Posted on 07/31/2003 4:13:06 AM PDT by kattracks
The expensive, federally mandated "cures" to the election snafus of 2000 are worse than the problem, experts warn.
"What we know is that the machines can't be trusted. It's an unlocked bank vault ... a disaster waiting to happen," warns David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has gotten more than 110 fellow scientists to sign a petition urging more accountability in voting technology.
The researchers think problems with software systems will result in hacking and even more fraud than usual, with people casting extra votes and poll workers changing ballots undetected.
"Techies and election bureaucrats are facing off in Denver this week at the annual meeting of the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers, where voting security is a popular topic of discussion,” the Denver Post reported today.
"The scientists have convened a separate, side conference in hopes of convincing those who control the purse strings in local governments to hold off buying billions of dollars in computerized voting equipment until the federal government sets clear and tough standards to ensure their security."
After the uproar over hanging chads in Florida, where thousands of Palm Beach County Democrats claimed to be too stupid to use a Democrat-designed ballot, Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a comically titled law perfect for a dumbed-down society.
Several states have sought extensions for the law's 2004 deadline to replace punch-card systems, among other "reforms."
'The Standards Aren't There'
"There's a sense of urgency about complying with the federal mandate. But we're urging counties not to rush into buying expensive equipment before it's proven in the interest of voter integrity," said Lisa Doran of the Colorado Secretary of State's Office.
"The funds aren't there. The standards aren't there. We've advised counties not to buy machinery that there's no standards for," Doran told the Post.
Touch-screen voting is hardly foolproof anyway. In a test run in notorious Palm Beach County last year, many people still needed help.
"There's such a rush ... to buy this stuff, but people don't have their acts together," said Dill, who calls HAVA a "collection of back-room deals" that fails to ensure security. He faults the law for not requiring paper receipts.
Professor Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College, who wrote her doctoral thesis on electronic voting machines, agrees. She has testified before government hearings that the machines cannot be trusted unless they produce a printed record for each voter to confirm.
Some government officials dismiss these warnings. "It's fear-mongering by a few people who want to go back to the 19th-century way of voting," said Carol Snyder, clerk and recorder of Adams County, Colo.
'Serious Flaws'
However, the Post reported today, "Though controversy over those standards has been brewing for years, it heated up last week with news that the software that runs many computerized voting machines has serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and poll workers to tamper with ballots undetected.
"A team at Johns Hopkins University's Information Security Institute examined software from the Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines in use throughout the nation. The software could be manipulated and the outcome changed by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, researchers said."
The researchers wrote: "Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. ... [A]s a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy [republic] at risk."
CNET.com noted, "The criticisms echo a fundamental issue that many security researchers have raised with most current systems: There is no way to verify that a vote was correctly recorded and no permanent record is kept.”
Diebold said the researchers used code that was out of date and never employed in an election. It complained that the report focused only on the software and not the other security measures the company uses.
Diebold President Tom Swidarski dismissed the study as a "homework assignment" by a bunch of graduate students aimed as a "misguided" "personal attack" on his company.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2004 Elections
Presidential Race 2000
What’s really going here is that democrats know electronic voting will result in more Republican voting. It can also be much more secure than any standard poll voting system in which you do not even have to provide ID to register or vote. Additionally, electronic voting creates a record and records can be used to prosecute fraud. All these issues would work against Democrats which is why they will do anything to slow down the future.
You're missing a critical difference.
In banking, there are two parties to every transaction, and it's a zero-sum system. Any fraud perpetrated on the system to benefit someone will result in someone else getting shafted, noticing it, and raising a big stink. The paper trail (or electronic version thereof) can be followed to find where the flow of money went haywire.
But in electronic voting, votes can be "created" out of thin air, or mutated from votes for candidate X into votes for candidate Y, and no one will be the wiser. 100 voters go into the booths and come out, 100 votes come out of the machine marked "70 for X, 30 for Y" -- how exactly do you propose to audit it to verify that that's how the people actually voted? How can any voter verify that his vote actually got registered and counted? There's no "bank statement" to balance.
Worse, banking is tracked so that records are kept every time a dollar changes hands, recording from whom and to whom it moved. Voting, on the other hand, is *purposely* anonymized, so that a given vote *can't* be traced back to the person who cast it. There's no way to audit it in order to make sure that Joe's vote didn't get "altered" somewhere along the line.
I can think of some ways to help close some of the obvious loopholes using crytpographic certificates and so on, but the point is that the current crop of electronic voting machines are still in the stone-age with respect to properly safeguarding the accuracy of their vote counts, compared to the *very* sophisticated work that would be necessary to even match the tamper-resistance of a physical locked box of paper ballots kept in plain sight of bipartisan poll workers.
And for every high-tech solution, there are going to be a dozen unforeseen high-tech loopholes. Just ponder the frequent security alerts and patches for every operating system or web browser from any software company (and no, Microsoft is hardly alone in that regard). It's the nature of the beast, not the oversight of any particular company.
True, but it also gives the rats a ready-made alibi for losing. They smell rat defeat in 2004, and they're already crowing "the fix is in" with electronic voting so that Bush can "cheat again". They can't get over losing in 2000 and they won't admit losing in 2004 either...they'll just blame their next "stolen election" on technology and eevil pubs.
Now having said that, I DO think electronic voting should create a paper or physical record of every vote, and that any electronic votes which cannot be verified against that paper record should be discarded. I don't want EITHER side to be able to invent votes, and just in case there's a recount (shudder), you can't recount bits in RAM. If we ever come to another 2000-style election debacle and there aren't even any chads to spill, God help us all. There won't be a legitimate winner and the catfight will go on for months...years...until the Supreme Court stops it and then aww, there y'all go again.
I don't have time now to go into it in any depth, but it's pretty simple to "adjust" the systems to count more "ballots" for one party/candidate than another. Just add a few at a time, maybe 1.1 *counted* votes for every 1 *actual* votes, rounded up to the nearest whole number....
You are being filmed when you vote (log's a picture of the voter for comparison, and prevents voter fraud)
We could mail special cards to all registered voters (prevents voter fraud)
It distributes the possible locations where people can vote
And it increases the number of locations people must cover to intimidate voters
BITS
I'm with you. The dims are using reverse psychology.
Hacking a computer program to ,for instance, add 1 dim vote for every 5 repub votes would be too easy.
It's who counts the votes, not who votes.
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