Pulling the plug on electronic elections.

[helderheid]

Aviel Rubin, 09.04.06, 12:00 AM ET

You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and
doctored drives.

I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one
Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p with a GPS unit, and I chose my
car (Infiniti M35x) because it had the most gadgets of any vehicle in
its class. My 7-year-old daughter uses e-mail. So why am I advocating
the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century--as
one of my critics puts it?

The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. In
2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which handed out $2.6
billion to spend on voting machines. Most of that cash was used to
acquire Direct Recording Electronic voting machines.

Yet while computers are very proficient at counting, displaying
choices and producing records, we should not rely on computers alone
to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make
mistakes, and, safeguards aside, they are more vulnerable to
manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a
power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that
holds votes to permanently lose its data. The only remedy then: Ask
voters to come back to the polls. In a 2003 election in Boone County,
Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer
than 6,000 registered voters. Though election officials caught the
error, it's easy to imagine a scenario where such mistakes would go
undetected until after a victor has been declared.

Consider one simple mode of attack that has already proved effective
on a widely used DRE, the Accuvote made by Diebold (nyse: DBD - news -
people ). It's called overwriting the boot loader, the software that
runs first when the machine is booted up. The boot loader controls
which operating system loads, so it is the most security-critical
piece of the machine. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example,
make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic
vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a
completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at
the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to
the computer's memory card slot.

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http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0904/040.html?partner=alerts&_requestid=2972

[IndyOp]

1. Go, Avi! Go, Helderheid! (n/t)

[lgn19087]

5. Don't count on it

The only time Republicans see "voter fraud" is when they lose. When they lose big in a few months, all we'll hear about is "voter fraud". Then, they'll be even more aggressive in controling the machines, and they are one step further along in ruining the world.

[acmejack]

8. They are already worried about "Voter fraud" hence the ID cards.

WE are worried about ELECTION FRAUD! The semantics here are critical. They claim we are cheating with illegal voters, we contend the are manipulating the electoral process via the machines, the voter rolls, disenfranchisement. lack of voting machines, not counting Provisional Ballots, etc.

[Lars39]

2. K&R

:kick:

[left is right]

3. can make the machine count every fifth R vote as a D vote

am I reading too much into this or did this guy just plant a seed that will link election fraud to the Democrats?

[Bandit]

7. Maybe that fear is what it is going to take to get the damn things

thrown into the bay where they belong...I don't give a damn if the Republicans think it is their idea or not..

[Warren DeMontague]

17. That's my point. If that's their gambit, it will be shooting themselves in

the foot.

They're terrified of fair elections and full representation, obviously.

[kster]

4. K&R..NT

[Eric J in MN]

6. kick

kick

[texpatriot2004]

9. No Transparency = No Democracy nt

[cascadiance]

10. At this point the only thing machines should be used for is punching cards

So that we have more reliable cards rather than the hanging chads that were more associated with human error. But if we had basically very equivalent cards to what we used to use that could avoid the hanging chad problem, BUT are verifiable by the voter like older cards used to be, we've solved the fundamental flaw of the 2000 election, without introducing so much more problems. You could have a touch screen help the voter vote too, so long as the card it punched out that would be used to count the vote with was human readable and they could verify that their votes were proper. THAT would have been a useful usage of machines to AUGMENT the voting process instead of trying to REPLACE the old manual process.

Perhaps down the road we could find better ways to automate the other pieces too, but we are seeing too much problems with other pieces of the process that are being introduced that we should totally back up and just attack the small problem of human error of interacting with ballots first.

That way, even if the computers /power go down, or lines get too filled up, people could still fill out their ballots by hand if need be. And blind and other handicapped voters wouldn't be as apt to be disenfranchised either with the voting machines assisting them, and they could have someone they trust along with them to look at their ballot before it gets cast to know their vote was counted properly, where they might have had a tougher time before with just manual ballots.

It's too bad those involved still don't understand the KISS principle!

[Bill Bored]

11. So we don't post in the Electrion Reform forum anymore?

www.electionfraud.net

[helderheid]

12. I used to spend all my time there. I just want to make sure as many people

see this as possible.

[kster]

13. And the election reform forum is constantly under attack

SMOOTH MOVE helderheid.......

[helderheid]

14. I do my best :)

[bananarepublican]

16. Good on you! In the lead up to November election fraud should be in...

... everyone's face 24/7.

[Kurovski]

15. Kick.

I missed this thread on the first go-round. it's absolutely terrific.

Thanks to all.