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Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons
bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "
MDB? Are these people serious? They think Access has a chance of holding this number of records? I bet a single machine would be crawling by the end of a day.
And if they're going to export to a more suitable db anyway, why not just stick postgres or mysql on there to start? They need only be configured once, same as Access.
Not to mention the incredible drop in required hardware resources, which times all the voting machines to be used is tax money much better spent.
It seems to me that these voting systems should be given to a bidder, and then whatever system they consider can be scrutinized. Faster, cheaper, better, safer...
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
these people think so.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
The EFF is organizing a petition to encourage IEEE to set trustworthy standards for electronic voting. Read about it and join the petition here:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/
"EFF supports the IEEE in taking on the issue of setting standards for electronic voting machines. We also support the idea of modernizing our election processes using digital technology, as long as we maintain, or better yet, increase the trustworthiness of the election processes along the way. But this standard does not do this, and it must be reworked."
> George W. Bush won the 2000 election under the current ... The mix-up in Florida was because people couldn't figure out a simple ballot.
> American Electoral System.
Oh, is that how it happened?
Even if we ignore the controversial Supreme Court ruling, the issue was much more complicated than that.
Jeb Bush and co. worked to get thousands of black voters disenfranchised by removing their names from the voting rolls if they had a name similar to that of a convicted felon ("Official: Florida disenfranchised minority voters", CNN, March 9, 2001).
Bush worked to maximize the number of overseas ballots in counties he won, he also worked to disenfranchise military ballots in counties Gore had won ("How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote", New York Times, July 15, 2001).
Of course, the problem was exasperated by Gore deciding to only have recounts in counties he won, rather than across the whole state.
So, the real issue was not just a complicated voting ballot, but also the way the votes were counted. And it's easier to verify how votes are counted (and recounted if necessary), if there's a paper trail. It doesn't help that Diebold's system is insecure.
Consider the fact that Diebold CEO Waldon O'Dell is a Republican who said in a fundraiser letter that he was committed to ""committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to [George W. Bush] next year." It is all the more important to make sure the way votes are cast and counted are transparent to the voters themselves.
And before I get lambasted by conservatives, consider the following: how would you react if you heard that the CEO of the company supplying voting equipment wrote in a Democratic fund raising letter that he was committed to helping Hillary Clinton win the presidency in 2004? You'd be a little nervous, and a lot pissed.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
> NO! First of all, when the (Democrat majority) USCCR
:
... In an analysis of the 2,490 ballots from Americans living abroad that were counted as legal votes after Election Day, The Times found 680 questionable votes. Although it is not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast, four out of five were accepted in counties carried by Mr. Bush"
> held hearings on the Florida election, they were not able
> to find a single person that was disenfranchised by the
> felon list.
You linked to the dissenting opinion, and not the original report. The majority opinion was 6-2. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that the 2000 presidential race in Florida was marred by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" that disenfranchised minority voters.
The report concluded that
* "countless unknown eligible voters" were wrongfully turned away from the polls or purged from voter registration lists because of procedures and practices used by election officials.
* criticism of an an effort to purge convicted felons and other ineligible voters from registration roles. Lists of ineligible voters, compiled by a private firm, had an error rate of at least 14 percent, and black voters had a "significantly greater chance" of appearing on the inaccurate lists than white voters
* black voters were nine times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected during the counting process. Faulty voting systems were more likely to be used in areas with higher percentages of minority voters, but even in counties where the voting systems were the same, black voters still had a higher rejection rate than white voters
(Source: "Civil Rights Commission Approves Report Assailing Florida Vote", CNN, June 8, 2001.)
The sentence you cited from the New York Times article was incomplete and out of context. It was talking about the Democrats' accusation that the Republicans had organized an effort to seek votes after the deadline: "The Times study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party. In particular, while some voters admitted in interviews that they had cast illegal ballots after Election Day, the investigation found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes."
Earlier in the article, "the Republicans mounted a legal and public relations campaign to persuade canvassing boards in Bush strongholds to waive the state's election laws when counting overseas absentee ballots. Their goal was simple: to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Mr. Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Vice President Al Gore.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
No, you're wrong. Greg Palast did extensive research into what happened. Don't buy the party line from Fox News, CNN, and others who completely whitewashed what happened in Florida.
Now that Diebold has a lock on voting systems, expect more fraud and even less media acknowledgement of it.