Activist: E-Voting to Be a 'Train Wreck' (Associated Press)
Ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their homes and offices, a literary publicist has uncovered conflicts of interests and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Reuters report "largely" deviod of facts
I'm pulling information from the below source. My comments are in this funny font style.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040303/campaign_tech_1.html
Reuters
U.S. e-voting machines largely bug-free on Tuesday
Wednesday March 3, 4:50 pm ET
By Andy Sullivan
I read headline and thought, "oh, I must be full of it, the system is bug free". I didn't even notice the word "largely". Largely is an interesting word. It's sort of a weasel word which is another way of saying there were problems. So the headline could have said "U.S. e-voting machines have bugs", though Tuesday could be an important qualifier too.
WASHINGTON, March 3 (Reuters) - Voters across the United States encountered scattered problems with new touch-screen systems on Tuesday as they voted in primary elections, but by and large the machines ran smoothly, state election officials said on Wednesday.
I'm glad the election officials are happy that things ran smoothly... by and large. Then the below:
Voters in some polling stations in San Diego and Oakland, California, were turned away after officials had trouble starting up the machines, while others in Maryland and Georgia had to use paper ballots, officials said.
What happened to those voters in San Diego and Oakland? Did they get to vote or did they have to go home? How many voters were affected? Since San Diego and Oakland are pretty small towns, I bet only five or six people lost their right to vote. I wonder if those who didn't vote feel that the system was "largely" bug free.
Aside from setup problems, the machines functioned smoothly, officials said.
Once again the machines functioned smoothly says the officials. Boy, these officials are patient. I get pissed off when my laptop bluescreens because it tried to hibernate.
"We had no technical issues at all, just the normal human stuff," said Linda Lamone, Maryland state administrator of elections.
She is just saying what her boss wants her to say. That's part of her job. If it's raining, it's only partly cloudy. See earlier posts about her boss Karl who is good buds with GWB.
Several states have adopted the electronic machines after the 2000 presidential election recount battle in Florida highlighted shortcomings in aging punch-card systems.
I thought the biggest problem was the meddiling Republican staffers and the Supreme Court? Normal folks know that a dimple next to a canidates name is as clear as a hole. Those dimples weren't just lying there.
Election officials say the machines are easy to use and allow fewer voting errors, but a growing number of computer experts say they are prone to glitches and vulnerable to hackers.
Easy to use, sure. Easy to manipulate by a few people. That's the heart of the problem. It's far harder to manipulate paper ballets being counted by many people who are made up of the two dominate parties.
Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Avi Rubin, who uncovered several flaws in one system made by Diebold Election Systems (NYSE:DBD - News) last summer, said he saw few problems when he volunteered at a polling place near his home in Baltimore County, Maryland.
But in an account posted on his personal Web site, Rubin said the vote tallies could still be changed without the knowledge of election judges.
Changing the vote tally without anyone the wiser. That is the problem that chooses our next president, and the next, and the next.
"I continue to believe that the Diebold machines represent a huge threat to our democracy," Rubin wrote.
Problems in the three states centered around the encoding devices used by poll workers to activate "smart cards" that voters use to cast a vote on the machines.
In Maryland, polling stations in Ann Arundel and Baltimore counties received encoders intended for other stations, Lamone said.
Is this part of the "largely bug free system"? Again, how many votes were affected?
In Georgia, an election judge in Effingham County failed to program the encoders properly, said Cara Hodgson, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state.
California secretary of state spokesman Doug Stone said he did not know exactly what were the problems with encoding devices in precincts that encountered problems.
"It's not clear if it's the system or human error," Stone said.
A spokesman for Diebold, which makes the equipment used in all three states, said the encoding devices had likely run low on batteries and presented a different start-up screen than the one poll workers had been trained to expect.
The problem was cleared up with a call to Diebold technicians, spokesman David Bear said.
This was on Tuesday. I wonder what happens on super Tuesday? It's not so much the bugs I'm worried about, it's the undocumented "features". Features used to sway the tally one way or the other during close elections.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040303/campaign_tech_1.html
Reuters
U.S. e-voting machines largely bug-free on Tuesday
Wednesday March 3, 4:50 pm ET
By Andy Sullivan
I read headline and thought, "oh, I must be full of it, the system is bug free". I didn't even notice the word "largely". Largely is an interesting word. It's sort of a weasel word which is another way of saying there were problems. So the headline could have said "U.S. e-voting machines have bugs", though Tuesday could be an important qualifier too.
WASHINGTON, March 3 (Reuters) - Voters across the United States encountered scattered problems with new touch-screen systems on Tuesday as they voted in primary elections, but by and large the machines ran smoothly, state election officials said on Wednesday.
I'm glad the election officials are happy that things ran smoothly... by and large. Then the below:
Voters in some polling stations in San Diego and Oakland, California, were turned away after officials had trouble starting up the machines, while others in Maryland and Georgia had to use paper ballots, officials said.
What happened to those voters in San Diego and Oakland? Did they get to vote or did they have to go home? How many voters were affected? Since San Diego and Oakland are pretty small towns, I bet only five or six people lost their right to vote. I wonder if those who didn't vote feel that the system was "largely" bug free.
Aside from setup problems, the machines functioned smoothly, officials said.
Once again the machines functioned smoothly says the officials. Boy, these officials are patient. I get pissed off when my laptop bluescreens because it tried to hibernate.
"We had no technical issues at all, just the normal human stuff," said Linda Lamone, Maryland state administrator of elections.
She is just saying what her boss wants her to say. That's part of her job. If it's raining, it's only partly cloudy. See earlier posts about her boss Karl who is good buds with GWB.
Several states have adopted the electronic machines after the 2000 presidential election recount battle in Florida highlighted shortcomings in aging punch-card systems.
I thought the biggest problem was the meddiling Republican staffers and the Supreme Court? Normal folks know that a dimple next to a canidates name is as clear as a hole. Those dimples weren't just lying there.
Election officials say the machines are easy to use and allow fewer voting errors, but a growing number of computer experts say they are prone to glitches and vulnerable to hackers.
Easy to use, sure. Easy to manipulate by a few people. That's the heart of the problem. It's far harder to manipulate paper ballets being counted by many people who are made up of the two dominate parties.
Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Avi Rubin, who uncovered several flaws in one system made by Diebold Election Systems (NYSE:DBD - News) last summer, said he saw few problems when he volunteered at a polling place near his home in Baltimore County, Maryland.
But in an account posted on his personal Web site, Rubin said the vote tallies could still be changed without the knowledge of election judges.
Changing the vote tally without anyone the wiser. That is the problem that chooses our next president, and the next, and the next.
"I continue to believe that the Diebold machines represent a huge threat to our democracy," Rubin wrote.
Problems in the three states centered around the encoding devices used by poll workers to activate "smart cards" that voters use to cast a vote on the machines.
In Maryland, polling stations in Ann Arundel and Baltimore counties received encoders intended for other stations, Lamone said.
Is this part of the "largely bug free system"? Again, how many votes were affected?
In Georgia, an election judge in Effingham County failed to program the encoders properly, said Cara Hodgson, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state.
California secretary of state spokesman Doug Stone said he did not know exactly what were the problems with encoding devices in precincts that encountered problems.
"It's not clear if it's the system or human error," Stone said.
A spokesman for Diebold, which makes the equipment used in all three states, said the encoding devices had likely run low on batteries and presented a different start-up screen than the one poll workers had been trained to expect.
The problem was cleared up with a call to Diebold technicians, spokesman David Bear said.
This was on Tuesday. I wonder what happens on super Tuesday? It's not so much the bugs I'm worried about, it's the undocumented "features". Features used to sway the tally one way or the other during close elections.
Aren't I overreacting about Republicans in charge of this year's election?
That is a fair question. Just because someone is part of a party doesn't mean they'll do everything they can to push the election results to their party. Right? I mean, spending millions of dollars to get people to elect someone from their party is just part of the business. And so is campaigning for their party's heavyweights. That is what you do when you are part of a party. You push and campaign and spend money and get people in your party into positions of power and influence so they can get more of your party into elected positions. Nothing wrong with that right? That is what it means to be part of a party.
Cool! As secretary of state and in charge of elections all by yourself, you can allocate funds to voter precincts, and by gosh, those precincts which vote for your party are going to get the best, well tuned equipment. The old equipment, the ones tagged from previous elections as not working too well, heck, let's just put those in the precincts that vote the other way. Why heck, might as well put fewer machines in those other precincts because obviously, those who vote against your party might as well stand in line before they vote. If those folks show up a little late expecting to get through the line before the precinct closes, well, that's just poor planning.
Hey, what is this, some kind of CONSPIRACY theory? Isn't this looking at things in the worst possible light? I mean, no one would actually do something like that... It's unfair, unethical, and if you get caught, heck, you might even go to jail. Screwing with peoples votes is un-American.
Great! I agree with all the above. The problem is that this has happened. Let's take a look at Katharine Harris: Secretary of State in Florida.
Like Karl of Maryland, Katharine Harris was a member of George W. Bush's campaign for president.
OK, so why should I get my shorts in a knot about Maryland Secretary of State, Karl? He's his own man, he's a completely different person right? Well yes. The problem here is that it fits the same pattern. It could happen again, and this time it's even easier because in the case of the AccuVote system, it leaves no paper trail. Republican owned Diebold designed it. It's known to have several security flaws. And you and I cannot look at the voting program to see if it was done correctly. At least with paper and a punch, *you* can see who you really voted for. The hole is there in the right spot. With a computer, all indications on the screen can look like you voted one way, but the database behind the scenes could store a very different result. The analogy is this: You call Karl (or Katharine Harris) and say Karl, put me down for the Democrat candidate". Karl says "sure will", and he could take his pen and put a tick column for George W Bush, AND YOU WILL NEVER KNOW THE DIFFERENCE! Even if you get to take home a receipt, you don't know what is stored in the database. Do you see the emergent pattern? Katharine Harris hired Clayton Roberts so she could gain deniabilty if any court proceedings should come up, and JEB Bush chose Harris, naturally. Now if anyone gets caught, they just say, "oh, it must have been a software bug". It's the ultimate scapegoat. And George W. Bush wrote the system of using Secretary of States as those in charge of voting, into a law. And he wrote into law the use of electronic voting system. DieBold won the contract (see earlier posting about its GOP ties). Now this simple pattern begins to look like a design, and the design has a purpose: Relect George W Bush no matter who the public votes for. And you and I will never know. You can thank now Congresswoman Kathryn Harris for performing the successful beta test, soon to be Senator Harris. Hey, if you not only toe the line for you party, but drag the damn thing half a mile to help them win an election, you get to climb the ladder. http://electharris.org
The below is a nice overview of this situation from Greg Palast:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=259&row=2
Visualize a Fair Election in 2004
YES! Magazine
Friday, August 22, 2003
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version
by Greg Palast and Ina Howard
MAY 4. BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA. At the dais, Martin Luther King spoke with the marchers who had crossed the bridge into Birmingham, the women and men who had faced down Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses: “We ask a simple question. Do African Americans have the right to vote in the United States of America?”
We had to blink. Speaking was Martin Luther King the Third, son of the late Nobel Laureate—and the year was 2003. The elderly foot soldiers of the legendary civil rights march of 1963 had gathered to commemorate their peaceful invasion of the city 40 years earlier.
They were invited by Birmingham’s new mayor and police chief, both African Americans. Counterpoint to the toasts to such stunning progress, King called attention to a cloud on the political horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, threatening to grow into a storm—the racial fix of the presidential election of 2000 in the state of Florida.
The civil rights activists knew in detail what most Americans today have yet to learn: In the five months leading to the 2000 presidential election, political appointees working for Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 voters from Florida’s vote registries.
The official reason? Those they targeted were felons, ex-cons who had illegally registered to vote. The truth? Virtually every voter they “scrubbed” from the voter rolls was innocent of any crime—except the crime of Voting While Black. There’s no guessing about this—Florida’s voter registration roles include each citizen’s race.
King had invited us to the 40th anniversary of the march on Birmingham because we uncovered this racial “cleansing” of the Florida voter rosters. We do investigative reports for BBC Television and the Guardan papers of Britain. It didn’t take much investigating, however, to note something funny about the voter purge once we got my hands on Katherine Harris’ computer files. One criminal, Thomas Cooper, was listed as convicted of a felony on “January 30, 2007.” The whole list was rotten with these whacky faux felony convictions—and loaded with the tag line “BLA”—black voter.
The purge of black voters in Florida was the herald of an ugly new development in our democracy. Where once African Americans had to fear night-riders in white sheets, the new threat to their civil rights comes from politicians armed with computer programs—“lynching by laptop” one called it. And now, King warns, America faces “Florida-tion of the nation”—the system that disenfranchised tens of thousands of blacks in Florida would now be imposed by a new federal law upon all 50 states.
In 2002, with little public notice, Congress passed and the president signed the “Help America Vote Act.”Hidden behind the apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time-bomb. Every state must, by the 2004 elections, imitate Florida’s system of computerizing voter files; the law empowers 50 secretaries of state to purge these lists of suspect voters. And King knew darn well the probable color of those who will be wrongly purged.
The new law is a radical change in our democracy. Until now, with the notable exception of Florida, voter rolls throughout America have been maintained by county officials watched over by bi-partisan committees. Now the job of deciding who can and can’t vote will fall to a single official —the ‘Katherine Harris’ of each state.
Secretaries of states are notoriously partisan officials. Besides the well-known Ms. Harris (who directed the vote count in Florida while holding the title state chair for the Bush for President campaign), there’s Illinois’ office of secretary of state; whose former director was convicted thismonth of running what prosecutors called “one of the most corrupt constitutional offices in Illinois history.”
King and the civil rights activists knew the spread of the Florida system—computerizing and centralizing voter files—could only harm black and Hispanic voters whose voting pattern (solidly Democratic) makes them an obvious target for abuses of voter-list “cleansing.”
But King III had learned a lot at his daddy’s knee. He did not come to wring his hands at this new threat to civil rights, nor moan helplessly. Rather, he would use the occasion of the anniversary of the Birmingham march to launch a new struggle for civil rights at the ballot box.
The crowd stood to sing “We Shall Overcome,” not out of nostalgia for the old days, but as a melodic announcement of this form of activism. Like his father, King knows that adversity is opportunity, challenge is inspirational.
And most important, Martin the Third learned from his father the trick of shrewd organizing: using the tools of the opposition against them. In decades past, the Ku Klux Klan used parades and demonstrations to intimidate black citizens and Jim Crow laws to bar them from voting. In the ’60s, King Junior surprised the South with marches and a call to higher law, reversing segregation with its own weapons. Now his son would use the computer and the Internet to organize against Jim Crow’s new appearance in cyberspace.
On May 12, on the website www.workingforchange.com, King announced a petition drive. Within days, thirty thousand virtual demonstrators had added their cyber-signatures. Through the organizing power of the Internet, the petition has gone up on nearly300 websites ranging from www.blackvoices.com to www.coalitionforworldpeace.org, along with an explanatory op-ed that I wrote with King. The ethnic and political breadth of the sites that have joined together harks back to the original civil rights coalition before the vanity of small differences fractured the progressive movement.
Voting by computer? Just say paper trail – because you’ll be wishing you had one.
And where the late King, Jr. used the expertise of constitutional lawyers, King III has called on the expertise of computer science professors, those at the pinnacle of American geekdom, to expose the computer games politicians play. The new law to “Help America Vote” will eat up $3.9 billion of taxpayers’ money, partly to tempt states and counties to adopt computerized ‘touch-screen’ voting and expensive electronic con game. As reported in the sumer issue of YES!, computer sciences academics have already sniffed out the rat in the ballot box. Led by Professor David Dill of Stanford University, 300 of America’s top computer academics have signed their own petition warning of the treacherous potential of electronic voting.
What gives the experts the jitters? Unlike paper ballots, there’s no “audit” trail. If the machine is messed with, or even crashes of its own volition (that’s happened a few times with computers as you may have heard), there is no way whatsoever to tell how people actually voted.
Professor Dill and the dissenting academics are hardly Luddites opposed to progress. They have seen the first elections with computers produce vote-count horror shows that make one yearn for hanging chads. In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new computer voting machines—and three Republican candidates each won their respective offices, each with exactly 18,181 votes. “Isn’t that the weirdest thing?” County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. “We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence.”
Just down the road in Scurry County, Texas, two unexpected landslide wins for Republican candidates struck election clerks as just one coincidence too many. Joan Bunch, the county’s clerk, investigated and found that a faulty computer chip had caused the county’s optical scanner to record Democratic votes as Republican. After two manual recounts and one electronic recount using a replacement chip in the scanner, the Democratic candidates won by large margins and the original results were overturned.
King is not so naïve as to believe vote-count errors are race-neutral. In the presidential election of 2000, 1.9 million ballots cast were never counted by tally machines—“spoiled,” in the language of elections officials. But the spoilage rate has a distinctly “color”: The massive Harvard University Civil Rights Project study released last year found that it was 50% more likely fr a black vote to be “spoiled” than a white vote. In Florida, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that a black vote was nearly 10 times as likely as a white vote to be rejected.
Machinery, computerized or otherwise, has made the racial bend of lost votes worse. In our investigations in Florida for the BBC, we found that in 2000 paper ballots read by optical scanners in the county with the highest black population were 25 times as likely to be rejected as those cast in the neighboring majority white county, using the same paper ballots—but a different automated counting system.
Does the situation sound grim to you? Heck, no. Most of us have become lazy about civil rights. But the old lions of the 60’s marches have remained vigilant. The road they have traveled is long and the sacrifices too many to let down their guard. The new challenge is invigorating. I stayed up with King and Dick Gregory past midnight, plannng the next maneuvers on this new civil rghts battlefront.
For them, the ethnic cleansing of black voters from the Florida registries is the wake-up call for a new activism that must be fought in the Birminghams and Selmas of cyberspace. Now it’s your turn. Click in, sign on … to ML King’s voting rights petition at
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=14993
Get a printable, mail-in version of King’s voting rights petition at http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=228&row=1
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Ina Howard is coordinating the petition drive.
Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
Cool! As secretary of state and in charge of elections all by yourself, you can allocate funds to voter precincts, and by gosh, those precincts which vote for your party are going to get the best, well tuned equipment. The old equipment, the ones tagged from previous elections as not working too well, heck, let's just put those in the precincts that vote the other way. Why heck, might as well put fewer machines in those other precincts because obviously, those who vote against your party might as well stand in line before they vote. If those folks show up a little late expecting to get through the line before the precinct closes, well, that's just poor planning.
Hey, what is this, some kind of CONSPIRACY theory? Isn't this looking at things in the worst possible light? I mean, no one would actually do something like that... It's unfair, unethical, and if you get caught, heck, you might even go to jail. Screwing with peoples votes is un-American.
Great! I agree with all the above. The problem is that this has happened. Let's take a look at Katharine Harris: Secretary of State in Florida.
Like Karl of Maryland, Katharine Harris was a member of George W. Bush's campaign for president.
OK, so why should I get my shorts in a knot about Maryland Secretary of State, Karl? He's his own man, he's a completely different person right? Well yes. The problem here is that it fits the same pattern. It could happen again, and this time it's even easier because in the case of the AccuVote system, it leaves no paper trail. Republican owned Diebold designed it. It's known to have several security flaws. And you and I cannot look at the voting program to see if it was done correctly. At least with paper and a punch, *you* can see who you really voted for. The hole is there in the right spot. With a computer, all indications on the screen can look like you voted one way, but the database behind the scenes could store a very different result. The analogy is this: You call Karl (or Katharine Harris) and say Karl, put me down for the Democrat candidate". Karl says "sure will", and he could take his pen and put a tick column for George W Bush, AND YOU WILL NEVER KNOW THE DIFFERENCE! Even if you get to take home a receipt, you don't know what is stored in the database. Do you see the emergent pattern? Katharine Harris hired Clayton Roberts so she could gain deniabilty if any court proceedings should come up, and JEB Bush chose Harris, naturally. Now if anyone gets caught, they just say, "oh, it must have been a software bug". It's the ultimate scapegoat. And George W. Bush wrote the system of using Secretary of States as those in charge of voting, into a law. And he wrote into law the use of electronic voting system. DieBold won the contract (see earlier posting about its GOP ties). Now this simple pattern begins to look like a design, and the design has a purpose: Relect George W Bush no matter who the public votes for. And you and I will never know. You can thank now Congresswoman Kathryn Harris for performing the successful beta test, soon to be Senator Harris. Hey, if you not only toe the line for you party, but drag the damn thing half a mile to help them win an election, you get to climb the ladder. http://electharris.org
The below is a nice overview of this situation from Greg Palast:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=259&row=2
Visualize a Fair Election in 2004
YES! Magazine
Friday, August 22, 2003
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version
by Greg Palast and Ina Howard
MAY 4. BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA. At the dais, Martin Luther King spoke with the marchers who had crossed the bridge into Birmingham, the women and men who had faced down Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses: “We ask a simple question. Do African Americans have the right to vote in the United States of America?”
We had to blink. Speaking was Martin Luther King the Third, son of the late Nobel Laureate—and the year was 2003. The elderly foot soldiers of the legendary civil rights march of 1963 had gathered to commemorate their peaceful invasion of the city 40 years earlier.
They were invited by Birmingham’s new mayor and police chief, both African Americans. Counterpoint to the toasts to such stunning progress, King called attention to a cloud on the political horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, threatening to grow into a storm—the racial fix of the presidential election of 2000 in the state of Florida.
The civil rights activists knew in detail what most Americans today have yet to learn: In the five months leading to the 2000 presidential election, political appointees working for Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 voters from Florida’s vote registries.
The official reason? Those they targeted were felons, ex-cons who had illegally registered to vote. The truth? Virtually every voter they “scrubbed” from the voter rolls was innocent of any crime—except the crime of Voting While Black. There’s no guessing about this—Florida’s voter registration roles include each citizen’s race.
King had invited us to the 40th anniversary of the march on Birmingham because we uncovered this racial “cleansing” of the Florida voter rosters. We do investigative reports for BBC Television and the Guardan papers of Britain. It didn’t take much investigating, however, to note something funny about the voter purge once we got my hands on Katherine Harris’ computer files. One criminal, Thomas Cooper, was listed as convicted of a felony on “January 30, 2007.” The whole list was rotten with these whacky faux felony convictions—and loaded with the tag line “BLA”—black voter.
The purge of black voters in Florida was the herald of an ugly new development in our democracy. Where once African Americans had to fear night-riders in white sheets, the new threat to their civil rights comes from politicians armed with computer programs—“lynching by laptop” one called it. And now, King warns, America faces “Florida-tion of the nation”—the system that disenfranchised tens of thousands of blacks in Florida would now be imposed by a new federal law upon all 50 states.
In 2002, with little public notice, Congress passed and the president signed the “Help America Vote Act.”Hidden behind the apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time-bomb. Every state must, by the 2004 elections, imitate Florida’s system of computerizing voter files; the law empowers 50 secretaries of state to purge these lists of suspect voters. And King knew darn well the probable color of those who will be wrongly purged.
The new law is a radical change in our democracy. Until now, with the notable exception of Florida, voter rolls throughout America have been maintained by county officials watched over by bi-partisan committees. Now the job of deciding who can and can’t vote will fall to a single official —the ‘Katherine Harris’ of each state.
Secretaries of states are notoriously partisan officials. Besides the well-known Ms. Harris (who directed the vote count in Florida while holding the title state chair for the Bush for President campaign), there’s Illinois’ office of secretary of state; whose former director was convicted thismonth of running what prosecutors called “one of the most corrupt constitutional offices in Illinois history.”
King and the civil rights activists knew the spread of the Florida system—computerizing and centralizing voter files—could only harm black and Hispanic voters whose voting pattern (solidly Democratic) makes them an obvious target for abuses of voter-list “cleansing.”
But King III had learned a lot at his daddy’s knee. He did not come to wring his hands at this new threat to civil rights, nor moan helplessly. Rather, he would use the occasion of the anniversary of the Birmingham march to launch a new struggle for civil rights at the ballot box.
The crowd stood to sing “We Shall Overcome,” not out of nostalgia for the old days, but as a melodic announcement of this form of activism. Like his father, King knows that adversity is opportunity, challenge is inspirational.
And most important, Martin the Third learned from his father the trick of shrewd organizing: using the tools of the opposition against them. In decades past, the Ku Klux Klan used parades and demonstrations to intimidate black citizens and Jim Crow laws to bar them from voting. In the ’60s, King Junior surprised the South with marches and a call to higher law, reversing segregation with its own weapons. Now his son would use the computer and the Internet to organize against Jim Crow’s new appearance in cyberspace.
On May 12, on the website www.workingforchange.com, King announced a petition drive. Within days, thirty thousand virtual demonstrators had added their cyber-signatures. Through the organizing power of the Internet, the petition has gone up on nearly300 websites ranging from www.blackvoices.com to www.coalitionforworldpeace.org, along with an explanatory op-ed that I wrote with King. The ethnic and political breadth of the sites that have joined together harks back to the original civil rights coalition before the vanity of small differences fractured the progressive movement.
Voting by computer? Just say paper trail – because you’ll be wishing you had one.
And where the late King, Jr. used the expertise of constitutional lawyers, King III has called on the expertise of computer science professors, those at the pinnacle of American geekdom, to expose the computer games politicians play. The new law to “Help America Vote” will eat up $3.9 billion of taxpayers’ money, partly to tempt states and counties to adopt computerized ‘touch-screen’ voting and expensive electronic con game. As reported in the sumer issue of YES!, computer sciences academics have already sniffed out the rat in the ballot box. Led by Professor David Dill of Stanford University, 300 of America’s top computer academics have signed their own petition warning of the treacherous potential of electronic voting.
What gives the experts the jitters? Unlike paper ballots, there’s no “audit” trail. If the machine is messed with, or even crashes of its own volition (that’s happened a few times with computers as you may have heard), there is no way whatsoever to tell how people actually voted.
Professor Dill and the dissenting academics are hardly Luddites opposed to progress. They have seen the first elections with computers produce vote-count horror shows that make one yearn for hanging chads. In 2002, Comal County, Texas, tried out new computer voting machines—and three Republican candidates each won their respective offices, each with exactly 18,181 votes. “Isn’t that the weirdest thing?” County Clerk Joy Treater asked at the time. “We noticed it right away, but it is just a big coincidence.”
Just down the road in Scurry County, Texas, two unexpected landslide wins for Republican candidates struck election clerks as just one coincidence too many. Joan Bunch, the county’s clerk, investigated and found that a faulty computer chip had caused the county’s optical scanner to record Democratic votes as Republican. After two manual recounts and one electronic recount using a replacement chip in the scanner, the Democratic candidates won by large margins and the original results were overturned.
King is not so naïve as to believe vote-count errors are race-neutral. In the presidential election of 2000, 1.9 million ballots cast were never counted by tally machines—“spoiled,” in the language of elections officials. But the spoilage rate has a distinctly “color”: The massive Harvard University Civil Rights Project study released last year found that it was 50% more likely fr a black vote to be “spoiled” than a white vote. In Florida, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found that a black vote was nearly 10 times as likely as a white vote to be rejected.
Machinery, computerized or otherwise, has made the racial bend of lost votes worse. In our investigations in Florida for the BBC, we found that in 2000 paper ballots read by optical scanners in the county with the highest black population were 25 times as likely to be rejected as those cast in the neighboring majority white county, using the same paper ballots—but a different automated counting system.
Does the situation sound grim to you? Heck, no. Most of us have become lazy about civil rights. But the old lions of the 60’s marches have remained vigilant. The road they have traveled is long and the sacrifices too many to let down their guard. The new challenge is invigorating. I stayed up with King and Dick Gregory past midnight, plannng the next maneuvers on this new civil rghts battlefront.
For them, the ethnic cleansing of black voters from the Florida registries is the wake-up call for a new activism that must be fought in the Birminghams and Selmas of cyberspace. Now it’s your turn. Click in, sign on … to ML King’s voting rights petition at
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/petition.cfm?itemid=14993
Get a printable, mail-in version of King’s voting rights petition at http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=228&row=1
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Ina Howard is coordinating the petition drive.
Sign up for Palast's investigative reports at http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Will the election be hacked? It's glaringly clear by this article that DieBold has our best interests at heart. I'm sure that any problems with the election system are purely accidental.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/09/voting_machines/index_np.html
(excerpt)
DieBold has downplayed such vulnerabilities, arguing
that
studies by the Hopkins researchers and others fail to account for the
security safeguards employed by the electoral system. DieBold, however,
has
come under heavy scrutiny not just for the alleged flaws in its software,
but for internal emails that apparently acknowledged security holes and
recommended the circumvention of testing authorities; one program manager
suggested that DieBold charge exorbitant prices for adding a
voter-verifiable paper trail to its machines.
My prediction? No matter what, we'll see DieBold in court someday talking about how they were unaware there where problems with their software, and amazingly, no one thought to inform the CEO or anyone else who could do anything about it. This has become known as the Ken Lay (Enron) defense.
If your a DieBold stockholder, you can see how the company is doing http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=DBD&d=t
Anyone from Maryland out there? Hey your state has certified AccuVote for YOUR election!
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040129/clth080_1.html
Here is Karl's phone number (Maryland Secretary of State) if you should decide that this is a bad idea. 410-974-5521 or 888-874-0013
http://www.sos.state.md.us/
But hey, he seems to be pretty unbiased.
http://www.sos.state.md.us/rkabio.htm
(excerpt)
Long active in Maryland's Republican Party, Secretary Aumann was president of the Loyola College Republicans for two years and was elected First Vice-Chairman of the Maryland Federation of College Republicans in 1981. In 1983, he helped found the North Central Republican Club of Baltimore County where he served as president and vice-president. He was elected a member of the State Central Committee for Baltimore County in 1986 and again in 1990.
In 1991, Mr. Aumann was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as counsel and senior policy advisor to the Appalachian Regional Commission. When Governor Ehrlich was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1994, Mr. Aumann became his Chief Administrator and District Director, a position he held until 2003. His responsibilities included office oversight and policy development, with special focus on international relations.
No doubt he knows what he is doing when he certified AccuVote for his state!
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/09/voting_machines/index_np.html
(excerpt)
DieBold has downplayed such vulnerabilities, arguing
that
studies by the Hopkins researchers and others fail to account for the
security safeguards employed by the electoral system. DieBold, however,
has
come under heavy scrutiny not just for the alleged flaws in its software,
but for internal emails that apparently acknowledged security holes and
recommended the circumvention of testing authorities; one program manager
suggested that DieBold charge exorbitant prices for adding a
voter-verifiable paper trail to its machines.
My prediction? No matter what, we'll see DieBold in court someday talking about how they were unaware there where problems with their software, and amazingly, no one thought to inform the CEO or anyone else who could do anything about it. This has become known as the Ken Lay (Enron) defense.
If your a DieBold stockholder, you can see how the company is doing http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=DBD&d=t
Anyone from Maryland out there? Hey your state has certified AccuVote for YOUR election!
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040129/clth080_1.html
Here is Karl's phone number (Maryland Secretary of State) if you should decide that this is a bad idea. 410-974-5521 or 888-874-0013
http://www.sos.state.md.us/
But hey, he seems to be pretty unbiased.
http://www.sos.state.md.us/rkabio.htm
(excerpt)
Long active in Maryland's Republican Party, Secretary Aumann was president of the Loyola College Republicans for two years and was elected First Vice-Chairman of the Maryland Federation of College Republicans in 1981. In 1983, he helped found the North Central Republican Club of Baltimore County where he served as president and vice-president. He was elected a member of the State Central Committee for Baltimore County in 1986 and again in 1990.
In 1991, Mr. Aumann was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as counsel and senior policy advisor to the Appalachian Regional Commission. When Governor Ehrlich was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1994, Mr. Aumann became his Chief Administrator and District Director, a position he held until 2003. His responsibilities included office oversight and policy development, with special focus on international relations.
No doubt he knows what he is doing when he certified AccuVote for his state!
Monday, February 09, 2004
ABC News has finally come out and said it.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=43845
Monday, February 2, 2004 11:30 PM
Electronic voting makes election cheating too easy
Concerned citizens have been warning that new-electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof.
When the state of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines’ vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails.
When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election.
They were disturbingly successful. It was an “easy matter,” they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location.
Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland’s 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in “approximately 10 seconds.”
Diebold, the machines’ manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline “Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary.” The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively. Their report said that if flaws they identified were fixed, the machines could be used in Maryland’s March 2 primary. But in the long run, they said, an extensive overhaul of the ma chines and at least a limited paper trail are necessary.
The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Indiana, last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said.
Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguards are in place. The New York Times
If you haven't been paying attention, AccuVote is a system developed by Diebold. You can place your order at http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_ts.htm
So what if a corporation that wins a government contract delivers an inferior product? It has to be an improvment on punch cards and chads right? Well, that depends on if you think that the voting machines should be impartial to the users intent. Maybe Diebold is an impartial supplier of equipment who is just trying to make a buck. And maybe the system though insecure, will be compromised equally so that it doesn't give an edge to one canidate or another... Well, friends, perhaps. But Diebold is a supportor of the GOP.
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldusenix.html
http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/wincontract.html
(excerpt)
In Ohio, state Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a suburban Dayton Republican, reacted to the report by calling upon Blackwell to remove Diebold from the running here.
Political insiders say it would be virtually impossible - given the firm's political connections - for Blackwell, a Republican, to not have Diebold on his final list.
Diebold chief executive Walden O'Dell is a generous contributor to Republican campaigns and fund-raisers, from the Republican National Committee and White House on down.
He and his wife donated a combined $8,500 to Gov. Bob Taft between June 2001 and October 2002, state records show, and Taft subsequently appointed O'Dell to the board of trustees at Ohio State University.
W.R. "Tim" Timken, one of Ohio's most influential Republicans, is on Diebold's board. Members of the Timken family contributed almost $66,000 to Republican campaigns in Ohio from 2000 to 2002.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Opinion&OID=43845
Monday, February 2, 2004 11:30 PM
Electronic voting makes election cheating too easy
Concerned citizens have been warning that new-electronic voting technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal elections. Now there is proof.
When the state of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines’ vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails.
When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election.
They were disturbingly successful. It was an “easy matter,” they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location.
Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland’s 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in “approximately 10 seconds.”
Diebold, the machines’ manufacturer, rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release with the headline “Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary.” The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively. Their report said that if flaws they identified were fixed, the machines could be used in Maryland’s March 2 primary. But in the long run, they said, an extensive overhaul of the ma chines and at least a limited paper trail are necessary.
The Maryland study confirms concerns about electronic voting that are rapidly accumulating from actual elections. In Boone County, Indiana, last fall, in a particularly colorful example of unreliability, an electronic system initially recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters, County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said.
Given the growing body of evidence, it is clear that electronic voting machines cannot be trusted until more safeguards are in place. The New York Times
If you haven't been paying attention, AccuVote is a system developed by Diebold. You can place your order at http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_ts.htm
So what if a corporation that wins a government contract delivers an inferior product? It has to be an improvment on punch cards and chads right? Well, that depends on if you think that the voting machines should be impartial to the users intent. Maybe Diebold is an impartial supplier of equipment who is just trying to make a buck. And maybe the system though insecure, will be compromised equally so that it doesn't give an edge to one canidate or another... Well, friends, perhaps. But Diebold is a supportor of the GOP.
http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/dieboldusenix.html
http://foi.missouri.edu/evolvingissues/wincontract.html
(excerpt)
In Ohio, state Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a suburban Dayton Republican, reacted to the report by calling upon Blackwell to remove Diebold from the running here.
Political insiders say it would be virtually impossible - given the firm's political connections - for Blackwell, a Republican, to not have Diebold on his final list.
Diebold chief executive Walden O'Dell is a generous contributor to Republican campaigns and fund-raisers, from the Republican National Committee and White House on down.
He and his wife donated a combined $8,500 to Gov. Bob Taft between June 2001 and October 2002, state records show, and Taft subsequently appointed O'Dell to the board of trustees at Ohio State University.
W.R. "Tim" Timken, one of Ohio's most influential Republicans, is on Diebold's board. Members of the Timken family contributed almost $66,000 to Republican campaigns in Ohio from 2000 to 2002.
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