"But I hear a lot of this electronic voting discussion as HYSTERIA, and that concerns me as well."
What hysteria? Do you really trust voting machine companies (not just Diebold) when there is no valid way to do an audit of the kind the IRS would do if checking your income tax? Voting is MUCH more important than income tax. The software people developing these voting machines are incompetents!
This is not just my opinion! It is the opinion of literally THOUSANDS of professional software developers and prestigious University computer scientists across the USA and the world. For example, the oldest and rather large professional society of computer software and hardware professionals, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), which normally prefers to stay clear of political matters, has come out with a strong statement supporting the voter verified paper ballot and audit trail. These true experts are getting hysterical at the fact that you people out there who are not experts will not listen to them!
Who am I? A retired software engineer in Houston, Texas (NASA) who became an instant activist when I found out how incompetently the designs of the new voting machines were! I am not some loony chicken little type, but rather a proven software systems expert.
However, the audit trail problem is just the tip of the iceberg!
There is HARD EVIDENCE to support these claims!
To be understood, I have written these provable claims in bold, clear terms, they are:
1. Election officials are being forced to buy incorrectly certified voting equipment. There will be new certification requirements for 2004. These machines will surely fail the necessary re-certification for 2004.
2. The voting process is being controlled in such a way that the 2004 elections could be rigged.
3. This is done by controlling both the voting machine companies and the "independent" certification laboratories so that the machines could be secretly rigged for voter fraud without any chance of detection.
4. The paper ballot solution, being proposed by many computer scientists, will not work to prevent fraud in many cases, so it is only one of many safeguards needed! In general, no existing touch screen voting machine has an ADEQUATE verifiable audit trail.
5. The needed safeguards will never be implemented before 2004 unless the majority of American voters becomes convinced that they are needed!!! Currently this is not happening.
Claim 1 Hard Evidence
1. Election officials are being forced to buy incorrectly certified voting equipment. There will be new certification requirements for 2004. These machines will surely fail the necessary re-certification for 2004.
In Maryland and in Kansas there is incontrovertible evidence that new FULLY CERTIFIED touchscreen voting machines had such serious security flaws that they have required significant modifications in voting procedures and software security. These examples demonstrate that the CURRENT certification process is seriously flawed.
Maryland's situation is a textbook case:
40,000 Diebold Corporation Election Systems' files were left on an unsecured website which was discovered and made available to curious computer scientists. The computer scientists were amazed and concerned at what they saw!
Maryland had its Diebold voting machines certified and tested by both the manufacturer and the usual certification laboratories. However, when a bunch of computer scientists at the John Hopkins University created a big flap in the State's media, the Governor had another company (SAIC) examine the Diebold secret source code. The SAIC report was only partially made available with the rest "redacted". Translation, "redacted" in this case means "information that is embarrassing to Diebold or the State or both".
A Washington Post Article about the SAIC report said this:
.
"An independent review released yesterday found 328 security weaknesses, 26 of them critical, in the computerized voting system Maryland has just purchased, flaws that could leave elections open to tampering or allow software glitches to go un
The most important issue in the history of our democracy!
The Candidates can win the voters, but lose the elections! How? See the amazing facts below!
Diebold and all the other major national voting machine companies are owned or controlled by people with close ties to President Bush! WHAT IS LESS WELL KNOWN is that the National Independent testing laboratories (ITAs) that the states are depending on to test these systems are ALSO OWNED AND CONTROLLED BY REPUBLICANS!!!
REASONS WHY THIS IS SO URGENT: *** More states are poised to acquire these voting machines now because they need almost a year to get ready for the 2004 elections! ***
If action is not taken NOW it will be too late!
Both the voting machine software and the ITA testing is KEPT SECRET. All that anyone gets to see is that it was certified or not by those Republican companies.
(NOTE: The following does not apply to INDIVIDUAL Republicans who are likewise concerned about this voting problem!)
Please, please, grasp the significance of this: THE REPUBLICANS CONTROL BOTH THE VOTING MACHINE COMPANIES AND THE "INDEPENDENT" TESTING LABORATORIES!
It does not matter if you could somehow think that the Republicans would not rig those voting machines or not, what matters is that they could, and no one would know it!
Serious evidence indicates that the Republicans may be back at it, planning to make every vote NOT count! Certainly, they have an enormous temptation to do this, even if they are honest. Certainly, we should save them by removing this unnecessary temptation!
Surely, Democrats and others can believe that the Republicans probably will rig some of those machines in 2004, since there are no REAL safeguards in place, only phony ones, which will be proven to you below, dear reader, if you will continue.
A Strategy for Regaining Voting Rights:
Among the large number of problems that need to be addressed about computerized voting machines, the FIRST ONE, really, should be to get standards and government over-site of the National Independent testing laboratories (ITAs) that certify these machines. THE ELECTION OFFICIALS HIDE BEHIND THAT CERTIFICATION saying we are just silly people making much ado about perfect and certified machines. OBVIOUSLY, IF THE VOTING MACHINES ARE DECERTIFIED THEN THEY WILL BE THE FOOLISH LOOKING ONES! Below I will present PROOF that an ITA certified voting machine system had software that was full of security breaches and bugs.
PROOF that the current ITA certifications are truly inadequate:
Maryland had its Diebold voting machines certified and tested by both the manufacturer and the usual ITA. However, when a bunch of computer scientists at the University of Maryland created a big flap in the State's media, the Governor had another company (SAIC) examine the Diebold secret source code. The SAIC report was only partially made available with the rest "redacted". Translation, "redacted" in this case means "information that is embarrassing to Diebold or the State or both".
There were about 128 major security flaws and more than a hundred software bugs identified by SAIC. THIS IS AFTER FULL CERTIFICATION BY AN ITA! This proves, FOR SURE, that the ITA's certification was truly inadequate!
The "redacted" report currently can be seen in pdf format at this web address:
" But vendors say their voting machines are certified:
Voting systems ARE CURRENTLY certified under a system established by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). This certification is based on the 2002 FEC guidelines that were only adopted by 37 of the states and have been criticized by technologists as flawed. (See my detailed comment The FEC Proposed Voting Systems Standard Update.) Accordi
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"But I hear a lot of this electronic voting discussion as HYSTERIA, and that concerns me as well." What hysteria? Do you really trust voting machine companies (not just Diebold) when there is no valid way to do an audit of the kind the IRS would do if checking your income tax? Voting is MUCH more important than income tax. The software people developing these voting machines are incompetents! This is not just my opinion! It is the opinion of literally THOUSANDS of professional software developers and prestigious University computer scientists across the USA and the world. For example, the oldest and rather large professional society of computer software and hardware professionals, the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), which normally prefers to stay clear of political matters, has come out with a strong statement supporting the voter verified paper ballot and audit trail. These true experts are getting hysterical at the fact that you people out there who are not experts will not listen to them! Who am I? A retired software engineer in Houston, Texas (NASA) who became an instant activist when I found out how incompetently the designs of the new voting machines were! I am not some loony chicken little type, but rather a proven software systems expert. However, the audit trail problem is just the tip of the iceberg! There is HARD EVIDENCE to support these claims! To be understood, I have written these provable claims in bold, clear terms, they are: 1. Election officials are being forced to buy incorrectly certified voting equipment. There will be new certification requirements for 2004. These machines will surely fail the necessary re-certification for 2004. 2. The voting process is being controlled in such a way that the 2004 elections could be rigged. 3. This is done by controlling both the voting machine companies and the "independent" certification laboratories so that the machines could be secretly rigged for voter fraud without any chance of detection. 4. The paper ballot solution, being proposed by many computer scientists, will not work to prevent fraud in many cases, so it is only one of many safeguards needed! In general, no existing touch screen voting machine has an ADEQUATE verifiable audit trail. 5. The needed safeguards will never be implemented before 2004 unless the majority of American voters becomes convinced that they are needed!!! Currently this is not happening. Claim 1 Hard Evidence 1. Election officials are being forced to buy incorrectly certified voting equipment. There will be new certification requirements for 2004. These machines will surely fail the necessary re-certification for 2004. In Maryland and in Kansas there is incontrovertible evidence that new FULLY CERTIFIED touchscreen voting machines had such serious security flaws that they have required significant modifications in voting procedures and software security. These examples demonstrate that the CURRENT certification process is seriously flawed. Maryland's situation is a textbook case: 40,000 Diebold Corporation Election Systems' files were left on an unsecured website which was discovered and made available to curious computer scientists. The computer scientists were amazed and concerned at what they saw! Maryland had its Diebold voting machines certified and tested by both the manufacturer and the usual certification laboratories. However, when a bunch of computer scientists at the John Hopkins University created a big flap in the State's media, the Governor had another company (SAIC) examine the Diebold secret source code. The SAIC report was only partially made available with the rest "redacted". Translation, "redacted" in this case means "information that is embarrassing to Diebold or the State or both". A Washington Post Article about the SAIC report said this: . "An independent review released yesterday found 328 security weaknesses, 26 of them critical, in the computerized voting system Maryland has just purchased, flaws that could leave elections open to tampering or allow software glitches to go un
The most important issue in the history of our democracy!
The Candidates can win the voters, but lose the elections! How? See the amazing facts below!
Diebold and all the other major national voting machine companies are owned or controlled by people with close ties to President Bush! WHAT IS LESS WELL KNOWN is that the National Independent testing laboratories (ITAs) that the states are depending on to test these systems are ALSO OWNED AND CONTROLLED BY REPUBLICANS!!!
REASONS WHY THIS IS SO URGENT:
*** More states are poised to acquire these voting machines now because they need almost a year to get ready for the 2004 elections! ***
If action is not taken NOW it will be too late!
Both the voting machine software and the ITA testing is KEPT SECRET. All that anyone gets to see is that it was certified or not by those Republican companies.
(NOTE: The following does not apply to INDIVIDUAL Republicans who are likewise concerned about this voting problem!)
Please, please, grasp the significance of this: THE REPUBLICANS CONTROL BOTH THE VOTING MACHINE COMPANIES AND THE "INDEPENDENT" TESTING LABORATORIES!
It does not matter if you could somehow think that the Republicans would not rig those voting machines or not, what matters is that they could, and no one would know it!
Serious evidence indicates that the Republicans may be back at it, planning to make every vote NOT count! Certainly, they have an enormous temptation to do this, even if they are honest. Certainly, we should save them by removing this unnecessary temptation!
Surely, Democrats and others can believe that the Republicans probably will rig some of those machines in 2004, since there are no REAL safeguards in place, only phony ones, which will be proven to you below, dear reader, if you will continue.
A Strategy for Regaining Voting Rights:
Among the large number of problems that need to be addressed about computerized voting machines, the FIRST ONE, really, should be to get standards and government over-site of the National Independent testing laboratories (ITAs) that certify these machines. THE ELECTION OFFICIALS HIDE BEHIND THAT CERTIFICATION saying we are just silly people making much ado about perfect and certified machines. OBVIOUSLY, IF THE VOTING MACHINES ARE DECERTIFIED THEN THEY WILL BE THE FOOLISH LOOKING ONES! Below I will present PROOF that an ITA certified voting machine system had software that was full of security breaches and bugs.
PROOF that the current ITA certifications are truly inadequate:
Maryland had its Diebold voting machines certified and tested by both the manufacturer and the usual ITA. However, when a bunch of computer scientists at the University of Maryland created a big flap in the State's media, the Governor had another company (SAIC) examine the Diebold secret source code. The SAIC report was only partially made available with the rest "redacted". Translation, "redacted" in this case means "information that is embarrassing to Diebold or the State or both".
There were about 128 major security flaws and more than a hundred software bugs identified by SAIC. THIS IS AFTER FULL CERTIFICATION BY AN ITA! This proves, FOR SURE, that the ITA's certification was truly inadequate!
The "redacted" report currently can be seen in pdf format at this web address:
http://www.dbm.maryland.gov/dbm_search/technolog y/ toc_voting_system_report/votingsystemreportfinal.p df
Quoting Dr. Rebecca Mercuri,
" But vendors say their voting machines are certified:
Voting systems ARE CURRENTLY certified under a system established by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). This certification is based on the 2002 FEC guidelines that were only adopted by 37 of the states and have been criticized by technologists as flawed. (See my detailed comment The FEC Proposed Voting Systems Standard Update.) Accordi