-Caveat Lector- http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,57831,00.html
Voting Software Firm Gets Sued 02:00 AM Feb. 27, 2003 PT In a case calling into question the thoroughness of the certification process for touch-screen voting systems, a former engineer for an election software company has filed a lawsuit against his ex-employer, claiming executives ignored his warnings of potential defects. In the suit, filed in superior court in King County, Washington, software engineer Dan Spillane claims that his ex-employer, voting software developer VoteHere, wrongfully fired him after less than seven months on the job. The suit claims the termination occurred shortly before Spillane had planned to meet with officials of the independent testing authority responsible for certifying voting machines and the U.S. General Accounting Office. He claims the firing was "clearly in retaliation for whistleblowing." Although more than a year and a half has passed since he lost his job, Spillane said he decided to file the suit because he believed it was important to disclose potential defects in voting software applications and in the certification process. "I didn't feel that just shutting up was, in my opinion, the American thing to do," he said. The suit also seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in monetary damages. Because of the termination, Spillane claims he lost wages, suffered emotional distress and has to pay for a degree in a new field, life sciences, since he no longer wants to work in the software industry after his experience with VoteHere. Officials of VoteHere, based in Bellevue, Washington, declined to comment on the suit, saying it is not the firm's normal practice to discuss matters regarding former employees or their performance. However, a company spokesman said the firm is "aware of Mr. Spillane's filing and believes there is no merit to his claim." According to David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who is critical of touch-screen voting systems that are currently in use, Spillane's suit is significant because it could shed some light on the process by which federal and state election officials certify new equipment. "What we're hearing from a lot of different places is that you don't have to worry about these machines because they're certified at the federal level and the state level," he said. "But it's difficult to get direct information about what happens in the certification process." Dill said he had no opinion, however, on the merits of the specific claims against VoteHere. In his lawsuit, Spillane claims that he submitted about 250 defect reports during his tenure at VoteHere, where he was hired in January 2001 to test voting applications to ensure they were in compliance with Federal Election Commission guidelines and industry standards. One of the defects he cited was a data path flaw that interfered with the software's ability to correctly transmit votes from the computer screen to the record log. Other defects affected usability of touch-screen voting systems, particularly for seniors and people with "limited educational experience." Spillane claims he sent his defect reports to his manager, who classified them as highly important quality-assurance concerns. But he said his manager's managers then "de-prioritized" the defect reports and did not attempt to resolve them. The timing of the lawsuit filing coincides with efforts by advocacy groups, including a consortium led by Dill that is mainly composed of computer scientists, to improve the transparency of computer-tabulated election results. The chief complaint from many computer scientists is that the touch-screen voting systems now used in many U.S. elections do not provide a verifiable audit trail. They say voters have no way of knowing whether the vote they enter on the screen is accurately recorded in the computer's memory. To solve this problem, many computer scientists, including Dill, want computerized voting systems to provide a paper printout that voters could see, and that would count as the official ballot in the event of a recount. Although no municipality is using such a system in the United States yet, the state of California recently created a task force to examine the issue of voter-verified election results. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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