Posted on 01/12/2004 4:54:35 PM PST by GregD
Hello. Im the webmaster of www.verifiedvoting.org.
Im a Democrat, and you folks presumably will want to flame me on that point alone. But if you would bear with me, perhaps we could avoid that. I need to talk about an issue that affects all of us, and I am not here to pick a fight. I need your help.
VerifiedVoting.org is NOT about conspiracy theory. We are NOT about screaming about Wally ODell delivering the votes to GWB, but I do have to admit that his remarks were about as ill-conceived as they might have possibly been, and have made it a lot easier to recruit activists to this issue from certain segments of our population. And we certainly are NOT about one party or the other is trying to rig the machines or steal an election.
What we ARE about is looking at this situation from a non-partisan, academic, computer-science perspective. Our goal is to see that legislation and procedures are established and enforced to make sure that elections are counted properly; them may the real winner prevail, and we can all rest assured that the win was indeed valid and fair.
OK, so lets frame the situation: we have systems which run proprietary code that nobody gets to look at. At the certification stage there is no organized code review, at the development level there are no standards that have to be met. As such, the certification process appears to be completely lame. When I developed mission-critical applications for a major international retailer, we had team walkthroughs that senior members of the tech staff participated in. Each line of code was inspected, each module carefully discussed. So when you look at the observations of the Johns Hopkins study http://avirubin.com/vote/, along with other studies, it is clear that the Diebold code completely sucked but that it was not rejected by the ITA. (Sure, the code that was reviewed by Rubin was not current at the time of the review, but it was likely current code at an earlier point, and the certification process has NOT substantially improved since then.) Why did this get past the ITA? Because they (the ITA) dont get to see the code all they do is run some (undisclosed to the public) tests, give it a kiss and tell it ya look pretty, have a nice day See ya If I presented that crap to a senior manager in my former shop, Id get canned plain and simple. Boom, outta there, have a nice life
So, we have these systems running secret application code that stores our votes, our precious and irreplaceable votes, without so much as an audit trail. Buy gas? Get a receipt. Buy food? Get a receipt. Get cash or make an ATM deposit? Damn right we get a receipt! Our vote is more valuable than any of those things, and do the machines print anything that allows verification of our votes? Nope, sorry dont think so What? And with no audit trail, be that paper or whatever other technology might be is verifiable in the future, there is no means of verifying the results of an election. If the computer malfunctions, we cant prove it. If a bug creeps in, we wont know. Can we do a recount? Absolutely not all we can do is re-print the same totals that were questioned in the first place.
A common arguement that frequently comes up is related to cost. My response is "what is the price of democracy". Also, if the vendors want the business, make them find a way to build that into the product at a reasonable price. They stand to sell tens (hundreds?) of thousands of these at around $5k-6k a pop. And in San Diego, CA one vendor already committed to throw them in for free. So as far as I'm concerned, forget the cost question - it just does not seem to apply.
Is this a partisan issue, from one side or the other? Not the last time I checked, although some would like to frame it that way VerifiedVoting.org refuses to it simply is NOT a partisan issue
Has this caused problems in elections? Yes, for both parties, in recent state elections we have problems in (at least) Maryland, Virginia and (of all places) Broward County Florida...
Broward (just in the past week or so) is a total meltdown. They had a single race in which 7 Republicans were seeking a state legislative seat. 134 votes were not counted by the touchscreen machines. The race was won by 12 votes, well under the .25 percent level for a mandatory recount (state law). But you cannot recount the vote with paperless touchscreen systems. They are not designed for that.
A number of these instances are listed here: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=997
So thats the issue we have these machines running programs that are NOT REQUIRED to achieve the sort of levels of quality control expectations or scrutiny that any corporate mission-critical software application currently demands, the security on the systems appears to be TOTALLY out of control, yet this is how we are supposed to run our democracy. This just is not right!
It gets worse... We have procedures that are not being followed. How do we know? Because people made a big enough stink that California decided to audit Diebold in 17 counties. (In case you dont know, all hardware / firmware / software needs to be certified at the Federal level, assigned a NASED number, then approved by the State.) So they run an audit and what percentage of the randomly selected systems are in compliance? NONE! ZIP! NADA! Whose fault? Not sure yet, we will start to determine this on January 15 when the VSP meets again but it looks like Diebold breached the public trust by supplying (or installing) software that was not certified, and the counties allowed the installation of non-compliant code (or installed it and didnt check to make sure it was good to go.) http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article_text.asp?articleid=978
So what do we do about it? Well, thousands of our fellow Americans have spent the past 6 months (or more) calling Congressmen and asking them to support HR2239. That bill is ok, could be stronger, but it will have to do for now time is running out. Frankly it would be nice if there was a stronger automatic recount (right now it calls for .5 percent, and that really needs to go up, just to make sure these beasts arent hosed.) It would be nice to boost this in conference committee, assuming we get that far, and before the bills become law.
Currently, were looking at just under 100 Democrat cosponsors and 3 or 4 Republicans. Im sorry, but I really dont understand those numbers. Im glad we have a few Republicans that have joined in agreeing that a fairly counted election really still is the core of Americas democracy. But we need more, and thats why I am here. I need your help, and I need it pronto please
How can you help? Call your Congressmen (ask for their support of HR2239) and Senators (ask for support of S1980 which is a duplicate of HR2239). Help us get organizations to endorse this important legislation. Here are organizations that already stand behind these important bills: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/endorsers_s1980.asp
There are other action items on our site. I beg you in respect for what our forefathers left for us please help us get this done and protect the core of our democracy.
Here is what your own people are saying:
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Back in August, lelio said
I'm more scared as Diebold's engineering staff sounds like a bunch of clowns. An MS Access database on Windows 98? Are they asking to be hacked into? He referred to this story. I completely agree with him.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm
And in http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/973667/posts, Timesink said:
There is little question, though, that we can never totally trust the results of any election conducted via computerized voting, and such machines should not be allowed to be used (and indeed, I give it less than ten years until they start being outlawed state by state as various scandals pop up, real or imagined). For all the mess that Florida 2000 turned out to be, at least we had actual physical ballots to deal with. The optimal solution, of course, would be going back to something along the lines of the old standards: Paper ballots in sealed boxes; monitors from both parties (and anyone else that wants to watch) at every precinct; multiple police officers riding along as ballot boxes are delivered to the county courthouse; all boxes opened and all votes counted in front of cameras from the news media, local government and any public citizens that wished to make their own records ... along with laws requiring proof of identity in order to vote
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Whoever lelio and Timesink are, Im with you 100 percent. How can we TOTALLY trust these systems, simply looking at it from the programming perspective? Programmers make mistakes, and with the current certification procedures, those mistakes will NOT all get caught. You would be amazed if you looked at the modification logs and bug lists for the Diebold stuff. These are NOT simple programs, and complicated programs are prone to error.
The only practical solution is to demand visibility into the programs, a verification procedure that allows each citizen to check their vote, and a robust automatic (random) recount to make certain that there is no program errors, and no fraud (on EITHER side).
Help us get this done Please! Come to our site, have a look, and write to us if you have comments or questions.
www.verifiedvoting.org
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That is the exact point - there is no means to conduct a meaningful recount to check. That is why we are pursuing this.
NOTE: THIS IS NOT AN ENDORSEMENT, JUST WANTED TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING
http://www.vogueelection.com/products_automark.html
This is an interesting approach. You use the computer to configure the election, and to cast the votes. It then prints a ballot, which is then run through a scanner. You still need to inspect scanner code, and the code that combines the precinct totals, but at least there is a paper backup.
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OK, I'd like to discuss that. For starters, this is my first post and if I somehow failed to observe site ettiquite I offer my apology.
Now, if I were here to sell something, or otherwise personally benefit, perhaps the condemnation that I was "promoting my website" would be an appropriate concern. If that were the case, I would expect to be nuked.
But the fact is that I came here because we have a National crisis in the works. It is small now, and we can get our arms around it, if I can engage people and get them to help. Do you really want to deal with another botched election, this time perhaps in multiple states? Because that is exactly what is at stake here.
I'm not doing this work for personal benefit (other than my personal prayer for our country.) Indeed, I have abandoned a perfectly successful web development business because I feel this is tremendously urgent, I recognized the need for someone to step forward, and I did it.
There are a bunch of young men and women fighting on behalf of the US in Iraq and other places as we sit here in our comfortable homes. I saw a need to serve the nation, and basically "drafted" myself. Since I never served in the military, this is my opportunity to serve the US in another meaningful way.
I NEED (NO, SKIP THAT) AMERICA NEEDS REPUBLICAN SUPPORT FOR LEGISLATION THAT WILL ALLOW US TO RETAIN CONFIDENCE (HOW ABOUT "REGAIN CONFIDENCE") THAT OUR ELECTIONS ARE FAIRLY COUNTED.
So if you want to pull the thread, have at it. I am trying to express alarm about an urgent issue, and to discuss it in a non-partisan and respectful manner.
Many others, Democrats and Republicans alike, have tried to frame the electronic voting issue as a partisan debate. One fact is that there is an abundance of individual who own (or are elevated members of management) that are Republican campaign contributors. Another fact is that in VA and FL, Republicans were the ones that got hosed as a result of the absence of a paper trail. Did Democrats somehow cause this to happen? Of course not! The freaking systems somehow screwed up, in whatever manner, and because they don't have some sort of a physical backup the intent of the voter could not be verified.
Did I select a news article that would gain your attention? You bet I did. Does that really matter? Probably not, since most of the recent e-voting screwups impacted Republicans, and I need to gain your support for legislation that will benefit us as a democracy, as a nation.
There is no excuse for this. When the voter leaves the machine it should always show one more ballot cast (even if he or she cast a completely blank ballot).
We presently have around 6000 volunteers in our database.
To make this problem get solved, we need the issue to be a daily topic of discussion. If you can help get it into newspapers, TV, radio - that is the sort of help we need (besides the obvious acts of speaking to legislators).
There has been overwhelming mis-information given to people who influence these decisions. We need people who see this issue as clearly as many contributors to this thread to communicate this to the masses and help them understand how much a paper-trail solution makes sense.
As for me, when I get done with this, I'm going fishing.
Read this article: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_3
In counties that use Diebold, absentee ballots are frequently counted using Diebold scanners. The same GEMS software which is the source of the controversy (Google: diebold GEMS) which is used for counting the touchscreen votes, and has been revealed to have so many security flaws, is used to count scanned ballots.
Moral of the story 1 - Until we get better control of the overall system, voting by absentee ballots is not the complete solution we wish it to be
Moral of the story 2 - Voting by abssentee in overwhelming numbers could send a message to the elections officials that people demand a reliable, voter-verifiable solution
A voter-verifiable solution could involve producing a printed ballot, which must be surrendered before leaving the polling place, eliminate this "undervote" problem, and produce the ability to perform a recount whenever necessary.
A voter-verifiable solution would have allowed Florida to comply with their own laws concerning a mandatory recount in the event of a (less than) .25 percent win.
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