Re:Violation of election laws (Score 1)

"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 undetected. " http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=& contentId=A60825-2003Sep24Found=true THIS IS AFTER FULL CERTIFICATION BY THESE CERTIFICATION LABORATORIES, Wyle Laboratories and Ciber, the independent authorities that originally tested the Diebold system! This proves, FOR SURE, that the labs certification was truly inadequate! Claims 2 and 3 Hard evidence and strong circumstantial evidence 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. (NOTE: Many INDIVIDUAL Republicans are concerned about this voting problem!) Bob Urosevich, a close Bush supporter, is CEO of Diebold Election Systems and is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United States. Also significant, from what we can determine about the architecture of the software, is that its basic structure was specifically a creation of Mr Urosevich's company I-Mark. For more background on Diebold Systems connections to the Republican Party see: Diebold - The Face Of Modern Ballot Tampering http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0211/S00081 .htm Meanwhile Presidential wannabee and Republican Party United States Senator Chuck Hagel has been directly connected to ES&S via his campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, who has admitted that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group. Senate Ethics Director Resigns; Senator Hagel Admits Owning Voting Machine Company http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0301/S00166 .htm Certification laboratories are called Independent Testing Laboratories (ITA) and have connections to Diebold and thus to the Republicans: Brit Williams, the Georgia-based voting machine technologist at Kennesaw State University, who was instrumental in bringing the Diebold touch-screen voting to Georgia. Williams was a consultant to the Federal Election Commission during the development of the FEC Voting System Standards in 1990 and 2002. He also chairs the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) Voting Systems Board Technical Committee and consults for several states, including Virginia. Certification Process Problems The way the certification process works at the moment goes like this. There is a list of Independent Testing Authorities (ITAs) which are private testing companies certified by the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED) to test and certify elections systems hardware, firmware and software. The company making the system applies to NASED for certification. The company picks one or more ITAs to test their system, and pays them a substantial a fee to to do so. Here we have an inherent conflict of interest. There are currently two ITAs which handle most of the certification; Wyle Labs which certifies only the hardware and firmware; and Ciber, Inc. which certifies only software. Wyle labis testing is limited to repetition testing -- they devise routines to test functionality and run those tests over many cycles. Ciber, Inc. is one of only two companies in existence willing to certify software since the court decision making the software source code a trade secret, and the only one apparently to actually certify any Diebold software. Ciber, Inc. claims the means it uses to test the software to ensure it meets NASED standards are trade secrets. Therefore, not only can we not see the code ourselves, we are not even allowed to know how the software is tested to be certified. Ciber is only the latest of several companies to successively do software testing, each one with the same director, a man by the name of Shawn Southworth. As mentioned above, Ciber, Inc. does not answer questions directly about its testing processes, and REFERS all questions to The NASED Election Center. Election Center Director R. Doug Lewis declines to answer questions about testing processes. No one really knows the background of Southworth, and R. Doug Lewis' background is known only to the extent of his press releases from The Election Center. This organizational arrangement has therefore created a tremendous amount of secrecy surrounding the certification process. Thus, Brit Williams is the connection center between The FEC, NASED, and R. Doug Lewis. Brit Williams was involved in the Georgia patches! Brit williams lies proved by RobGeorgia http://www.blackboxvoting.org/williams.htm Now with the voting machine code secret and the testing secret, If there were any lines of computer code for rigging elections in those systems there is no way we can know except to TRUST the Republican companies. Actual case of TRUSTING the Republican owned Diebold Corporation: Once an election official buys this junk they don't want to admit they screwed up. The Democratic Secretary of state of Georgia replaced all machines in the state with Diebold. In 2002 the polls said that a Democrat would win the Govenorship but instead a Republican won, same with several other races there, Republicans won. THERE WAS NO WAY TO PROVE they did not with these machines! But pretty suspicious! Secretary of State claims she single handedly has taken Georgia into the 21 century! Yeh! the Republican "New American Century"! More examples of extremely suspicious voting results that cannot be resolved because of voting machines that have no truly auditable results can be found in Black Box voting Chapter 2 at this (and other) websites: http://bitn-babylon5.com/Politics/bbv_chapter-2.pd f Claim 4 Hard evidence 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. A voter verified paper ballot is one that is printed out after touch screen voting by a voter. The voter verifies that the paper record has the same choices as he selected on the touch screen and then he does not sign the paper ballot which is to be an old fashioned secret paper ballot, instead he places it into an old fashioned ballot box. So, why bother to have a computerized voting machine then? To provide a backup in case the electronic records are accidentally erased or for use in case of a recount. However, by far the most important value of these paper ballots is for use in special surprise audits of the voting system to prove that no computer fraud has occurred! Now let us look at a Kansas real world example: Posted on Sun, Sep. 21, 2003 By FINN BULLERS The Kansas City Star Exerpt: "The county's election system is not connected to the Internet, avoiding a possible external attack, she said. The election office's main computer is not connected to a network and is locked in a room with a surveillance camera trained on it at all times. Schmidt has the only key to the room. We really are like a bank and are locked up and secure; she said. People can't just be wandering around in the polling place and step up and vote undetected. We can balance our votes, like money, at the end of each day at every polling location and then trace it through audit tapes. A shaky maiden run Johnson County encountered problems, however, when it used the touchscreen machines for the first time in a live election. The county agreed in 2001 to buy 860 touchscreen machines for $3 million. The county will spend an additional $600,000 for 200 machines next year. In the April 2002 municipal elections, some modems used to transmit results from polling places to the central election office failed. The county no longer transmits results from polling places to the central election office via modem; cartridges that record results are hand-delivered to the office. Also, results were misreported in six races. The system miscounted hundreds of votes, and a re-count was ordered. The hand re-count was done by printing an image of each ballot recorded by the touchscreen machines. No outcomes changed after the re-count. Schmidt said the voting machines worked fine, but problems arose when the results were fed into the main computer. We really can't answer what went wrong, Schmidt said at the time. In a recent interview, she referred all technical questions to Diebold. Diebold investigated the problem and said in a news release issued at the time that a software error had led to the election night problem." The problem appears not to have been in the Accuvote-TS Ballot Stations. If so, then even if the system had accurate printed paper ballots as required by H.R. 2239, they would have corresponded with the ballot stations but the vote inaccuracies may have occurred in the Host and MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN CAUGHT BY THE H.R. 2230 PAPER BALLOT SCHEME! 4. The paper ballot solution, being proposed by many computer scientists, will not work in many cases, so it is only one of many safeguards needed! Guess what! Paper Ballots are not enough! Why? Fraud by ballot box requires a lot of effort to make up false ballots and stuff them in there, a few hundred at a time. Only useful to a crook if an election is close. Now, however, even if the election is not close, only one click of a mouse can instantly transfer 100 million votes to the wrong side! Thus if the election results are not close, they could still be fraudulent, but no one would be willing to do a recount without some sort of evidence of the fraud, which will not be available with these machines! From Russ Holt's staff: "HR 2239 does not alter state recount laws as they pertain to recounts conducted at the request of a candidate." "If HR 2239 passes, it will override any State law to the contrary with respect to recounts (or with respect to any other provision in HR 2239). Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution reads as follows: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators." If Congress mandates a voter verified paper trail (by passing HR 2239), States cannot conduct elections for federal office on equipment that does not produce one. If Congress mandates mandatory spot HAND recounts of the voter verified records in a percentage of contests, no State law to the contrary can prevent one. If a State law (I have been told Nebraska has one such as this) says recounts many only be counted in exactly the same manner as the original count, and the original count was by the computer, that doesn't matter. The mandatory spot recount will still (under HR 2239) be conducted BY HAND, on the voter verified records. The percentage of recounts to be conducted was chosen by Rush in consideration of, on the one hand, what percentage would provide a meaningful deterrent, and on the other hand, what percentage could realistically be passed in this Congress. H.R. 2239: "SEC. 7. REQUIREMENT FOR MANDATORY RECOUNTS The Election Assistance Commission shall conduct manual mandatory surprise recounts of the voter-verified records of each election for Federal office (and, at the option of the State or jurisdiction involved, of elections for State and local office) in .5 percent of the jurisdictions in each State and .5 percent of the overseas jurisdictions in which voter-verified records are preserved in accordance with this section immediately following each general election for Federal office, and shall promptly publish the results of those recounts. The treatment of the results of the recount shall be governed by applicable Federal, State, or local law, except that any individual who is a citizen of the jurisdiction involved may file an appeal with the Commission if the individual believes that such law does not provide a fair remedy." This extremely small percentage could easily MISS catching a miscount! HERE is the weakest point that the voter verified paper ballot solution that has been proposed in house amendment H.R. 2239 (bottled up in committee) has. The standard configuration of a Diebold AccuVote-TS(TM) system is best understood by an analogy with a system that is familiar to people who surf the internet. The Host Computer at the Election Officials' headquarters functions quite like an internet service provider (ISP). The voting machines (Accuvote-TS Ballot Stations) are computers which have modems that can dial up the Host computer, after the elections close, to upload the voting data. The Host Computer also can access the internet in a fashion somewhat similar to an ISP. That is the Diebold voting system in a nutshell. The actual system is somewhat more complex but this analogy is all one needs to understand the main issues involved. Now the GEM's Access database is located in that HOST computer. That paper ballot solution with its .5 % manual surprise counts would allow an audit trail only if the voting stations recorded database records that included the data from each anonymous secret ballot and which voting station it came from. Summary data and an identifier for each voting station all to be uploaded to the Host. Presently, it appears that the only data sent to the Host is station voting sums and not the detail I mentioned! Never-the-less, if that were changed to what I would want, then when we get to the Host we have to ask if the uploaded data indeed agrees with what is in the voting stations. How do we audit/prove that? Then that data, of course, has to be summed to give the final vote tallies. How do we audit/prove that those sums are valid? There are solutions to these questions but none have been implemented in the current crop of voting machines. We hold these truths to be self evident. That contrary to common law a voting system must be assumed guilty of being rigged until proven innocent. That the mechanism for proving that innocence is a verified by multiple means audit trail that starts with the voter verified paper ballots and is built throughout the voting system's structure. This audit trail should be the primary design focus of the entire voting system design. Failure to provide such a VOTER VERIFIED AUDIT TRAIL is evidence of extreme incompetence in voting system design. It is the very minimum one would expect from a voting system! So why haven't the voting machine manufacturers done this? Either they have hired inexperienced and or incompetent software developers or perhaps they have more sinister motives! 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. The biggest problem to getting action is this: 1. In congress the Republicans normally act according to orders from their leadership. That leadership sees no need for H.R. 2239, the verified paper ballot initiative proposed by the democrats. 2. So with the Republicans against it H.R. 2239 has no chance in hell to be passed, and there is no chance that they will change their minds unless there is a massive demand for it from the majority of the voting public. 3. Since to the naive there is no "sky is falling" urgency, so what little coverage of the topic is done by the mainstream press will be a fair and balanced tepid presentation between the trust worthy voting machine companies versus the crazy radical "cry wolf" computer scientists. (God, that is so backwards!) 4. That will likely continue until the 2004 elections are close. At which point the mainstream press will reckon, that with the elections close, this controversy will now attract viewers and readers and there may even be enough public outcry to get H.R. 2239 passed but it will be way too late for the critical 2004 elections since there will be not enough time to install all those printers and other software in time for the elections, so that is when the sky falls! Claim 5 Hard indisputable evidence 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. A Strategy for Regaining Our 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 UNFORTUNATELY APPEAR TO BE THE FOOLISH LOOKING ONES! Lynn Landes writes: "Congress has failed to safeguard our right to vote. Instead, they passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that gives billions of dollars to the states to purchase voting machines, while failing to require any mandatory safeguards or standards. Meanwhile, misguided voting rights groups are SUING for the right to use the latest most sophisticated computerized voting equipment which is the easiest to rig by the fewest number of technicians." (Lynn Landes) These recommendations in the "Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force Report " commissioned by the Democratic California Secretary of State Kevin Shelly is a wonderful description of the things that need to be done in terms of both federal and state law. NOTICE that in the report, the California Task Force tried to contact some ITAs and they refused! Wonder why? The recommendations should be a good starting point. The report can be found at. http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/taskforce_report_4. htm Quoting Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, "The Presidentially appointed 4-member HAVA Election Assistance Commission, in addition to approving each of the state plans, will also be responsible for administering a host of other tasks, not the least of which include overseeing a 14-member Technical Guidelines Development Committee and a 110-member Standards Board, and making provisions for "testing, certification, decertification, and recertification of voting system hardware and software by accredited laboratories." The Technical Guidelines Committee must produce a set of recommended voluntary voting system guidelines nine months after appointment, and it is understood that these guidelines would be the ones used by the laboratories in their certification and testing processes. Only problem is, the HAVA Commission has yet to be appointed (it was supposed to have been created by February 26, 2003). As well, none of the HAVA Committees and Boards were established. Thus, the Technical Guidelines are unlikely to be available by the time that state implementation plans are due. This has resulted in the states contracting to purchase voting systems that can not possibly be HAVA compliant, since there does not yet exist any HAVA standards." (Dr. Rebecca Mercuri) Now, if and when, Bush does appoint the HAVA commissioners, etc. he will probably try to appoint people who concur with the existing Republican voting machine companies and Republican ITAs. CLEARLY THAT WOULD BE TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! We would be right back on square one. A "failure is not an option" strategy to beat the Republican's excessive control over these voting machines: What we need is to take immediate, vigorous, and non-stop action until this issue is properly resolved! In particular, for Democrats, that means finding people with CONNECTIONS who are VIP enough to talk directly with NATIONAL Democratic campaign ISSUE strategists and convince them that all this is REAL in the sense that if nothing is done, we can kiss our democracy goodbye! If this voting machine problem was pushed by most Democratic Candidates as a number one MAJOR, won't go away, repeated and repeated (as the Republicans do) issue, it will be forced into the major media and more and more citizens will begin to take it seriously and eventually develop enough pressure to get H.R. 2239 and other needed reforms passed and most importantly IMPLEMENTED! Look at the magnitude of the problem. They don't want to put it into the media as a campaign issue, but If they do not, it will not get into the mainstream press, if it does not get into the mainstream, the neo-cons take over! Example: General Wesley Clark's Campaign's take on this! I suggest each of us do some research on this if we're serious about it. And before we do anything, we remove the discussion from the Wesley Clark Weblog space. This has nothing to do with his campaign and we do not want to create suspicions that this is occurring as political retribution for 2000 presidential election. This is because we are favor a fair and accountable election process that is transparent. This is a nonpartisan issue. That said, I suggest a couple of people start doing in-depth research as to the background and history of the articles and try to find out as much as possible. At the same time, we should contact other organizations (perhaps involved in the 2000 recount - just for their information, not their opinions) and ask how they proceeded and any advice they may have. Then we approach the press. Once we become more than a blip on "local" radar screens, and find conclusive evidence that the election process has been tampered with, we can perhaps team up with other organizations and petition Congress to investigate and submit to state attorney generals. If we succeed, we not only demonstrate our resolve towards a transparent democracy but also show those in power that in the end they are still accountable to the electorate. Posted by: Steph4Clark at September 12, 2003 04:23 PM | Link The whole discussion is found at: http://wesleyclarkweblog.com/archives/000339.html For extensive facts and details about voting machine fraud see the free Book at: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/ or http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ Other very revealing and informative links: A superb example of how to rig a voting machine system is at this web address: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064 .htm http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00078 .htm http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/34803555 3 http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html http://liberty.hypermart.net/Newsletter/3/4_The_20 04_Election_Has_Alread y_Been_Rigged.htm http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/ http://www.hermes-press.com/Voting/vote_rig.htm http://truthout.org/docs_03/102003A.shtml FIN