Remember, the triple lock: #1: Overwhelming advantage in campaign cash, #2: Complicity of the "US mainstream news media," and #3: Control of the voting process itself. Yes, 2+2=4, but in Fraudida, and Georgia (the "defeat" of Max Cleland), 2+2=5...
Henry Norr, www.tompaine.com: The latest scandal broke
in mid-December, when an audit by Shelley's office
revealed that Diebold had installed uncertified
software in all 17 California counties that use its
electronic voting equipment. That revelation was
particularly damaging, according to Kim Alexander,
founder and president of the California Voter
Foundation and a longtime critic of paperless voting,
because many state and local election officials had
responded to the arguments of the academics and the
damaging disclosures about industry practices by
arguing that their own certification and monitoring
systems would prevent flawed technologies from getting
into the field.
Thwart the Theft of a second US Presidential Election,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9712
Inside The Black Box
Henry Norr is a longtime reporter and editor covering
technology issues. He lives in the San Francisco Bay
area.
Fueled by a seemingly unending series of damaging
revelations about the insecurity of electronic voting
systems and the practices of the companies that make
them, the burgeoning movement demanding that new
election equipment generate a voter-verifiable paper
ballots enters 2004 with growing legitimacy and
surprising momentum.
The grassroots activists and computer scientists
leading the effort to put the brakes on the nation's
headlong rush toward paperless voting—based on
touchscreen-equipped computers—scored a stunning, if
incomplete, victory just before Thanksgiving, when
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered
that counties purchasing new touchscreen voting
terminals must provide a "voter-verified paper audit
trail," starting in July 2005, and that the four
California counties already using the high-tech
systems must retrofit them with printers by July 2006.
Though critics of the new technology had hoped for
more—a ruling that would cover this November's
elections and perhaps a moratorium on purchases of new
equipment until printer-equipped systems are fully
tested and certified—his ruling still marked an
important turning point: it was the first time a state
government has mandated a voter-verified paper record.
That gave a new impetus to similar demands in other
states: Nevada quickly followed California's lead,
several other states are expected to do so soon, and
Ohio has decided to delay deployment of touchscreen
systems it has already purchased and planned to roll
out in March. (On the other side of the ledger,
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. continues to push
ahead with plans to deploy 11,000 new touchscreens in
that state, even though a review he commissioned
concluded that the system was "at high risk of
compromise.")
Another effect of the California ruling, it seems, was
to give the case against blackbox voting new
credibility with the corporate media. The issue—once
confined to computer-science newsletters, then taken
up over the past year by progressive and libertarian
journals and Web sites—has in recent months been
covered with surprising depth and fairness by
mainstream dailies and network news.
And the media are not just giving the critics a
hearing, but in many cases endorsing their position:
The list of papers that have editorially endorsed the
demand that new equipment provide a voter-verified
paper trail includes The New York Times, The
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The San Jose
Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle and The
Seattle Times, as well as numerous smaller
publications such as The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun and
The Evansville (Ind.) Courier & Press. Last month
Fortune magazine even designated paperless voting the
"worst technology of 2003."
A major factor in the movement's development has been
the support of prominent computer scientists. After
all, who's going to believe voting-equipment
manufacturers' self-interested claims that their
products are fail-safe and tamper-proof when numerous
internationally renowned experts—the people who know
better than anyone else how high technology really
works—say both history and science demonstrate that
there's no basis for such guarantees?
Though he's by no means the first in his field to take
up the issue—he himself is quick to credit pioneer
experts such as Peter Neumann, Rebecca Mercuri and
Barbara Simons—Stanford University Professor David
Dill has given the movement new energy and leadership
over the last year. A resolution he drafted demanding
that a voter-verifiable audit trail be an essential
requirement for certification of new voting systems
has garnered the support of more than 1,500 other
technologists, as well as thousands of people from
other fields. A Web site he runs, VerifiedVoting.org,
has become action central for the activists on the
issue—not only a rich compendium of background
information and news about the issue, but also a hub
for organizing and lobbying efforts.
Dill and his colleagues argue on both historical and
technical grounds that paperless systems—known in the
field as DRE, or "direct recording electronic"
equipment—can't be trusted for something as important
to a democracy as voting. But persuasive as their
arguments may be, they might never have caught the
public eye if it weren't for a steady stream of
disclosures about the industry that have shown that
the critics' concerns are far from purely theoretical
possibilities.
"I couldn't have asked for a better ally than
Diebold," jokes Dill about the voting-machine
manufacturer that has been the subject of most—though
by no means all—of these embarrassing revelations.
Leaks of its vote-counting software and internal
e-mails—quickly circulated across the Internet,
notably via the muckraking Web site
BlackboxVoting.com—have demonstrated not only
fundamental security flaws in its products, but also a
haphazard, even contemptuous approach to the whole
issue on the part of at least some of its employees.
Diebold compounded the problem by a heavy-handed legal
campaign—eventually abandoned—to force the hosts of
Web sites where the leaked documents were posted,
including Swarthmore University, to remove them. And
the company's president, Walden O'Dell, reminded
Democrats—and other democrats—what the stakes in the
debate could be when he penned a fund-raising letter
on behalf of George W. Bush in which he declared that
he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president" in this year's
elections.
The latest scandal broke in mid-December, when an
audit by Shelley's office revealed that Diebold had
installed uncertified software in all 17 California
counties that use its electronic voting equipment.
That revelation was particularly damaging, according
to Kim Alexander, founder and president of the
California Voter Foundation and a longtime critic of
paperless voting, because many state and local
election officials had responded to the arguments of
the academics and the damaging disclosures about
industry practices by arguing that their own
certification and monitoring systems would prevent
flawed technologies from getting into the field.
"They say we have a whole network of checks and
balances they rigidly adhere to," Alexander said.
"What this last case showed is that the process simply
isn't reliable." Beyond the technology debate, she
added, "the bigger picture is that election security
is a house of cards, one that's easily toppled."
While the battle continues in communities across the
country, the focus now may shift to Washington, D.C.
Congressman Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a former Princeton
University physicist, last year filed a bill that
would amend the Help America Vote Act—the 2002
legislation that provides funding for new voting
equipment—to require a voter-verified paper record for
the 2004 elections. That bill, H.R. 2239, now has 94
co-sponsors, including three Republicans. In December,
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) filed a similar bill in the
Senate (S.1980), and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)
announced her attention to do likewise, while Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) announced a separate
bill that would add a general voter-verification
requirement, but not require that it take the form of
a paper record—opening the door, according to Dill and
other critics, for technological pseudo-fixes that add
no real guarantee of the systems' integrity.
The prospects for these bills are of course uncertain.
The opposition—led by the voting-equipment
manufacturers, but supported by many state and local
election officials who don't want to face the extra
hassle and expense inevitably associated with a paper
trail, as well as by some disability-rights activists
and, surprisingly, the League of Women Voters—will
surely be formidable, and although the Bush
administration has yet to take a public stand on the
issue, it would be a major surprise in the wake of the
Florida fiasco if the Republican majority were to
support a paper-trail requirements.
But Holt said last week that, "I don't think the
leadership in Congress will be able to ignore this
issue in an election year. I'm confident that we're
going to come together in a bipartisan way to protect
every citizen's vote." He may well be overly
optimistic, but in light of the remarkable progress
the opposition to blackbox voting has made over the
last year, it's a safe bet that the issue won't die
quietly.
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Published: Jan 09 2004