"Sarasota: Limited Investigations"

Ed Felton has this very interesting post on his blog. A snippet:

The second attempt [to investigate what happened in the FL-13] was by the Department of State (DOS) of the state of Florida, who commissioned a study by outside experts. Oddly, I am listed in the official Statement of Work (SOW) as a principal investigator on the study team, even though I am not a member of the team. Many people have asked how this happened. The short answer is that I discussed with representatives of DOS the possibility of participating, but eventually it became clear that the study they wanted to commission was far from the complete, independent study I had initially thought they wanted.

The biggest limitation on the study is that DOS is withholding information and resources needed for a complete study. Most notably, they are not providing access to voting machines. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you want to understand the behavior of voting machines, it helps to have a voting machine to examine. DOS could have provided or facilitated access to a machine, but it apparently chose not to do so. The Statement of Work is clear that the study is to be "a...static software analysis on the iVotronics version 8.0.1.2 firmware source code".


Posted by Rick Hasen at February 5, 2007 01:46 PM