FL sec. of state says: "Touch-screen machines are not computers"

[rfranklin]

Bill Gates will be interested to know that since they are running on Windows.

Secretary of state tries to calm voters
Secretary of State Glenda Hood hopes for a scandal-free election in November, even as she acknowledges a swirl of questions about the state's new voting machines.
BY LESLEY CLARK
[e-mail]

Amid controversy over touch-screen voting machines and a purge of felons from the voting rolls, Secretary of State Glenda Hood sought on Thursday to reassure anxious voters that 2004 won't be a rehash of the 2000 presidential debacle.

Hood, addressing the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, said she has ''great confidence'' that the state's 67 elections supervisors are ready for the November election -- and the scrutiny that will accompany it.

''I want the attention to be on Florida, but I always want it to be in a positive way,'' she said.

But Hood acknowledged her office is investigating a voting machine glitch in Miami-Dade County, which she said was not properly reported to the state.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/8779323.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp&1c

[Paradise]

1. Better known as, Glenda Hood-Over-Her-Head,

trying to Pull-The-Wool-Over-Our-Eyes! :silly:

[Vickers]

2. From dictionary.com: "A device that computes, especially a programmable...

"...electronic machine that performs high-speed mathematical or logical operations or that assembles, stores, correlates, or otherwise processes information."

Yup, she's just another in a long line of RW ignorant fucksticks.

[Eric J in MN]

3. Glenda Hood pretends that a company won't rig the machines.

''The touch-screen machines are not computers,'' she said. ``You'd have to go machine by machine, all over the state.''
-----------
No, the corporation which builds the machines can put the same code to rig the machines in all of them.

[unblock]

6. you don't need to rig every damn machine, just a few is felony enough!

rigging just one machine would have been enough to sway the election last go 'round.

vote rigging is usually made up of a combination of dirty tricks. rig a machine here, throw out some ballots there, detain some liberals hither, disenfranchise some blacks yon. it all adds up.

never mind the mass manipulation you could do with these machines via the code, a distributed patch, and/or a wireless trigger.

[mmonk]

4. Ha!

Geez, that's sad.

[Eric J in MN]

5. by the way, Glenda Hood made another bizzarre statement

By the way, Glenda Hood made another bizzarre statement a couple of months ago that the machines will automatically shut down if they miscount votes.

[unblock]

8. convenient rhetoric.

yes, there's probably a failsafe that shuts down if, e.g., it read 100 ballots and comes up with 158 votes for each candidate. i.e., if everything adds up to something physically impossible.

but, of course, as long as the fraud is plausible, the machine couldn't possibly detect a problem, such as a 90-10 victory for bush in a democratic stronghold.

[Eric J in MN]

10. a corporation which rigs the election isn't going to program

A corporation which rigs the election isn't going to program the machines to shut down from it's method of rigging.

[KG]

7. Glen or Glenda?

[peekaloo]

12. LOL........her dialog would make Ed proud.

:dunce:

[Eric J in MN]

9. regarding the "conspiracy theory" issue

If you believe that no election has ever been rigged, then concern about the rigging of elections is a pointless conspiracy theory.

If you realize that the last Presidential election in Florida was rigged by

1) telling legal voters that they couldn't vote because they're suspected felons

2) asking overseas soldiers to send in ballots AFTER the election

3) writing in the verification number on Republican absentee ballots, while leaving it blank on Democratic absentee ballots


then it's more than just a theory. Election fraud is a fact.

[Nomad559]

11. Bill Gates will be interested to know that since they are running on Windo

I recall reading somewhere that the voting machines did not use Windows.

[jpgray]

13. I believe they use Microsoft Access for updates or somesuch?

And Access is predictably replete with security holes--an expert on computer security on one of the news programs dealing with this described how he got administrator's privileges, changed the vote count and hid his tracks all in under five minutes. :(

[pansypoo53219]

14. i think we need some democratic programers down there

not to fix it, but to make all the machines crash, there-by, not giving diebold the chance to steal anything.

[ET Awful]

15. Really?

I could've sworn that the software for Diebold's machine was utilizing a Windows based database engine.

[Nomad559]

16. Bev Harris

Someone should check with Bev Harris, I believe she stated In one of her posts here at D.U, that Windows was not used In Diebold's voting machines.

[Nomad559]

18. I did a Google search

and found this.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00198.htm

Diebold systems go by the name "AccuVote" and "AccuTouch," and the software program is called "GEMS."

Harris hopes to obtain a higher level of cooperation from Microsoft, upon whose operating system the Diebold voting program is based.

"One of my sources reported a problem in the Windows code, apparently a change made by the Diebold programmers that could affect security, and I explained the urgency of the situation. I told Microsoft that these machines are used in 37 states, and requested immediate help to identify whether the Windows code had indeed been rewritten, and an opinion from them as to whether it compromises security. I hope to obtain their assistance as soon as possible."

According to Professor Douglas Jones, at an official examination in Iowa, when asked about this, the representatives of Global stated, firmly, that the version of Windows they used was purely unmodified commercial off-the-shelf software, and therefore not subject to a source code audit under the FEC/NASED certification rules. He discussed potential problems with this in his testimony before the U.S. Congress (House Science Committee on May 22, 2001. See "Problems with Voting System Standards"

[Deja Q]

17. FL sec. of state is a nitwit and a twit. When you get computer illiterate

people making the laws, the computer literate suffer.

So do the computer illiterate, they just don't have a clue that they're going to suffer.

But that's a glib generalization. She's just illiterate hoping that the rest of us are too.