more on " Bigger Than Watergate! The stealing of the US voting system"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: gep2 () terabites com
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 14:22:33 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: [IP] more on " Bigger Than Watergate! The stealing of the US voting
system"

> Upon careful reflection, one would have to consider this story highly
improbable at best.  Historically, the security of a secret in inversely
proportional to the number of people who know it.  The only real
guarantee is if exactly one person is in on it, and that person is
dead.

> Consider the number of people who would have to be in on the game
to make massive fraud possible:  programmers, program system
managers, executives in the company(s) making voting machines,
political operatives who decide how many votes to steal and from
whom, minions who actually carry out the manipulations, involvement
of the exit polling workers and organizations.

Actually, no.  

It would be quite easy for NOBODY to be involved beyond one or two
programmers 
at the company making the machines.

The fact that the source code running in the voting machines is not
auditable 
(the source code should be available, and it should be able to be
independently 
compiled and verified against the code actually in the machine), combined
with 
their being no paper or other hard-copy verifiable backup, is a HUGE
problem.

Any good programmer worth his salt could easily devise a strategy into their
code that would skew the results during "real" elections but that would
behave 
properly during nearly any kind of "test".  The truth is that a good program
could recognize the differences between "election day" voting patterns and
"test" patterns... and only tweak the results on election day.

And remember that the machines DO identify the parties of each candidate...
so 
giving an edge to (say) Republicans would be easy.

I think it's fascinating that the early voting here (in the Dallas area)
which 
uses the touchscreen systems (which are not auditable) has DRAMATICALLY
higher 
voting for Republicans than we see on Election Day.  If everything else were
equal (and you can argue all you like about hypothetical reasons why this
MIGHT 
not be true), one might expect that early voting results and election day
results (where there are marked and auditable paper ballots) would be
comparable.  Many Democratic candidates here win handily on Election Day,
but 
lose once the (un-auditable) touchscreen early voting results are added in.

> Considering the nearly
50,000 polling places across the US, the number of people who would
have to be "in" on the game boggles the imagination.

Actually, no.  

First, the election place could be perfectly legitimate... I work as an
election 
judge (and election clerk during early voting) and run everything 100%
correct.

We have *no* way to confirm that the numbers reported by the touchscreen
machines are anything other than fictional.  The only thing we can confirm
is 
that the number of voters and ballots they counted match the number of
voters 
who signed in.

It could take as little as one or two people at the voting machine company.

> Even more mind boggling is the idea that they could collectively keep a secret
for more than two or three microseconds, especially considering that
the media would have to in on the game as well.

The media CLEARLY IS "in on the game", judging by their obvious right-wing
bias 
(and the payback is the FCC restrictions on media ownership being lifted...)

> This is not to say that there is not vote fraud, but for the most part it
is ad hoc and local.

The fact that the internal firmware of the election systems is not available
for 
independent auditing is a SERIOUS red flag.

Internet and other offsite voting is similarly INHERENTLY unwise, for the
simple 
reason that it's impossible to verify that the voter isn't voting with a gun
(figuratively or even literally) held to their head.  Yet nobody is
mentioning 
this OBVIOUS problem, apparently choosing to focus instead on silly
technical 
issues which are far easier to solve.

Gordon Peterson                  http://personal.terabites.com/
1977-2002  Twenty-fifth anniversary year of Local Area Networking!
Support the Anti-SPAM Amendment!  Join at http://www.cauce.org/
12/19/98: Partisan Republicans scornfully ignore the voters they
"represent".
12/09/00: the date the Republican Party took down democracy in America.



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