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Help Black Box Voting Examine ES&S Software
From Bev:
"ES&S 'Unity' central tabulator software.
Software stash: three zip files --
http://www.blackbox1.org/ems.zip
http://www.blackbox1.org/un5.zip
http://www.blackbox1.org/Unity.zip
User Manuals for ES&S software can be found here:
http://www.bbvforum s.org/forums/messages/2197/2864.html
This is the ES&S central tabulator software, the ES&S counterpart to the Diebold
GEMS central tabulator software. No source code, sorry, and no software for the
precinct machines. This is reportedly one generation back, but from what I'm
told has significant similarities to the new stuff. I would appreciate it if
you can provide me with feedback on your impressions after looking at it. You
may want to Slashdot it or whatever.
Best,
Bev Harris
Founder
Black Box Voting
Why aren't we simply fighting for a permanent voter-verified paper trail, instead of always saddling every e-voting initiative with demands that EVERYTHING, hardware and software, be open source?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's not a good idea.
What I'm saying is this: since, even if recounts must be requested every time, a permanent voter-verified paper trail (and a true comprehensive system with regular audits and comparisons between paper vote counts and tabulations) solves almost everything, why are we instead trying to essentially unseat established, commercial enterprise e-voting vendors?
Wouldn't a more productive approach be to simply get a paper trail into place, since even an open source system is almost as worthless without one?
Keep in mind, too, that an open source system still needs to go through complex certification processes and code freezing just like the commercial products do. Even though the commercial products aren't "open source", the certification process allows for the necessary level of inspections by election agencies and external entities. The problem was the certification procedures being routinely ignored or bypassed for convenience, something that can just as easily happen with an "open source" solution.
The problem is that doing an electronic, anonymous, secret ballot that also exists in a system that attempts to enforce one-vote-per-person, combined with all the complexities and vagaries of local municipal and county systems is a lot harder than doing a vertically integrated system for one corporate customer (such as a bank).
Keep in mind, too, that much of the legislation (such as the Help America Vote Act) that essentially mandated e-voting in the hopes of ensuring uniform access to modern voting equipment was done in response to complaints about unfairness and inconsistency with manual systems in the 2000 elections, and not just in Florida. The one critical error was not explicitly recognizing that an electronic secret ballot is a hard thing to do, even without corruption, fraud, and incompetence, and a paper trail wasn't specifically mandated. And no, that wasn't by design. It was an error of omission.
Now, states, counties and municipalities have had to shell out hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, more dollars to add and retrofit certified paper trail functionality to existing systems (which, indeed, many are doing). But all e-voting vendors offer it. It just costs a lot of money.
So instead of trying to push out enterprise vendors with multi-million dollar contracts (which is essentially what demanding "all open source" would do, since no commercial vendor is going to open up ALL of their software and hardware code and designs), why not just work to get a permanent voter-verified paper trail in place in as many places as possible as soon as possible, perhaps even mandating it via legislation, since that will be required no matter what system is implemented?
What's more important: the egos of the people who have a vendetta against Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S, or actually getting a mechanism into place as quickly as possible that guarantees votes will be accurately cast and counted (and at a minimum immediately shows if there is a problem? (And yes, I DO expect the burden of actually looking at the piece of paper to verify that it's correct to fall on the person who is voting.)
Is there a reason why my computer is leaning to left now that I'm running the software?
Yes. Yes, we will.
Now stand back and let us get to work. We live for this shit... To some people it's just a job, but not to us, man. It's a passion. When we saved those baby orcas by slashdotting all of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s servers it was like.... wow, man. I've never felt so free.
I don't think of myself as a hero. I'm just doin' my job, ma'am.
Electric Monkey Pants
I won't say where they came from. I've checked them out to the extent possible, and they appear to be the real thing. In any situation like this you have to consider that the software might have changed significantly, or that someone could have left a honey pot out there, but I don't think this is a honey pot, not going to publish why on an Internet site. There is a good possibility that current versions have significant changes. Looking over these files should tell us a lot about how the ES&S programmers think, programming styles, etc. I haven't had time to look at the files at all, and I'm not a programmer. This program is designed to run on Windows, according to the user manuals, so I imagine you can just install it and start tinkering, as we did with the Diebold GEMS program. Some of the material refers to "Aero," which is definitely an older version that grew into the Unity program.
No source code was provided (no source code was provided for the Diebold GEMS program, either, remember). The software is only for the election management system/central tally system, and we have so far been unable to get programs for the precinct-based individual voting machines, nor for the ES&S equivalent of the memory card, which they call the "PEB".
Black Box Voting is receiving very credible reports of ES&S meltdowns in several states, though they always seem to have a temporary technician around to promise everyone their vote was not lost. Hard to explain, of course, since 18,000 votes are missing in action right now in Sarasota Florida, with about 300 votes separating the candidates for a U.S. House of Representatives race.
We are getting reports of ES&S anomalies from BOTH political parties.
If anyone has any questions, you can e-mail me at the e-mail address on the blackboxvoting.org Web site.
Best,
Bev Harris
Founder
Black Box Voting
Great, so instead of /.'ing her website we're going to /. her phone instead. :)
Hopefully putting to rest any questions as to who is who. I posted this discussion at Slashdot as the lead story on blackboxvoting.org Cheers.