapped voters at the polling place and I think you should call them and ask them about that because I didn’t provide it.
Dori Smith: I see, OK fair enough. Well I just wondered, overall are you satisfied with Diebold’s product at this point?
John Silvestro: Well I have, I am, I am very satisfied with their product. I have as a company we’ve been doing this for fifteen or sixteen years. We have had I’m going to guess somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to eighteen hundred recounts. We have had surprise audits. We had Ralph Nader in 2000 and I don’t remember if it was 2004 or 2000, I think it was 2004, actually pay the State of New Hampshire twelve thousand dollars to randomly select fifteen precincts that were using optical scan equipment and hand count the ballots; and after someone (seven?) canceled the recount because there were no changes. I mean I’ve had, you know, I’m very confident in the equipment. I you know thousands of re, thousands of re, at least a thousand recounts if not more. My own town uses it in Londonderry New Hampshire, and last year we had an election where two town counselors finished dead even on election day. Did a recount. Finished dead even on the recount. Did another recount and finished dead even on the recount and it was tossed, won by a toss up of a coin. So I mean I’ve seen it hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never seen a problem with optical scan voting from Global Election Systems slash Diebold Election Systems.
And I’ve you know again I haven’t had any experience with the TSX’s. I do know that, you probably won’t like this response but it’s true. You know all of the stuff that gets done by these, you know, by the computer scientists at colleges? It is legitimate, I mean obviously its done and I don’t believe that they would, you know stretch the truth. But it’s done in a controlled environment. It’s done in a closed room. The claim that software has not been seen and source code has not been seen is a fabrication.
When you go for federal certification though the EAC Federally Certified Labs you don’t supply compiled code you supply source code and it is reviewed by a number of people who can see it. And source code is also made available you know for review through that process and some states require source code to be provided as part of their certification versus some states do not. But the federal certification definitely requires source code and it is reviewed by independent people so you know I am not saying that post election audits should not happen, I’m I’m a big proponent of those because I think that’s what the industry needs to be able to put a lot of the stories that are kind of stretches and far reaching to rest and the only way you can do that is after the fact to go back through and say; if we find a discrepancy someone’s going to jail.
Dori Smith: Can I just ask about all that, um, the one thing that they did say is that you know a malicious insider would be the person they would worry the most about obviously. Now there’s only so many people who would be in that position to either work with the moderators or registrars or poll workers at any given time with this equipment. That would be either state people hired for the job or it would be in this case in 2006 it would be LHS staff people right?
John Silvestro: No because we don’t, we don’t have unfettered access to the equipment. All the access we have is in public view or in the view of the moderators or the registrars.
Dori Smith: But you had to be there because these folks didn’t really have a grasp of the technology and didn’t have technicians so…
John Silvestro: Well I mean there are things that you write up and the state wrote up for them. You know how are you going to recount the ballots when you do a recount, you are going to look at every ballot and you are going to feed every ballot that’s properly marked through the machine and the ones that are not properly marked by the voters you are going to put in a pile and you are going to take those and you are going to hand count them and that’s the process and the procedure for running a recount. And we had had other communities in the past run recounts without doing that process, with just taking all of the ballots and feeding them back through the machines.
Well you know when somebody mis-marks a ballot, puts an x in part of the oval instead of filling in the oval you know there are tolerances and the machine can read it in one direction and maybe not read that mark in another direction which is why you take those ballots to get a 100% accurate count. And you put them in a pile and you hand count them. So…
Dori Smith: Now that’s part of the protocol today and I guess what part of the effort you know to document all of this and again make it transparent is to make sure that protocols be set up that can last for decades and that the technology will be secure through all of that time. And again speaking as someone who could come in and let’s say bring a back up machine, bring a back up memory card, if that’s the vulnerability and you do have someone who wants to you know see let’s say a Republican in instead of a Democrat or vice versa then theoretically if you are talking about thousands of ballots and you are talking a protocol that could at any time in one town let’s say break down. I mean this is what we have seen and time and time again in Florida, in Ohio, and so on. So it is a fragile system. Let’s face it. That’s why we are having this conversation. And what I’m saying is if someone is bringing in this back up equipment, bringing in back up memory cards; yeah I mean you say that the card that they made a replacement used in the recount was coded for the town of Montville?
John Silvestro: I’m not quite sure which town it was. I saw it the other day but I don’t remember so I’m not going to, I don’t remember I really don’t.
Dori Smith: All right.
John Silvestro: If you knew me you would understand one of the things I’m very good with instances, but I’m not very good with names. Names are very difficult. I’m one of those people who can add up numbers in my head without a calculator but I am not (illegible) at remembering names.
Dori Smith: Chuckles. Well in any case I mean let’s just say if the technology is understood by someone who is bringing back up equipment and it’s not understood by the person who is there in particular, they have the same kind of problem, they understand theory and philosophy, that’s their specialty, but they don’t understand technology let’s say.
John Silvestro: Right.
Dori Smith: And they don’t know what this person is doing, and this person is putting a different machine, a different memory card….
John Silvestro: Right but the beauty of the system, the beauty of the election system; I’m not talking about Diebold, ES&S, I’m just talking about the system, and the system particularly in New England is the system here is not in control at a local level down to the point of districts or precinct. So unlike a lot of the other parts of the country where it’s county controlled and the data comes into a central location at the county and that’s where all of the results are, all of the totals and everything is printed, and you have a single point of failure because you follow everything from every precinct into this one place; as opposed to what we do here in New England which is by the precinct level or the district level and you produce totals at a district, precinct level, which are then put on the wall for public view and create an audit trail which allows you to track back the totals from that point back to the town clerks office, or the city clerk’s office; from there it goes to the Secretary of State. But totals are created and an audit trail is created all the way back to the Secretary of State’s office. So you know I mean when you talk recount, and I can’t think the recount was I think Congressional District 2? Is that what it was?
Dori Smith: Yes it was. The election was decided by less than 200 votes.
John Silvestro: Right. OK. But it was spread over I believe twenty, twelve towns, ten towns? I can’t remember how many towns there were total. But they were of the twenty five that used Optical Scan, I think it was ten Optical Scan towns and I don’t know how many of the other towns there were.
Dori Smith: Mmhmm. There were twenty five towns and ten of them were in the 2nd District is the way I recall it.
John Silvestro: And then there were you know there were other towns in the 2nd District that were using the lever machines.
Dori Smith: Well let’s say then hypothetically we are looking at a federal election run in the State of Connecticut OK? You know, you wouldn’t have to alter the vote by that much theoretically and unless someone recounts every single vote in the state by hand they might not pick up on a descrepancy that was actually intentionally caused let’s say by someone who made a switch here or there or changed a memory card or what have you?
John Silvestro: Right but you would have to have you know I mean again you can create audits for every situation. So let’s just say for the example that a memory card needed to be changed because both memory cards failed OK? And your choices were either A) create a new memory card, put it through the pre election testing and put those ballots through or B) a hand count. And let’s just say you chose the replacement memory card. Then automatically in my mind that precinct should come into the post election audit OK? And that you know although you are going to select 10% that one precinct may end up being, and it should, end up being one of the automatic entries into that 10% post election audit. And that’s the beauty of post election audits is that you can take situations that arise on election day and say OK. We want to do 10% of 793 with whatever that comes to, 79 or let’s call it 80 precincts. But we had problems in precinct you know A, B, C and D or E and F and whatever. Eight precincts? Those eight are already included and the other 72 are going to be randomly withdrawn. And that’s how I believe you would do this. That’s how you insure that no matter what happens that post election audit would be used to tell who is ever doing the election, and I don’t care if it’s LHS, I don’t care who it is, that at the end of the day we are going to make sure there was no, you know, jury rigging monkey business, OK so that’s you know what I think is a good solution to the problems that arise. That’s why I’m a big proponent of post election audits. It can be used to solve a number of issues that may or may not be expected on election day. And go back to the voters and say even though all of this happened when we counted those ballots they were the same today as they were on the election day.
Dori Smith: But I must say finally that the Secretary of State’s office was not aware, you know in my interviews with them, they said they were not aware that this memory card switch had been made. Given that that was the direct information from their computer expert they hired to go through the security measures for the machine, and they didn’t seem to know about this…
John Silvestro: Well there was a number of people who work in the office though.
Dori Smith: But I’m just saying…
John Silvestro: Who was working that Sat. or that Thurs. or whatever day it was. I have no idea, I know that at the time there were people there who could be contacted. And I’m just going to say I wasn’t there Dori so I really, I’m going to tell you my employees told me that they did contact the Secretary of State’s office.
Dori Smith: So what this raises though is the whole fact that it was up to them to do so and again when you are talking about an election….
John Silvestro: Well there is a meeting scheduled for August for us to go through and do a meeting on situations that can arise and the protocols for those situations so that we can you know document… and the other, whether you want to, you know take it for what it’s worth OK? We did last November’s election and there were things that you know the recount came up and the recount, we put the protocols together probably the week prior to the recount if it was even that far out. It might have been three days before OK? And we did the best we could to train people for those recounts. And you know we got through it you know? I don’t think you saw any big swings in polls. There was one community that was eleven votes short and two days later called and said you know we weren’t eleven votes short so I don’t know of any instances that came up that was not reported to anybody. I mean calls the calls were made and people were told and the information and the communication lines were open.
Now does that mean that a person who took the call relayed it to everybody else? I don’t know. I can’t answer for everybody through the process….
Dori Smith: Well it’s sort of…
John Silvestro: I have documentation here from my employees here from what went on at every one of those recounts. I have a folder and I have in it what went on OK? So I know what my employees put into our computer system as to what went on. I don’t know anything else. I can only speak for what I know here.
Dori Smith: Theoretically….
John Silvestro: Mmhmmm.
Dori Smith: Do you think that it is sound protocol for a state to purchase a machine from a vendor that is in this for profit and then also hire them to do training and then also hire them to be present at the polls and then to get information from them on which, you know, maybe certain numbers of results could hinge, and then at the end of everything, work with them on continued evaluation of those protocols and machines and so on. I mean do you think this is a kind of privatization of elections?
John Silvestro: No it’s not. It’s totally public. Everything is done in a public venue.
Dori Smith: One minute they are working for you the next minute they are working for the registrars?
John Silvestro: They are not working, who whose, the people who are there they work for the registrars now. Most of them are mechanics. Most of them are people that who have been supporting your lever machines for the past 35 years.
Dori Smith: No I’m I was speaking of the ones that you know do work for LHS and then work for the registrars of Connecticut and go back and forth that way. I’m just asking your opinion. Do you…
John Silvestro: My opinion is yes because I feel very confident that the process itself is better left in the private thing than it is in the public venue when I see the influence that each political party can put on people and make things happen in this country whether right or wrong, I mean if you think about it and I’d ask you the same way. Would you like politically connected people to vote parties, to be in charge of running you know the process of creating voting machines, counting ballots and you know would you like that? I don’t know…
Dori Smith: Well I can’t vote for you.
John Silvestro: What?
Dori Smith: I can’t vote for you can I? I mean you’re….
John Silvestro: No but if I do something wrong you can put me in jail..
Dori Smith: Well not easily but I mean I’m just saying I think the political system hopefully in a democracy is accountable to the public and…
John Silvestro: It’s exactly, accountable to the public. Absolutely.
Dori Smith: OK. So.
John Silvestro: I believe that totally.
Dori Smith: And I mean just for what it’s worth in terms of what corruption is about if you are talking politics usually there is money involved right?
John Silvestro: Right but I have, I find it you know, I mean I do find this kind of incredulous if you think about it. You have had a voting system in place in Connecticut for the better part of fifty years that has not produced one ounce of paper. Not one paper, auditable paper trail for fifty years. And the Secretary of State in my opinion, and you can say that OK I might give you this opinion or not but in a lot of people’s opinion you can go out and look at the research, you can look at the CalTech Survey, I mean you know that was done, and when they recommended that Optical Scan with a paper based Optical Scan system is the best voting system for you to chose for security, reliability, and audit ability.
And the Secretary of State in Connecticut took something that was basically ‘trust me’ voting, pull the lever and we hope all of the bands in the back were working and the counters are changing, and replaced it with an auditable paper based system that provides back end auditing for the integrity of the election to both the voters, the public and for the politicians who are running. And then turns around and it seems to be creating more of a conflict than there was before. You know probably a lot of the questions you should ask you should ask the people who get elected and lose the elections….
Dori Smith: Can I just a question, I mean in this state there were a lot of voting activists and I spoke with some of them about the process they were involved in prior to the selection of the machine and have you ever met with voting rights activists who have worked on you know helping select which voting machines are going to be chosen and how they get submitted and all of that?
John Silvestro: Like have I worked with them?
Dori Smith: Have you ever spoken to them, met with them and do you understand that in this state of Connecticut part of the reason that the Optical Scan with the paper ballot system was chosen was that people advocated for it. So I just was curious if you knew them or knew of their efforts?
John Silvestro: I know of I think it’s Verified Voting Connecticut?
Dori Smith: Well there are several yeah.
John Silvestro: I mean I think I have. I mean I’ve discussed, um I’ve had discussions with Bill Bunnell on the day the announcement was made. And somebody else was with him and I don’t remember who that was.
Dori Smith: But so they are kind of in a way they are simpatico with what you are saying and I’m not you know trying to represent their views but from what I’ve heard in speaking to people that have done that advocacy work I understand that they are very interested in having a paper trail ballot that’s verified by voters and that’s verifiable after the election. I will say though that they are also equally concerned about protocols now and I read their material on that before I did any interviews and that one of the concerns was that, you know one of the concerns was the lack of investment in time and validation or certainty in the protocols that exist between the Secretary of State and other state offices versus the various towns carrying out the elections; what their understandings are and what your understandings are.
Now you can say a lot of things about the reports I did. But you can’t say that I didn’t learn clearly at the polls that there is confusion there. I mean I don’t think the confusion was mine. I think the Secretary of State told me they sent you a protocol that said don’t handle the machines. I think everybody from LHS I spoke with said their protocol was to handle the machines and they said they saw that protocol from the Secretary of State. So there was a difference there wasn’t there?
John Silvestro: I really um again I wasn’t there on site and I’m going to have to say if you are telling me that then I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Dori Smith: But I mean I did transcribe my interviews with them. I…
John Silvestro: According to my employees I mean your transcribed interviews were in some cases taken out of context. Now I’m not going to challenge you on that. I mean you produced a report and you have every right to do that and you talked to my employees and…
Dori Smith: I don’t think they want me to air the whole time I spent with them. No I wouldn’t think so where they talked about.. do you want me to…(edited for privacy sake, further info. pending.)
John Silvestro: You have employees in Connecticut who were doing recounts and as a matter of fact a couple of the people who were there were not even in Connecticut for the election. They were people who were in other states for the election in November and because of the resources we had uh had to be dispatched to Connecticut or the recount at the request of the Secretary of State OK? So there were people who may have been confused about protocols between New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut. I mean I do support you know five states and they may have spoken to you about the average or the way things are done in other states which is different than the way it’s done in Connecticut. So I mean it’s not like its a uniform protocol between all of the states. Some of the states allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states do not allow us to handle equipment. Some of the states allow their local people on site to open the ballot box. Other states do not allow them to open the ballot box without calling in to the Secretary of State’s office first. So I mean there’s different protocols. We are allowed in New Hampshire, you know, in New Hampshire to do one thing that we are not allowed to do in Massachusetts. We are allowed to do some things in Massachusetts we are not allowed to do in New Hampshire….
Dori Smith: Well one thing I will leave you with…a thought here…
John Silvestro: …This was the first election and the first recount we had in Connecticut and we learned from it and we will make the proper adjustments in the future to make sure that the things that may have been improperly, I don’t even want to, I don’t want to use the word improperly; things that were not understood correctly in last November will be understood correctly in the future and will be handled properly and the protocols will be read, signed off on, and enforced, and adhered to. So if they weren’t in November it will not happen again in the future. And that I can assure you.
Dori Smith: Well I appreciate your saying that and especially to me under these circumstances. And I also appreciate the fact that your employees were willing to take the time to speak with me and that they followed up and that they told me to the best of their knowledge what they were there to do and what the circumstances were and I really valued their openness actually.
John Silvestro: And that’s what I’ve always told them unfortunately I mean my employees have always tried, look I am a customer service business and every one of my employees is a customer service representative. And when you are a customer representative, customer service representative, your jobs is to do the words h.e.l.p. And it’s to help people either understand the process, tell people how to use the process, help people to learn how to use the process, it’s always to help, so my employees are very helpful I mean and that’s what makes them the good employees that they are and that’s what makes them valuable to the company and it also makes them valuable to our customers because they are always willing to help. They are always willing to (illegible) you would be surprised at the number of letters I have of emails I have from registrars in Connecticut or clerks in New Hampshire or clerks in Maine about how my employees go above and beyond what they are expected to do. Unload trucks when they weren’t needed to. Carried stuff in when they weren’t need to because they were there. Explained things beyond what they needed to explain. So that’s what my employees do. And unfortunately Dori I mean they can sometimes be overly helpful. It was a new process in Connecticut and they were trying to educate as well as help. And you know maybe they can be overly helpful sometimes.
Dori Smith: Um. I’ll interpret that the way that I think it should be interpreted after I’ve had a chance to reflect and listen to this whole conversation again.
But what I will say to you to is that I would like to speak with you again after the Secretary does get back to me and I’d like to do that if possible under more public circumstances where I’m not the only one asking questions because I think one of the things that people are concerned about is that they hire you know various people to work for them in their lives or they purchase products at a store and they know the system when it comes to purchases, when there is money involved; they know that system. But I think a lot of people are under the impression that when they vote that’s different. That doesn’t have anything to do with money. There’s nobody making a profit who stands to lose if they describe something that went wrong. And that’s very much on the minds of voting rights activists now who are looking at the privatization process as you know–you can say what you want to about the way states do elections but we do need to talk about the pros and cons in a democracy of hiring people to do these tasks on which democracy depends.
John Silvestro: But you always have hired people. I mean some people have not. I mean however you look at it you know whether it was Connecticut whether it was Missouri I don’t care where it is. I mean even today people who are hand counting paper ballots are being paid whether they are local citizens they are still being paid.
Dori Smith: But they don’t have multi million dollar contracts at stake.
John Silvestro: Well they don’t have multi million dollar contracts at stake and that’s you know that’s correct, they don’t. But you also have you know the issue of support and service and longevity and you know that’s one of the things that you get with privatization. That’s you know why doesn’t the Military make their own planes? You know you can go in and look at privatization and say why are a lot of these things done, you know, and on the other side why are they not? Why is health care not, why is is privatized why isn’t it public? I mean you know it’s a discussion of this country and I think it’s a good discussion. I mean it’s beneficial to have these discussions, to talk about what should and shouldn’t be done. How things should be done.
I’m very concerned. This is me, this is not as a President of LHS Associates so if you want to talk about this or quote it or anything, I’m just as concerned that the Parties would be involved. The Parties would actually be involved with election process if it wasn’t privatized.
Dori Smith: Well it’s a good point. It’s a kind of a separate discussion unless you want to talk too about the party affiliation of any of your staff who might work at an election site or at a recount site.
John Silvestro: And that’s of it is because that if you, I don’t even know the party affiliations of my staff, but if you went and polled them you would probably get the same breakdown in my staff that you get in the rest of the country. It’s that you have Republicans working for you…
Dori Smith: But my point is you don’t remove the problem OK by having LHS represent the process and we’re….
John Silvestro: I don’t represent the process. All I do is provide a service. All I do is provide the ability to code a machine on a memory card which then once it leaves it my possession becomes the possession of the election officials on the location and it’s their job by protocol to ensure that I have done everything in my power to do it right and that they’ve checked and double checked and rechecked and then you have post election audits and you do all of that and you’ve… what have you left me? I mean I never would but what have you left me? There’s nothing I can do, there’s nothing LHS can do, there’s nothing Diebold can do, because once it hits the registrar’s hands the election is run by the registrars. It’s not run by me you know? And I don’t run anything on Election Day. I provide a service of support on Election Day. I don’t run anything. I don’t swear any people in. I don’t count any ballots. I don’t go through and review, oh look what you did wrong. I don’t make voter determinations on Election Day. I don’t help voters understand the system. I don’t, you know, I didn’t make the instructional DVD to help voters learn how to use the system. I don’t do anything on Election Day. All I do is support the process up until then but on election day, I don’t do anything, you know, you make it sound, you don’t make it sound, you are insinuating that I actually count the ballots on election day and I don’t.
Dori Smith: No I’m actually just saying that the election machines that are provided by Diebold through you had their memory cards coded and set up by you and your office has provided training. Those are three very crucial steps to the operation of that machine before it ever hits the polls and then when it gets there if your staff is there you are playing a role. And let me just add that one of the things that has concerned people about these specific kinds of machines rather than let’s say the lever machines or what have you, the new interest is largely because many votes at one time can be changed in some settings with some machines; maybe this one maybe not. But in general the concern is that votes can be changed and not ever able to be discovered and I’ve read and I’ve interviewed…
John Silvestro: Doesn’t the post election audit solve…
Dori Smith: Well you could have said ‘post election audit’ in Ohio. You could have said ‘post election audit’ in Florida. The point is…
John Silvestro: What happened in both of those places?
Dori Smith: There was fraud committed. There was fraud committed in Ohio.
John Silvestro: Who went to jail I mean other than I know who went to jail in Ohio OK? Who, which, and I’m not even going to defend any one particular manufacturer of voting machines, which voting machine manufacturer went to jail in Florida and Ohio?
Dori Smith: You know you raise an interesting point. I don’t think that should be the measure. I think having, I think having a voter, um, let’s see. I think having an Election Day protocol intact and the most secure standards for every machine possible on Election Day is what we are going for. And so if anything is a problem in there that’s worth noting.
John Silvestro: Absolutely.
Dori Smith: The committing of fraud is only to, you know noting that, is only serve as a reminder that these things do happen. That they involve individual human beings who make mistakes or who commit crimes willfully what have you and that because it’s a human system we need to do our job of….
John Silvestro: It’s a human system and it has been and prior to voting machines and prior to voting machine companies the process was paper ballots and you, I’m sure you have read history and you know the paper ballots were manipulated…again…
Dori Smith: Absolutely, oh none of this is new….
John Silvestro: Again you know through the ages and actually machines, if you read responses from people at state levels. In New Hampshire I was at a meeting where the Secretary of State attested to the fact that the machines were more accurate because Connecticut, New Hampshire is a split state. They only have a hundred communities that use voting machines and two hundred and twenty communities hand count paper ballots. Same thing in Vermont. Same thing in Maine. And they all will tell you the same thing. Is that the machines are more accurate than the hand count paper ballots…and they…
Dori Smith: Well accuracy is what we are going for…
John Silvestro: And they leave less probability of fraud because you an have one or two people in a polling place just move fifty votes from one stack to the other an impact an election whether it’s done intentionally by hand or whether it’s done by accident. One stack of fifty of counting paper ballots and saying OK if this fifty belonged to candidate A and it really belonged to candidate B and went to candidate A’s pile and got counted as a fifty and impacted that count and it’s simple to do. It’s just moving a stack of fifty papers from one stack to the other. So I mean you know it’s not anything new and originally I think voting machines were a solution to the human part of hand counting paper ballots and now you know Dori I don’t disapprove you’re doing what you are doing and I don’t disapprove of anybody who has been a voting activist for being involved. I just want them to be reasonable and understand the system and I want them to take everything in total. That when a voting, you know I read the Uconn report. I read the Uconn report that said a voter could put a sticky memo paper on a ballot and pull it out and vote it three or four times. Well I’d like to know how you are going to stand in the middle of a room with twelve to fifteen people standing around and voters backed up behind you and you are pulling the ballot out and nobody is going to see you. There’s a lot of things that could be done but in the real world you can’t do them. In the real world in an open room with open people and moderators and check list people and other voters you can’t do that stuff. But you know it’s in the report. OK it looks like wow it’s a flaw in the system but at the end of the day even if you could do it you only had a hundred and ten people check in but you’ve got a hundred and thirty five votes in the machine. You know what you are going to do? You are going to identify that and you are going to hand count that precinct to find out what the heck’s going on. The checks and balances are there and they are there for reasons and you know I personally have full confidence in them and I would do everything in power to educate the public to have the same level of confidence that I do. And people will look at me and say well you have confidence because you make a living at it. Well yeah that’s true. I’m not going to deny that but I have also a level of confidence in the system. I am a voter. I am a citizen. It concerns me. I’m concerned about the country. I’m concerned about the people who are in office and I would not do anything to circumvent the process because it’s worked really really well for a long time. But I think people need to be educated and understand how they work, what you can do what you can’t do, what real life is; why do you put seals on memory cards? Why do you put seals on bags? Why do you make people sign for the sealed numbers before they go out and they come back, and yes they are equipment just like the lever machines were equipment and bands broke and machines had to be taken out of service and counts were lost. The beauty of an optical scan system is you never lose the count because you have the paper ballot whether you hand count them at the end of the day or whether you put them back through a machine you can count them, recreate the election, get an accurate count of what the voters intended and then you have the ballots to also audit on the back end. I can’t explain it simpler than that.
Dori Smith: Are you going to be holding any kind of educational effort yourself? I mean are you going to be doing any of the training yourself?
John Silvestro: Probably after I retire. I’m going to run around the country and talk to people.
Dori Smith: Chuckles. Well let me just add…
John Silvestro: And I’ve only got a couple of years left so…
Dori Smith: OK. Well I appreciate your spending this time. You know I was curious. I mean I would like to attend a training. I’ve heard that they are pretty, you know, pretty advanced and I’d like to see what goes on.
I’m here to do the story as it unfolds. To tell it like I see it and as it appears to me to be.
John Silvestro: And I have a lot of experience with these because I’ll tell you a story. I have also um I was you know a local activist if you want to call me that in my town. I mean I’ve been on the budget committee and the finance committee and I’ve been a town counselor and I’ve had to run for election in my own community using the voting machines that my company sold. So I’ve taken a lot of the questions and I’ve fielded a lot of the information and I’ve taken the hits and I’ve got some pretty thick skin. But I tell it like it is and, and I tell it from a rational I think point of view. The people, a lot of this you know if you are an activist and you don’t want to believe what I say there is no point in me talking to you because you are not going to believe what I say. If you listen to what I say and you understand what I say and you understand how the process works and you’ve worked at a poll, and you’ve seen what the moderators do and you’ve seen what the registrars do and you understand their responsibilities and you’ve seen the checks and balances of the check in list and the counts and the number of ballots that are printed and the number of unused ballots and you do the math that if I give you a 1000 ballots and you have three hundred people on the check list there had better be 300 votes in the machine and there had better be 700 ballots that weren’t used.
That is all part of the process that you can’t arbitrarily make up numbers and stick them in. You have no idea prior to Election Day how many people are going to vote in each precinct. That’s the randomness of it. You have no idea. If you had a, you know, I read about a group of people who manipulated the Thomas Jefferson election back in whenever, well (in principle?) you know it’s very good to do that when you knew what the results were. I can probably manipulate anything in hindsight once I know what the results were. But when you have no idea what the voter turn out is going to be, what the percentage is, how many voters are going to show up, how many are going to go in one direction or another.
There are so many unknown variables in an election. That’s the beauty of it. I mean I don’t know if you have ever done a recount. Have you ever, you know witnessed a hand recount?
Dori Smith: Well yeah I mean I was at several.
John Silvestro: No no hand recounts where they actually hand count the ballots…
Dori Smith: They did hand count the ballots.
John Silvestro: Then you have probably seen when you start out the day and you know it’s a fifty fifty election and both candidates have got like 49.9 and one got 50.1. And statistically if I told that to anybody they would think that all of the ballots would be basically fifty fifty all the way through the day but you would go through streaks. I’m sure you saw it where there would be fifty ballots in a row for one candidate and not one for another and you would scratch your head and go how the heck did this end up fifty fifty? Well about twenty minutes later you get a batch of fifty that all go to candidate B and you realize the randomness of people coming in and not you know that’s part of the process.
Dori Smith: It’s a tricky business. I will say someone told me once that an agenda sounds like a kind of negative thing to have but we all have them and he pointed out to me that you know we are not always aware of our agendas. But the most difficult agenda to get someone to understand they have is one where their bread and butter depends on something, but their bread and butter also depends on portraying themselves as open minded and fair minded and even handed across the board. Now that is a conflict right there. If someone says to you you’ve got to represent these machines, and someone says to you well but you’ve got to represent the best possible voting standards in every state you are working in…those are two very different subjects.
John Silvestro: Yeah and I try not to, the only recommendation I have ever made to a Secretary of State’s office, and you can, I’m on record in New Hampshire, I’m on record in Connecticut, I’m on record in Massachusetts, was please pass legislation for post election audits. That’s the only recommendation I have ever made on the process of election day and afterwards, that’s the only one I’ve ever made.
Dori Smith: Well let me just suggest then if that’s your concern that you get very very accurate protocols in place for your staff that if a, as you indicated, if a machine malfunctions, a switch is made, anything comes up that is unusual, that reporting is going to become crucial to any post election audit process. People need to know that it happened, they need to know exact details, and the right people need to know.
John Silvestro: Right and you can’t hide it. There’s nothing you can hide in, in the business I’m in you can’t hide anything because there’s too many, not because you want to but even if you wanted to, there’s too many people involved. In order to run elections as you said earlier you need human beings. And you need a lot of human beings you know and that’s again the beauty of the system is that, not the system that I’m talking about now, when I say system I mean the Amerian electoral process the number of eyes that are involved, especially in New England, I really, I’m glad I live in New England. Of course if you put this on the radio I might have people criticizing me from around the country but you know in New England these small polling places we have, the breakdown of the polling places and the quantity of polling places, I mean you know it’s expensive to do but we don’t have lines that run to or three or four hours as we all read about in 2006. Yeah maybe on Presidential election night you may have to wait 35 or 40 minutes but we don’t do the things here that get done in the rest of the country. I’m as appalled as anybody else. Again, you can say it’s my agenda. It’s not my agenda. I’m a citizen. I’m appalled when I read about people in Ohio having to wait nine hours to get in to vote. That is absolutely ludicrous. That’s ridiculous. That should never happen. That should never even be part of the problem. I mean I can’t believe in today’s world with today’s technology that we have issues like that.
Punch cards. Punch cards were decertified in Massachusetts in 1998 because the Secretary of State, and it was all over the press, knew the punch cards were inaccurate. They were not dependable. You know they would run recounts with punch cards and the counts would change from the first time through the reader to the second time by as much as 20%. Those little chads all over the floor didn’t get counted the first time got counted the second time. And the Secretary of State in Massachusetts, they had it in Fall River, and that was the biggest cause, they went to court and he decertified punch card in 98 and yet in 2000 what did we do? In the rest of the country 60% of the votes were counted on punch cards.
Dori Smith: Well they decertified Diebold’s Accuvote TSX voting machine in California but there it was again.
John Silvestro: Well it was, I don’t know, I mean again I don’t know the instance…
Dori Smith: They decertified it in 2006.
John Silvestro: That’s outside of…I don’t know. That’s, I can’t comment on that..
Dori Smith: I mean you still have it for sale if it were certified in Massachusetts or in Connecticut you would sell it to them right?
John Silvestro: If they certified it.
Dori Smith: So I mean I think I made my point.
John Silvestro: That’s, but that’s the independent part of it. That’s the part that you know that’s not public, I mean that isn’t in public view. The certification process is done by the states who I would hope represent the voters and the residents of their state.
Dori Smith: But the State hired Professor Shvartsman who found flaws in that machine.
John Silvestro: He found flaws in the machine in his situation. He would find flaws in my lap top. And now I’m going to sound like I’m defensive because now you are gonna, you are probably going to portray it this way but I’m not. The reality is it’s a computer. It’s a computer and I’ve got my computer here sitting on my desk and if I gave it and I’ve got all kinds of firewalls and all kinds of stuff built into it and I have no idea how to get into it. But if I took this computer to a computer science department with computer science post graduate and undergraduate students and left it there for a week they would get into my system.
Dori Smith: I’d like to think that a nice looking post graduate or computer scientist, professor, might wind up getting into a position of having their hands on a voting machine prior to an election and that that possibility is what Professor Shvartsman at…
John Silvestro: Well fortunately there aren’t any of them working for me…
Dori Smith: Laughter. But I’m just saying…
John Silvestro: But I’ve had to exclude people. I’ve actually thought about it. I have actually I would not hire, if I tell you this this is true just because of the business I’m in; I would not hire, I would not want the liability of having a computer science degreed person working for me working on computers.
Dori Smith: Well it’s a big responsiblity you have sir. John Silvestro, is that the right pronounciation.
John Silvestro: That’s the correct pronunciation.
Dori Smith: Well John Silvestro I am very glad that you were able to spend this time with me and I look forward to speaking with you again.
John Silvestro: Well I hope you understand that I am forthright and I’m not trying to hide anything. It’s just sometimes, and you know I’m going to say it to you because look I’m not a baseball player I’m not a football player, but the Press can be two types of people. There are people who listen and report and then there are people who listen and then take stuff out of context and report. And you know that can be very difficult when you are trying to maintain your position as the President of a company as you know a father and a parent and you know a grandfather and upstanding member of your community which is, I would consider myself to be in Londonderry so. I mean I gave twenty years of public service to my town so I think I’m viewed in a very good light and someone who has integrity.
Dori Smith: Well thank you again for speaking with us. Take care.
John Silvestro. You’re welcome. Thank you.
