Black Box Voting Lawsuit:
Voting Machine Engineer
Sues, Alleges Machine Design Flaws

by Dian Hardison

February 21, 2003 -- This afternoon, the disturbing issues surrounding voting machine security were racheted up another notch:

Dan Spillane, a voting machine test engineer, filed a lawsuit against his former employer, DRE touch-screen voting machine manufacturer VoteHere.

Georgia recently approved VoteHere's machines, and the military is considering them for overseas voting. The company does business also in Sweden and England, and appears to be manufacturing, or planning to manufacture, components for other voting machine companies.

Spillane alleges in his lawsuit that he reported over 250 errors in the system, including critical errors of "severity 1" which include errors that may prevent the machines from correctly registering the votes. He sought meetings with company officials to express concerns about system integrity flaws, and created logs and reports of such flaws.

His complaint indicates that VoteHere did not address the flaws, and that the VoteHere system was certified by independent testing labs despite known flaws. Just when the testing lab began its examination of system integrity, VoteHere fired Spillane.

VoteHere's board of directors includes former CIA director Robert Gates. VoteHere's Chairman is Admiral Bill Owens, who was senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Carlucci, of course, now heads the Carlyle Group and Cheney is Vice President.

I will retrieve a copy of the lawsuit early next week, case # 03-2-18779-85SEA, filed in King County, Washington. If possible we will post it later in the week.