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"The worst thing about being blind would be the inability to see if there were bugs in your food." - Jerry Seinfeld
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WHO’S GUARDING THE GUARDS?
GLITCHES, HITCHES, ANOMALIES AND IRREGULARITIES
BLIND TRUST Examination of transparency and security in elections worldwide WHY? A rhetorical musing in search of rationale
ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION (EAC) Numbers, Numbers, Numbers... THERE MUST BE 50 WAYS TO STEAL ELECTIONS PAPER TRAIL OF TEARS Pros, Cons and Tricks with Paper Dozens of Suggestions and Links to get on board in the Election Reform Movement HATE MAIL CONTACT US
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The general consensus among computer professionals and scientists is that we should use Open Source Code in the voting equipment software. Instead, we are using proprietary or “secret” code—known only to the corporations who own the machines and supposedly placed in escrow with the NASED (National Association of State Election Directors), but unavailable to the public who vote on it.
For example, OpenBSD is an Open Source operating system used by government organizations and NASA. Per Popular Science magazine, “OpenBSD is arguably one of the most secure operating systems in the world.” Wouldn’t that be something we could ALL be comfortable with protecting our votes?
Australia has now stepped up, joined Brazil, and recognized the need for Open Source, heeding the warning of computer scientists around the world. After pushing hard for the use of Open Source Software in e-voting machines, the Australian Electoral Capital Territory Commission recently won the battle last year, and is now openly publishing their voting software. It can be downloaded from their site. Voting any other way relegates the voter to subscribe to a system of blind trust in the voting machine companies and their product. And then– according to Jerry Seinfeld- you wouldn’t be able to see the bugs in the system...
In 1997, Costa Rica thought they would jump on the vote modernization bandwagon. They consulted with ATT Labs Research, where computer scientist Avi Rubin was working at the time, to inquire about a new e-vote system for their country. After the initial meeting, however, the representatives – having reviewed all the information--changed their minds and declined to go electronic due to “unresolved security issues.”
In Utah, they are seeking paper ballot verification after their particular surprise in the last election. Using old fashioned punch-cards, Utah voters thought they’d be protected from the concerns of the high-tech electronic “glitches” that other states were experiencing. But when 33,000 votes failed to be counted, people woke up to realize that their punch card ballots were indeed being counted… that is, tabulated… by Diebold’s GEMS tabulators. Diebold, however, with characteristic buoyancy, stated that they were --“thrilled by their equipment’s performance.”
Some suggest we abandon electronics altogether and return to paper ballots and hand counting. Ironically, on the forefront of this paper bandwagon we find a considerable number of computer professionals: Information security experts, programmers, auditors, and computer science academics, who- although immersed in electronics- don’t trust these systems for elections. An MIT/Cal Tech study from 2001 found ‘manually counted paper ballots’ to be the most accurate system out of the five systems used in the last four presidential elections. That same study pronounced electronic DRE Touch Screens as the system having the highest incidents of lost votes.
Germany, Switzerland and Canada are a few countries who still engage in the hand marked, hand-counted ballot practices. In Switzerland, universally accepted as a model democratic nation, people vote with hand counted paper ballots minimally four times per year. Best-selling author Thom Hartmann fondly remembers the voting process when he lived in Germany, not dissimilar to the one we enjoyed here for 200 years before HAVA. The people fill in hand-marked ballots which are then hand-counted by civil servants who are supervised by volunteer representatives from each political party. The time it takes is irrelevant according to Hartmann, because the people rely exclusively on the news media exit polls that night for results....because, for two generations of reporting... .they have never been more than one tenth of a percent off. Such is the exacting science of polling today… most of the time, in most of the places.
Canada, with its over 32 million people and 25 million voters seems to function very efficiently and citizens feel protected that their vote remains in the hands of the people. An example was in the November 2000 Parliamentary elections, employing the same hand-count system they’ve used for over one century, Canadians managed to smoothly wrap up a 13 million vote count of paper ballots within 4 hours from polls’ closings - with only 6 ‘counters’ per precinct. They have “Scrutineers” at their polls, one from each party, who observe and assist in the process. One such Scrutineer, who had been scrutineering for 30 some odd years, when posed with the question; “What happens if the number of ballots in the box doesn’t match up with the number of voters who’ve voted?” simply replied—“It’s never happened in my 30 years...”
The Canadians have a hard time understanding our system today which completely contradicts their own. In Canada, the ballots and the counting of the ballots MUST always be transparent and conducted in public view. If any ballot should stray from the eyesight or view of a Precinct worker, it MUST be discarded to avoid even the remotest possibility of tampering. Their perspective of our electronic system, with invisible digital votes and corporate owned secret codes counting the votes, is that in contrast---our ballots and counting of the ballots MUST always be removed from the peoples’ supervision and public view.
We still have a few locales in our Country where we do it the old-fashioned way with paper and pencil. It’s estimated only 2% of the American population still vote on hand counted paper ballots. Maine is one place where human hands still count 80% of that state’s paper ballot votes. They report no widespread voting problems and consider their system to be trustworthy. Residents cite this system as the best way to prevent election errors and additionally proclaim that they find the hand-counting by citizens to be “comforting.” Other states where some citizens still engage in counting by hand are parts of Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Michigan.
One of the intrinsic problems with using electronics to cast and count our vote, per Lynn Landes, election reform expert, “--Voting machines (including the Internet and optical scanners) introduce concealment and secrecy to those parts of the voting process (casting and counting the ballots) that depend on public oversight to ensure a fair and honest election.” The transparency that we took for granted in the past has all but disappeared.
There are some countries that employ electronic voting systems yet manage to check their accuracy by engaging in serious oversight and audits of equipment. Venezuela is one. They use Touch Screens which offer a paper print out of each vote. That paper receipt is then deposited into a box where it will later be used to audit the machine totals. These audits are performed (in the most recent election) on at least one machine from each voting center, and the machines are randomly selected by election workers and party representatives at that site.
As for the argument postulated by electronic vote advocates that their systems are more efficient and secure than hand counted paper ballots... According to the U.S. Justice Department, thieves of paper money made off with $45 million dollars in 2003, juxtaposed against computer thieves, who-- in the same year-- successfully stole $500 million of digital money. (Per the American Bankers Association.)
PerSecurity Pro News online article of August 2, 2005, IBM’s Global Business Security Index released a new report detailing the dramatic increase in cyber-crime statistics. In the first six months of 2005, there were 237 million attacks reported, representing a 50% increase over 2004! The report showed the United States as leading the world in hacker attacks with 12 million, New Zealand trailing in second place at a mere 1.2 million, followed by China at 1 million. Per the IBM Index, the most common victims of cyber-crime are reportedly governments and financial services institutions.
The article concludes with: “So what does this say? It says cyber-security has an extremely long way to go.” -- “This information shows that private industry and the governments need to work much closer together to protect the cyber infrastructure of the U.S. and the world.”
IBM is not yet being called a Conspiracy Theorist for suggesting that malicious electronic cyber-hacking has mushroomed into a problem of serious consequence that needs to be addressed. But- hey, that’s only in the governmental and financial arenas, nobody would be interested in tampering with electronic voting, would they? What’s to be gained there?
And now we have former NSA Chief Scientist, Robert Morris, warning us that our traditionally trusted ATM systems are perhaps the next victim in line for malicious attacks from black hat hackers.
From Morris: “During my years at the NSA, I witnessed the growth of the electronic banking industry and observed many poor security design decisions as the ATM network was built. The means for authentication, the protection of data, and the methods for transferring sensitive information are just the tip of the iceberg. The ATM network is the next financial hacking pot of gold.”
It will be interesting to see how Diebold, America’s premier ATM manufacturer, responds to this threat. Unprotected monies versus unprotected vote counts....let’s watch and see which trumps the other under the ever-vigilant eyes of Diebold.
This past year we heard on the news about a hacker who broke into the T-Mobile service and was able to read Secret Service emails. We are hearing that the FBI has just discovered that they too have been hacked into. We hear Senator Charles Schumer of New York speaking on the Senate floor of “West Law,” the on-line subscription service that will yield you hundreds of Social Security numbers along with personal information on people like John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, and they even have a George W. Bush at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue. Then we heard about the leak of private information from Master Card involving thousands of users’ identities.
And, as if that weren’t enough—Paris Hilton’s Blackberry, containing dozens of celebrity emails and contact numbers, has also been compromised by hackers. Paris, in her inimitable fashion, sums up the perpetrator on the David Letterman show (April 29, 2005) like this: “He was like a genius... He was like... one of those computer people...”
Don’t suppose Paris, the FBI or the Secret Service will just “get over it” and “move on,” do you? I’ll just bet they repair their flawed systems before further usage. Why shouldn’t we—the voters—be able to do the same?
Banks, corporations, government agencies — all run attack vector analyses to monitor the status of their systems’ security, and are constantly upgrading accordingly. Why can’t we apply these same kinds of common sensical standards to our voting systems?
Stanford Computer scientist David Dill compares voting electronically with proprietary code to “telling a man behind a curtain whom you want to vote for and trusting that he has recorded it faithfully.”
“There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.” - Demosthenes
Forward to Pentagon, CIA & Cyber Wars
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