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E-Voting Reform Bill Gaining Adherants
JeremyDuffy sends us to Ars Technica for a look at an e-voting bill making its way through Congress that is gaining the support of the likes of Ed Felten and the EFF. Quoting: "HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available."
eVoting is not designed to make things easy or verifiable. It is supposedly designed to solve a non-existent problem, lack of speedy vote counting. In the real world, the code is secret, easily modified by dispatched techs during the election, and the fact of its very existence during the act of voting or accumulation is forever unverifiable. The voting machine companies fought like rabid weasels for years to silence questions about their machines. They bought the regulators.
Don't forget that changes can be made up the line at the accumulator boxen. Don't just suspect the touchscreen PCs.
Amazing things happened during the last few elections. Votes swung republican in key counties in both 2000 and 2004 after a little visit from the company reps in Florida and Ohio. A major stockholder in Diebold ran against a Vietnam vet, Clelland, in Ohio and overcame a pre-election poll deficit of double digit proportions. Boys and girls, those machines are being used to cheat in big races that come down to a few districts. After all that I've seen since 2002, we've had Bush reinstalled through a little magic code.
This legislation will not solve the problem, because automatic recounts were already fraudulently pre-selected by voting companies in the last election to prevent a manual recount. They also can manipulate the totals to *just under* the mandatory margin for a manual recount. Not a theory, its already done and few cared. The men who are making a giant mountain range of cash from this administration aren't going to give up because some paper is kept around. Paper has to be counted, and that takes a margin trigger or a very expensive recount by candidate request.
Do it like the Canadians do. Count by hand, call it in to central offices, count those up by hand. Members of all parties present at all counts. They get their national counts done in HOURS, using pencils. And it doesn't cost them billions of dollars to do it. Techies are blinded by the wonders of their PCs. PCs can't do everything, and they aren't needed to do everything. When something infinitely malleable and secret is introduced to a simple, open process, it isn't done to make things easier or safer, but to hide cheating. QED