Electronic voting

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann () csl sri com>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 07:33:43 -0800 (PST)
To: dave () farber net
Cc: mercuri () acm org
Subject: Re: Lynn Landes' analysis of the 2002 Elections from RISKS

FOR IP.  Below is a response from Rebecca.
Here also is my own comment--

The most important question to ask is this:

  With respect to this year's all-electronic voting machines, is there any
  meaningful evidence that the vote you cast was correctly recorded -- that
  is, evidence that there were no misconfigured systems, accidents, internal
  fraud, etc.?  For almost all of the existing systems (with the exception
  of one that actually incorporates the Mercuri Mechanism, namely, Avante),
  the answer is an UNEQUIVOCAL NO.  This is an untenable situation if you
  believe in election integrity, IRRESPECTIVE of your party affiliations.

PGN
                ---------------

From: "Notable Software" <notable () mindspring com>
To: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann () csl sri com>
Subject: Re: <[IP]> Lynn Landes' analysis of the 2002 Elections from RISKS
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 00:02:11 -0500

First of all, it's more like $4B, Lynn wasn't including the additional sums
for training and so on that were also authorized by the Help America Vote
Act bills.  But even $4B is just the tip of the iceberg.

Over in Broward County Florida, where they just spent around $18M for brand
new touch-screen voting machines they found that they had to pay an
additional $2.5M just to run the November election, because the machines
couldn't be set up and monitored by the regular poll workers who are
normally hired. Now if Broward has to pay this sum 2 times a year for the
next decade, how does this Help America Vote? They could print up an
easy-to-read paper ballot for every man, woman, and child in the entire
County for well under $1M and they would probably not discover missing
cartridges 2 days later with 103,000 missing votes on them (after being
monitored by the Republicans who came down from the state to help the
Democrats out with the election).  A box of paper ballots is a lot harder to
lose (not that it hasn't been done) than a small voting cartridge. And the
paper ballots can be read by hand if the computers are misprogrammed (like
they seem to have been in a lot of US counties this past November).

Over in Texas, I don't really see how it's could be the Democrats' fault
when they discovered their brand new touchscreen voting machines lighting up
for the Republican candidates over in Dallas last week. When the Democrats
sued to stop the machines being used, the Republicans said "we haven't had
any complaints."  Sure, because they didn't light up for Democratic
candidates when the Republicans were pressed.  I wonder why? Misalignment?
Conveniently, none were misaligned in the other direction. Hmmm.

If you really look at your history books, you'll see all sorts of election
fraud in all sorts of places. We had things like literacy tests. And we had
to pass amendments to the US Constitution so that sex and race wouldn't be
used to prevent citizens from voting. There's plenty of election fraud too.
Tip O'Neil (the late Speaker of the House) described in his autobiography
(after he retired) a scheme whereby paper ballots were routinely substituted
(called chain voting). It's not any particular party that is to blame, it's
just that vote stealing is as much a tradition in the USofA as apple
pie. Unauditable voting machines just make it even easier to cover up.

Folks can continue to stick their heads in the sand and pretend this hasn't
happened, doesn't happen, and won't happen. Or they can face reality and
then work to adopt systems that will REDUCE and ELIMINATE election fraud,
rather than encourage and enhance the ease of doing it.

Please read the additional material and links on my website over at
www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html and join the effort to save democracy
before it's too late.

R. Mercuri.


------ End of Forwarded Message

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