Why is the United States the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software?
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdfElections: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed, GAO-05-956, September 21, 2005
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http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001940.htmBREAKING: NON-PARTISAN GAO REPORT CONFIRMS CONCERNS ABOUT SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES!
REPORT: 'Loss and Miscount of Votes in Recent Elections'!
House issues BI-PARTISAN Press Release: Report 'A Wake Up Call', 'Foundation of Democracy Rests Upon Security, Integrity of our Voting System'
<snip>
Cast ballots, ballot definition files, and audit logs could be modified.
Supervisor functions were protected with weak or easily-guessed passwords.
Systems had easily picked locks and power switches that were exposed and unprotected.
Local jurisdictions misconfigured their electronic voting systems, leading to election day problems.
Voting systems experienced operational failures during elections.
Vendors installed uncertified electronic voting systems.
<snip>
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For Immediate Release: October 21, 2005
Davis, Waxman, Sensenbrenner, Conyers, Boehlert, and Gordon React
To GAO Report on Security Problems With Electronic Voting Systems
http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20051021120405-06621.pdfhttp://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20051021120623-50342.pdf==================================================
(paraphrasing
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529 - Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman) the non-partisan GAO report states:
"some of
concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
plus:
1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to alter them without detection." - meaning the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count (More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory).
2. "It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded as voting for an entirely different candidate." - of course many of the 57,000 complaints recieved by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee including many with sworn statements and affidavits said this happened in Ohio and elsewhere.
3. "Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards" can easily be done.
4. The GAO also confirms that "access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network." - so rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will - indeed flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 in Ohio could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access "to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords," - meaning even folks as stupid as a Fox News viewer could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. "The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy," says the GAO.
7. "One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail."
8. "GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel."
Some highlights of the vote rigging were:
A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low but detailed precint level exit poll data (under a confidentality agreement of course) is still not being made available for analysis.
A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The fix is not known.
In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected.
In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
John Kerry lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
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