Judge hears e-voting concerns (Texas)

[PDittie]

From the Daily Texan, the newspaper of the University of Texas:

The electronic voting machines used during elections in Travis County since 2003 may require a paper trail in the future. A hearing for a lawsuit concerned with requiring the paper trail was held in the 353rd District Court of Travis County Thursday.

The lawsuit focuses on the reliability of electronic voting machines' ability to accurately record votes. Having a paper trail would allow for another way to confirm voters' intentions, according to the plaintiffs.

The NAACP, Nelson Linder, Sonia Santana and David Van Os filed the lawsuit against Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams and Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir on June 14 "for the defendants' failure to provide voting procedures that ensure their right to a properly counted vote, and a fair and secure election," according to the original petition. Linder is president of the Austin NAACP, Van Os is running for Texas Attorney General and Santana is working for Van Os' campaign.

Thread on this topic in the Texas forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=180x34196

Many thanks for their tireless efforts to DUers Sonia S. and David Van Os.

[Melissa G]

1. k-n-r! n/t

[sonias]

2. I'll kick this one myself

I was on an Access TV show here in Austin tonight called "Live and Let Live". The host is a Libertarian by the name of Gary Johnson and we had a good discussion of the case. He made a plug for the Libertarian candidate for AG and I mad a plug for David Van Os. We both agreed that current AG Abbott sucks.

In addition to discussion the the evoting issue for most of the hour, we managed to get into the recent results of the Mexican election and the involvement of ChoicePoint in that suspicious outcome. So it appears that the brand of Democracy we're exporting is the fixed election kind. How nice of us. :sarcasm:

http://www.gregpalast.com/section/articles
Guardian story 7/8
Mexico and Florida have more in common than heat

There is evidence that left-leaning voters have been scrubbed from key electoral lists in Latin America

Greg Palast
Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian

There's something rotten in Mexico. And it smells like Florida. The ruling party, the Washington-friendly National Action Party (Pan), proclaimed yesterday their victory in the presidential race, albeit tortilla thin, was Mexico's first "clean" election. But that requires we close our eyes to some very dodgy doings in the vote count that are far too reminiscent of the games played in Florida in 2000 by the Bush family. And indeed, evidence suggests that Team Bush had a hand in what may be another presidential election heist.

This BFEE world wide criminal involvement has got to stop.

Sonia

[PATRICK]

3. Does anyone give the judges the basics?

A large printout of typical vote machine code with highlighted areas where one keycode altered can make a backdoor. The more complex, the more possibilities. Or simply more "glitchy", but all prone to data shaving just as lever machines and other machines were able to be physically altered. In the case of software, especially secret proprietary software that even if (partially)inspected may doors to changes through later additions and hardware ports of entry, the changes are more invisible, more complex, more capable of vast or minutely controlled changes before, during, and after elections.

The point is they are inherently safe. If you have dynamite stored "securely" all around your house and you can trust everyone living there and your home is accident proof, why worry? unfortunately that trust cannot apply to the vast changing world of elections and WHY would you have such a thing in the first place?

The machine is inherently wrong to ever contain any actual ballot by itself. It can serve to organize and speed counts but should not be the first and sole container of the finger imprint. Optical scans are also inherently dangerous for doing the same thing. The check on both, the actual printed ballot, can be aided in its own security problems by software/hardware. The goals of modernization when listed and prioritized
would show, minus the straw man arguments of the disabled and slick uniformity, nothing but peril in e-voting and so purposely evasive of transparency as to be transparent fraudulent in its motivation.

I would bet instead that the legal arguments are just as hampered as the certification inspection of the over complex software(excluding many elements in the electronic software/hardware network) as any other rational discussion of the basics. Reduced to pleading for a paper trail no one is bound to recount is part of the pattern of triumphant fraud.