I protest.

More on the Riverside "test."

It appears that Jeremiah Akin, about whom I recently wrote, has discovered this weblog. I received email from him earlier today, with some attached documents in which he thought I might be interested. He was right.

There are three documents. All three are from Mischelle Townsend and can be found at this link. One is an "interim response' to a set of questions asked by Kevin Akin, Chair of the Peace & Freedom Central Committee. The answers given are essentially trivial, concerning the job titles and identities of those who signed the "Logic and Accuracy Observation Board" form. The interesting bit is at the end, when Townsend claims that she

served on a California Secretary of State Task Force which examined security issues on DRE touchscreen voting units. The Task Force, and computer scientists who had some of the same concerns you have outlined in your list, posed security-related questions to the voting equipment manufacturers. Enclosed is a copy of those responses from our vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems.

This is interesting in two respects. The first, of course, is that it would be very interesting indeed to see the responses from Sequoia to those questions. I'm more interested, however, in knowing who those "computer scientists" were, what the questions were and how that "task force" could possibly have been satisfied having only received unsubstantiated assertions from the vendor.

The first document is honestly not really all that interesting. It's the copy of the "Logic and Accuracy Observation Board" form that makes me sit up and take notice, because of the precise wording of the declaration on that form:

We the undersigned declare that we observed the process of logic and accuracy testing of voting equipment performed by the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, as required by law and that all tests performed resulted in accurate voting of all units tested, including both touchscreen and absentee systems.

(Emphasis mine, of course.) Followed by the signatures of Bonnie Flickinger, Charolette Fox, Suzanne Martin, Lloyd Brown and Marc Troast. As Jeremiah Akin described the test in his interview in Salon, the observers could not possibly have confirmed that "all tests performed resulted in accurate voting of all units tested."

If this is the case, then, Jeremiah was quite right to refuse to sign the form. And those five people have perjured themselves.

Hmmm.