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Wed 20 Sep, 2006 10:22 am
It isn't terrorism, or Iraq, or homosexuals, it's electronic voting.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20/index.html
Quote:Dobbs: Voting machines put U.S. democracy at risk
POSTED: 10:17 a.m. EDT, September 20, 2006
Programming note: A look at whether Iran and Venezuela should be considered for seats on the U.N. Security Council, on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," at 6 p.m. ET Wednesday.
By Lou Dobbs
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Democrats and Republicans are desperately trying to nationalize the midterm elections, now only 48 days away.
Democrats are seeking to focus voter attention on President Bush's conduct of the war in Iraq, while Republicans are trying to convince voters that the president and all Republicans should be given credit for the conduct of the war on terror, and the fact that there has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.
And voters will also choose which party to support on a host of other issues, local and national: illegal immigration, border security, the state of the economy, the escalating cost of health care, failing public schools, record budget and trade deficits, and the declining standard of living for the middle class.
Voters will be deciding whether the promise of challengers or the performance of incumbents merits their votes. The most recent polls reveal a national public mood that is now more supportive of a still unpopular president and about evenly divided over their preferences for, or tolerance of, congressional Republicans and Democrats. In other words, less than seven weeks before we go to the polls, there is every indication that the partisan quest for power on Capitol Hill will be close.
But there is additional uncertainty about the outcome of our elections that is intolerable and inexcusable, and which could make the contested 2000 presidential election look orderly by comparison. As of right now, there is little assurance your vote will count. As we've been reporting almost nightly on my broadcast for more than a year, electronic voting machines are placing our democracy at risk.
Across the nation, eight out of every 10 voters will be casting their ballots this November on electronic voting machines. And these machines time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error, and many of them have no voter-verified paper trail.
There is simply no way in which election officials and their staffs of thousands of volunteers with limited experience and often poor training can possibly carry out reliable recounts.
Only 27 states have laws requiring the use of voter-verified paper trails in electronic machines. Eight more states utilize a paper trail in their machines but don't require it, leaving 15 states with no mandated requirements for safeguarding your vote. But with no national law in place, our midterm elections are being threatened by a system lacking any real regulation and standards.
The problems with electronic voting aren't necessarily new, yet we're still not ready for the midterms. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine in a Columbus, Ohio, suburb reportedly added nearly 3,900 additional votes to Bush's total. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots at that precinct, but in a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly?
The May primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, was nothing less than a complete debacle. A report from the Election Science Institute found the electronic voting machines' four sources of vote totals -- individual ballots, paper trail summary, election archives and memory cards -- didn't even match up. The totals were all different, and the report concluded that relying on the current system for Cuyahoga County's more than 1.3 million people should be viewed as "a calculated risk." Are we really willing to risk our democracy?
This problem is obviously not limited to Ohio. During Illinois' March primary, Cook County delayed the results of its crucial county board elections for a week as a result of human and mechanical problems at hundreds of sites with the new voting machines.
The recent primary elections in Montgomery County, Maryland, also highlighted just how unprepared many polling places are for the midterms. The state election administrator is demanding to know what went wrong after election workers did not receive access cards to operate the Diebold voting machines for the county's 238 precincts on time, forcing as many as 12,000 voters to use provisional paper ballots that ran out quickly. Some were simply told to come back later and vote.
There are four main manufacturers of electronic voting systems, none of which has been demonstrated to be more secure than the others. Diebold is the most well-known, but a new Princeton University study concerning Diebold's AccuVote-TS machine found that hackers can easily tamper with electronic voting machines by installing a virus to disable machines and change the vote totals.
Princeton researchers found that "malicious software" running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little, if any, risk of detection, and that anyone with access can install the software. The study also suggests these machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses. Diebold says the unit used in the test was two generations old and to its knowledge is not used anywhere in the country.
A 2005 Government Accountability Office report on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears of watchdog groups and election officials. That report said, "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
That is simply unacceptable. Congress and the White House need to immediately take steps to assure the integrity of electronic voting with paper trails that could be audited in any recount, or provisions must be made for paper ballots if the reliability of e-voting cannot be assured before November 7.
When voters lose confidence in our elected representatives, we can vote the bums out. But what is the recourse if American voters lose confidence in our electoral system?
Dobbs asks the pertinent question:
But what is the recourse if American voters lose confidence in our electoral system?
It's is a true danger to our society if belief in the functioning on the system comes into question. It robs people of the security they now have in knowing that they have some reasonable control over the governance of their society.
This shouldn't be a Republican-Democrat thing, at all. All you Republicans don't wish to have elections stolen from you any more than the Dems do, yet it is entirely possible that it will happen all over the country on Nov. 7th; that Republican candidates will win, but will lose on the Rolls because the machines were hacked by Dems. Same goes the other way as well.
What can we do to stop these problems? Is it already too late? Will we see significant errors this election cycle? What will be the ramifications of this?
Cycloptichorn
I've done a thread or two on the same subject. A voting machine that leaves no paper trail is not a trustworthy machine. It would seem everybody would be concerned and want their vote fairly counted.
I've noticed some other threads, but this issue never seems to get much attention; even though it really supercedes the other arguments about elections and policy.
I could go into the nature of the Diebold and Sequoia, ESS corporations; but I want to keep this as non-partisan as possible, so...
Cycloptichorn
Re: An actual danger to our society...
Cycloptichorn wrote: What can we do to stop these problems? Is it already too late? Will we see significant errors this election cycle? What will be the ramifications of this?
There won't be anything done until all sides agree that only legitimate voters should be allowed to cast a single ballot for each contest and that each and every vote cast must have a guarantee of being correctly recorded and counted.
IMO, neither of those things can happen unless we are willing to sacrifice some of the anonnimity from the voting process. While I prefer the secret ballot idea I think it makes fraud much to easy to commit.
This reminds me of an interesting comparison by the Washington Post a few months ago. Apparently Las Vegas cares more about the integrity of its gambling than most states do about the integrity of their votes.
[img]http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.gif[/img]
Source: Washington Post
What can be done about it? To my knowledge, some groups have developed Open Source software for voting that can already run on pretty much any PC, and that could be made to run on any voting machine. Because the software is Open Source, everybody who wants to can review it and look what it really does, as opposed to what the producer says it does while hiding the details behind trade secrets.
The limiting factor seems to be that every state has different specifications for the machines, and making 50 specialized adaptions costs time and money. (A lesser problem is that on a PC, you have to point and click with a mouse, which is slightly less convenient than a touch screen. But I'm sure this problem is fixable.)
To me, this issue is more important even than who gets elected. It would be fine to follow those Vegas features, but to have a machine spit out a piece of paper would be cheaper and easier to verify. Representatives of both parties there to be sure the paper gets deposited in the ballot box and not tampered with. Neutral parties present, of course. It's not that hard, if they really want to be honest about it.
The answer is clear: slot machine manufacturers must be mandated to craft electronic voting machines and to manufacture them to the same rigid standard as slots.
Only people voting at the one dollar machines will have their votes counted.
Anyone who correctly solves a quadratic equation gets counted twice....
There are a number of bank teller applications that are quite capable of either reporting transactions to a central server, or storing the transactions until the connection to the central server is restored....
Smartcards could be worked the same way as current ballots....
Electronic voting with data stored in an unsecured location is just stupid....
If we continue having electronic voting machines we could wind up with someone incompetent like George W Bush as President!
Here in Germany, voters take a pencil in their hand, look for a box near the candidate of their choice, and mark it with the pencil. Then they throw the paper into the ballot box. (Note the paper trail this advanced technology produces!) After the polling stations close, the ballot boxes are counted by citizens of the community -- some of them volunteers, some drafted, much as American communities may draft citizens for jury duty. The system works well for us: Ballots usually close 6 pm. We usually have preliminary official results by about 11 pm. After that, parties can contest the preliminary official result for some time (I think two weeks). They almost never take this opportunity. When they do decide to contest, the same volunteers will recount.
This system works for us like a charm. I wonder if it might work for Americans too.
NickFun wrote:If we continue having electronic voting machines we could wind up with someone incompetent like George W Bush as President!
I know that was meant in fun, but really, something like that is no laughing matter.
What?
He is?
'Scuse me, i gotta go emmigrate now . . .
Thomas wrote:Here in Germany, voters take a pencil in their hand, look for a box near the candidate of their choice, and mark it with the pencil. Then they throw the paper into the ballot box. (Note the paper trail this advanced technology produces!) After the polling stations close, the ballot boxes are counted by citizens of the community -- some of them volunteers, some drafted, much as American communities may draft citizens for jury duty. The system works well for us: Ballots usually close 6 pm. We usually have preliminary official results by about 11 pm. After that, parties can contest the preliminary official result for some time (I think two weeks). They almost never take this opportunity. When they do decide to contest, the same volunteers will recount.
This system works for us like a charm. I wonder if it might work for Americans too.
So, let me see if I get this straight... People can go in, disassemble a voting booth, replace a computer chip and reprogram it, but they couldn't possibly open a ballot box and take an eraser to the German ballots? (not to pick on your post Thomas, just using it as an example.)
I'd say that no system of voting is more secure then any other. We must have some kind of trust in the volunteers that work voting stations to not screw with the system. There has to come a moment of trust in those that perform their civil duties not to abuse their positions whether in the US or in Germany.
Thomas wrote:Here in Germany, voters take a pencil in their hand, look for a box near the candidate of their choice, and mark it with the pencil. Then they throw the paper into the ballot box. (Note the paper trail this advanced technology produces!) After the polling stations close, the ballot boxes are counted by citizens of the community -- some of them volunteers, some drafted, much as American communities may draft citizens for jury duty. The system works well for us: Ballots usually close 6 pm. We usually have preliminary official results by about 11 pm. After that, parties can contest the preliminary official result for some time (I think two weeks). They almost never take this opportunity. When they do decide to contest, the same volunteers will recount.
This system works for us like a charm. I wonder if it might work for Americans too.
In a society such as ours, which seeks the lowest common demoninator, and does not discriminate among citizens as regards to mental capacity, such a high-tech solution would be inappropriate.
(I have often in the past, when not wishing to vote for any of the candidates for President, requested a paper ballot and cast my vote in that manner. It always pisses off the polling place volunteers.)
Thomas wrote: After the polling stations close, the ballot boxes are counted by citizens of the community
Ahem ... make that "the ballot boxes are
opened, and the votes are counted, by citizens ..."
McGentrix wrote: So, let me see if I get this straight... People can go in, disassemble a voting booth
I don't think so. Walter would know this better than I do, but I think paper ballot boxes are sealed, and the seal is hard to break. Moreover, paper votes come with physical stuff, adding 100 paper votes to a ballot is 100 times more work than adding one. Electronic votes, by contrast consist of electrons only. changing the outcome by 1000 votes is essentially as easy as changing it by one.
Setanta wrote:In a society such as ours, which seeks the lowest common demoninator, and does not discriminate among citizens as regards to mental capacity, such a high-tech solution would be inappropriate.
I understand. Not all societies can reach German levels of sophistication.
In all seriousness, i don't think a paper ballot in necessarily the answer to this problem. Electronic voting, if properly regulated and with proper oversight, could be a boon to the election process.
I've pointed this out before, but it takes a long time to vote, even with a touch-screen voting machine. We vote every year, and we vote for quite a few candidates, and on a lot of ballot initiatives. We vote for national, state, county and municipal candidates. We vote for sheriffs and judges (i know, the Europeans think appointing judges is a superior system, but, then, appointments are made by people you vote for, and your representation is often apportioned by percentages of the vote). Many offices at the national level which are appointive are elective offices at the state level--attorney general, treasurer, secretary of state, etc. We vote on tax levies, and property tax levies for school districts. We vote on ballot initiatives which are in effect legislation at the ballot box.
It is possible to invalidate one's ballot by filling it in incorrectly, but electronic voting machines can often obviate this. If there are 13 candidates for the bench, and you are instructed to vote for four of them (they are listed alphabetically, and there are no party affiliations listed, and you still have to vote for them even if you choose a straight party ticket for other elective offices). If, on a paper ballot, you voted for more than four, your ballot would be invalidated and none of your votes would count. With the touch screen, i personally once voted for four candidates and the machine cleared that space, and the instruction to "select three candidates" flashed a few times. I corrected my error, and if there were no chicanery going on, my vote counted.
I think it is important to make electronic voting work, and i think it important that Americans continue to vote for such large slates, and on so many issues, and so often. It may appear that the simplest solution is the best, but voting is never simple in the United States.
EDIT: In 2004, i waited between two and half and three hours to vote, and it took me between ten and fifteen minutes to vote when i finally reached the voting booth. It would have been a nightmare with a paper ballot.
Thomas wrote: Walter would know this better than I do, but I think paper ballot boxes are sealed, and the seal is hard to break. Moreover, paper votes come with physical stuff, adding 100 paper votes to a ballot is 100 times more work than adding one.
In my area they yank ballot boxes full of cast ballots out of Botson harbor or the Charles River for the first few weeks after each election. I beleive they found 9 full ballot boxes 2 weeks after the 2004 election day.
It looks like more and more information is starting to come out about vote tampering by Diebold as a company.
Quote:New RFK Jr. article will explore if 2006 election can be hacked
RAW STORY
Published: Thursday September 21, 2006
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In the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with award-winning writer Dick Russell, deepens his investigation into America's electoral process, according to a press release received by RAW STORY.
"Following the debacle of the 2000 presidential election, touch-screen voting machines promised to make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM," the press release states. "In 2002, privately owned Diebold, the world's third-largest seller of ATMs, was awarded a contract to install 19,000 voting machines across the state of Georgia even though its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors, and it had only recently completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems (a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia)."
"But as November's high-stakes midterm elections approach, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better," according to the press release. "Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries."
In the article, Kennedy interviews former Diebold consultant, Chris Hood, who "reveals to what extent our right to vote is at risk."
Excerpts from the article, which will be online tomorrow at Rollingstone.com:
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In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia's entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. "We ran the election," says Hood. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."
Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold's election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a "patch," a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do," Hood says. "The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done."
Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox's agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. "It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state," Hood told me. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level."
According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.
#
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/New_RFK_Jr._article_Will_election_0921.html
It is my firm belief that as time goes on, we will find more and more evidence that elections have, in fact, been rigged. On a large scale. This, in my opinion, is far more dangerous to the US system than any outside attacker could hope to be.
Without confidence that one's vote really counts, we lose confidence in the system. We also lose the ability to say that the majority actually prevailed in any election. The winner will be whoever the company running the machines declares the winner to be.
This is an unacceptable state of events. Don't you agree?
Cycloptichorn
I'm all for computerized voting. Just want it to also spit out a paper verifying the vote.
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