ARS Technica's viewpoint on the New Hampshire vote

[Ichingcarpenter]

This is one of the leading new/blogs on the internet rated #7 and on the top 100 list you can see who else is in the top 100.
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/


The problem with New Hampshire


On the subject of election integrity, I want to use this post to highlight a few very important points for the various pundits, bloggers, and other media types who may be working on this story.
First, it is a huge mistake to assume (like this DKos poster) that the optical scan machines used in NH are somehow more secure than the much-maligned touchscreen machines, which didn't seem to be that widely used in the primary. Optical scanners can actually be less secure than touchscreens, because they're just as easy to tamper with (sometimes more so) as the touchscreens, but there's typically only one per precinct—an attacker therefore has a single point of failure to manipulate. The fact that optical scanners leave a paper record is totally irrelevant if a random audit of the results is not mandatory by law after every election. And in New Hampshire, there are no mandatory audits. As I've said before, mandating a paper trail without also requiring post-election audits is like buying a security system for your house and then not turning it on.

Ron Paul and his supporters may be a bit loopy, but they are 100 percent correct in insisting on some type of audit of the NH results—not because Hillary hacked the vote (I currently think there are better explanations for the results than vote hacking), but because such audits should always occur as a matter of course. Again, when you use an electronic voting system, you must audit the results if you want to have confidence in them.......snip


Right now, in the absence of an audit of the New Hampshire results, the state has not met the requirement that it prove to the public that the election was fair. This is what the fuss is about. New Hampshire does not have the manual audit requirement that is necessary to prove that an election was fair, so that state's ballots were effectively counted in secret by closed-source machine code. When ballots are counted in secret and it's up to the voters to prove that the election was rigged when they're surprised by the results, that's not the kind of democracy that the Founders had in mind for us.

edited for link on editorial: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080111-analysis-why-the-hillary-hacked-nh-story-is-important.html

[Warren Stupidity]

1. counted in secret by closed-source machine code

That sums it up. We can have no faith in the integrity of our election process while this is true. As the election process is the foundation upon which our democratic institutions are built, as of 2008 the rational conclusion is that our democratic institutions are broken and untrustworthy.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. My LTTE from your OP

Ballots counted in secret by closed source machines.

Our state's election process is seriously flawed because of its dependency on proprietary and secret computer equipment to count our ballots. The optical scanner computer equipment used in our state has been demonstrated to be easily hacked to miscount ballots.

New Hampshire can restore citizen confidence in the election process through a simple statistically valid random sample hand count audit of the ballots. This should be an automatic process done prior to certification of the results and should be done with a complete chain of custody process for all of the ballots. Any discrepancy uncovered by such an audit should result in an immediate hand recount of all the results.

We should have no faith in the integrity of our election process while we continue to depend on secret and proprietary computer software to count our ballots. The election process is the foundation upon which our democratic institutions are built. New Hampshire should lead the way to restore ballot integrity to our Republic.

[Stevepol]

3. Exactly! I like the security device analogy. TURN IT ON!!!

[althecat]

4. Everybody in DU should read this.... kick it up and rec it up...

You have to love the Dkos and Josh Marshall references.

This post contains an excellent new point that had not occurred to me (and which i have not seen hereabouts) but which is particularly relevant to some of the audience here. It also provides yet another incontrovertible reason to take the issue of election integrity to the front of the Democratic Party - including the DNC and DLC - agenda.

The Ars Technica poster continues......


Hillary's New Hampshire woes could be a prelude to a much bigger mess

I've saved the most important part of this post for last. Note that this is also the part of the post where I do what folks on the Internet are always wishing that "mainstream" journalists would do, and that's call it exactly like I see it. So feel free to disagree, but I think even the small minority of our audience that believes the very worst about Hillary Clinton will have to concede that I have a point about the lay of the land here.

All NH integrity issues aside, the real story in the mini-firestorm stirred up on the Internet in response to Clinton's NH upset is that it has important implications for the any presidential contest that includes the former First Lady.

Imagine the scene on the day after the November 2008 presidential election if Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the presidency in an upset, after citizens in states like Ohio went to the polls and voted electronically. If you're an independent who thinks that the left has made a big deal over the Florida results in the 2000 election, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Over the course of the 90s, segments of the right accused Clinton of a litany of sins that includes the murder of Vince Foster, so it's not at all a stretch to assume that they could and would add mass electronic election fraud to that line-up.

My point is that given the simple fact of who she is and the feelings that she stirs in her opponents, a close Clinton victory—especially if that victory is at odds with pre- and post-election polling—could precipitate a major electoral controversy to a degree that is not true of any other candidate on either side. Unlike Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, no Republican candidate is likely to roll over and let Clinton take the White House if they can get substantial traction with accusations that she stole the election. So there's a small possibility (or a large one, depending on how you judge the odds of a close Hillary victory), that we may be in for a mess that makes us long for the halcyon days of "hanging chads."

From my perspective, this is what's really at stake in the ongoing e-voting controversy: the government's inability to fulfill its obligation to prove to the public that our elections are fair makes our democracy so much more fragile, and so much more susceptible to cracking under the shock of a major election controversy.

[truckin]

5. This guy gets it. And this is one of the best lines I've heard

about unaudited scanners or DREs with paper trails:

"As I've said before, mandating a paper trail without also requiring post-election audits is like buying a security system for your house and then not turning it on."

[althecat]

6. ...kick... if you read something about NH today read this and Brad Blog.....