All The President's Votes?
We have a serious problem on our hands. Whether Democrat or Republican, what's currently going on with our voting systems should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Elections should be run by the state, counted by the state and verified by the state.
Excerpts from article:
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?"
Excerpts from article:
Quote:
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into last November's election to see whether there was any chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.
First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and component parts must be certified before use in an election. So an Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary of state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford Tatum, assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners wrote to him as well. Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please provide written certification documents' ".
"If the machines were not certified, then right there the election was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's office has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating citizens then considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch". Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.
That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to look into last November's election to see whether there was any chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful.
First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone adequate checking. Under state and federal law, all voting machinery and component parts must be certified before use in an election. So an Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright wrote to the secretary of state's office for a copy of the certification letter. Clifford Tatum, assistant director of legal affairs for the election division, wrote back: "We have determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it was possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an official at the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners wrote to him as well. Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what you mean by the words 'please provide written certification documents' ".
"If the machines were not certified, then right there the election was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's office has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. The investigating citizens then considered the nature of the software itself. Shortly after the election, a Diebold technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that, when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically that their software had to be amended with a last-minute "patch". Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially time-consuming process, especially since its author was in Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file transfer protocol site, on the internet.
That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?"
Comments
Do they have a paper printout of the ballots or is it all digital?
At least Georgia didn't disenfranchise thousands of voters illergally like Harris did in Florida.
Problem is, Cleland is a vietnam vet, triple amputee and actually co-wrote the legislation that created the Homeland Security Department. IIRC, His objection was that the white house was preventing Homeland Security employess from being given the protection of civil servants.
Needless to say, Chambliss avoided the draft.
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work."
Hey, at least they are commenting their code
There was an interesting Wired article recently that discussed the Australian approach to e-voting...open source software.
Walden O'Dell, Diebold Election System's chief executive...stated recently that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
Or there should be a joint consortium of companies that share the code so that no one company has sole access to the code. I dunno... something as got to be better than this.
But when you have a justice department that refuses to investigate Florida's shenanigans before the last presidential election... what can you expect?
Originally posted by chu_bakka
Florida's shenanigans before the last presidential election
Anyone who is interested in finding out more about what went on in Florida during the 2000 election really should see the documentary Unprecedented. Some stills and a preview of this film can be found here, and a synopsis is available here.
I'm planning to give several copies of the DVD as gifts this year. A friend of mine who recently saw it wanted to start touring the country to provide free screenings.
An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.)
Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.
Why isn't this front-page news? In October, a British newspaper, The Independent, ran a hair-raising investigative report on U.S. touch-screen voting. But while the mainstream press has reported the basics, the Diebold affair has been treated as a technology or business story ? not as a potential political scandal.
But there's nothing paranoid about suggesting that political operatives, given the opportunity, might engage in dirty tricks. Indeed, given the intensity of partisanship these days, one suspects that small dirty tricks are common. For example, Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently announced that one of his aides had improperly accessed sensitive Democratic computer files that were leaked to the press.
This admission ? contradicting an earlier declaration by Senator Hatch that his staff had been cleared of culpability ? came on the same day that the Senate police announced that they were hiring a counterespionage expert to investigate the theft. Republican members of the committee have demanded that the expert investigate only how those specific documents were leaked, not whether any other breaches took place. I wonder why.
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation?
How would you like to turn up to vote and then be told you've been taken off the rolls because your name is similar to an ex-cons?
Originally posted by kneelbeforezod
Anyone who is interested in finding out more about what went on in Florida during the 2000 election really should see the documentary Unprecedented. Some stills and a preview of this film can be found here, and a synopsis is available here.
I'm planning to give several copies of the DVD as gifts this year. A friend of mine who recently saw it wanted to start touring the country to provide free screenings.
Thanks. I just put in an order.
Originally posted by giant
Thanks. I just put in an order.
As did I.
One of the best scenes is when they show the protest (supposedly by disgruntled Florida voters who do not want a manual recount) in Miami-Dade.
The shot becomes a still, which then zooms in to identify the 'protestors.' Many of them are Republican staffers sent to Florida (all expenses paid) to organize and protest for the cameras.
Some of them are identified here.
Originally posted by chu_bakka
I saw it.
How would you like to turn up to vote and then be told you've been taken off the rolls because your name is similar to an ex-cons?
Could someone explain to me why ex-cons are not allowed to vote?
Originally posted by New
Could someone explain to me why ex-cons are not allowed to vote?
A number of states, mostly in the south, do not allow you to vote even if you've served your time and are done with it. Our Supreme Court has reviewed the laws and has said they're OK. Of course, in the US, where we incarcerate so many, we're talking about millions and millions of people. I believe it's currently about 4 million people that can't vote due to convictions. I'm sure it's not a big political selling point to be in favor of liberalizing laws against felons voting.
The law Chatherine Harris decided to enforce for the 2000 election was passed just after the end of the civil war and primarily put forth by former Confederate soldiers to keep primarily blacks from voting.
if there was there should be criminal charges filed against all of those involved.
if there wasn't, what did they find that was "...proved unexpectedly, and disturbingly, fruitful."
The data analysis firm was asked by florida to ignore birthdates and middle names in order to get as many names as possible taken off the voter rolls.
Someone else who saw the documentary should clarify the details.
Also... the lists were submitted to the various districts... and the boards there were supposed to cross check the names.
One district stated that of the 680 or so names submitted only 80 were felons.
Originally posted by alcimedes
so there was or wasn't voter tampering?
It depends on how you define voter tampering...
Does setting the parameters of who can and can not vote so that you are more likely to exclude a legitimate voter from voting then you are to permit a felon from voting count as tampering?
Does setting the parameters of who can and can not vote so that a legitimate voter who will vote against the candidate that you support is more likely to be excluded than a legitimate voter who will vote for the candidate that you support count as voter tampering?
I think that the second situation indisputable counts as voter tampering...the first is just deeply unfair and undemocratic.
Originally posted by Scott
Is it at all possible that the opinion polls are wrong?
Sure, opinion polls are not elections. They can be wrong and sometimes are wrong. Not sure what that has to do with anything being discussed here.
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Or is it that any election a democrat loses must have been rigged?
You're missing the point. Sometimes democrat candidates win, sometimes they lose. The point is that the 2000 presidential election was awarded to Bush without a proper counting of the votes or a proper investigation of whether or not the democratic process had been served. Anyone who cares about democracy should care about this, no matter how partisan they are.