Stalin and Bush

[beowabbit]

Stalin is reputed to have said, "People who vote do not matter. People who count votes matter."

Slashdot had a thread today titled "E-voting Patches Skew Election?" (here's a link with lots of comments, and here's a link with just the more highly rated comments). This is a topic I've heard a bit about before, but it's not getting nearly as much press as it needs. Basically, the electronic voting machines being widely introduced around the country (1) are extremely insecure, as reported by security researchers in academia who stumbled across the code, (2) seem to be designed in a way that specifically makes tampering easy to do and hard to detect (as I understand it, votes are stored in two duplicate Microsoft Access databases; all the spot-checking that can be done on-site is done against one of the databases, but the final tally is done against the other database; if any argument has been made for why it's useful to have two separate databases that are supposed to contain the same data, I haven't read it), (3) provide no audit trail, and (4) are manufactured by Diebold, a company with strong Republican ties and whose CEO is a high-level Republican fundraiser. So, it would be easy for the results to be altered, there is no way the public would be able to tell if the results were altered, and the people with access to the machines have some incentive to alter the results.

Maybe we need some election observers from Zimbabwe or Cuba or Azerbaijan to help guarantee a free and fair election in this country.

Comments

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Microsoft Access databases

You've got to be kidding me.

[picture treacle_well gone white with horror]

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

A must-read article on this topic from The Independent:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972

Information technology experts and voting system analysts have been warning of these problems since before the 2000 election debacle. Nobody believed it. I find myself feeling cynically vindicated, though I doubt anyone will believe it now either.

Excerpt:

It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.

Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election officials around the country. Far from questioning the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of a paper record, secretaries of state and their technical advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential recount in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen voting machines as a technological miracle solution.

....

Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?