Since you make a number of claims, and I have limited time, I won't attempt a complete refutation, but will merely try to provide enough representative links to show that e-voting concerns are not the singular obsession of Bev Harris and that the concerns Harris raises are not evidence of hysteria but actually originate in comments of technical experts. Following these links further would probably dispose of all your accusations. Otherwise, a few more minutes with a search engine would suffice.
You can ridicule Aviel Rubin as Bev Harris's "partner in crime" and sneer that he "spent a day as a poll worker in Baltimore." But in fact he's a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, Technical Director of their Information Security Institute, and a specialist in network security, applied cryptography, at privacy technology, which actually well qualifies him to discuss issues such as the reliability and security of these little electronic "voting machines."
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~rubin/Rubin also belonged to the expert group that studied the possible internet voting for overseas voters:
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DRE (direct recording electronic) voting systems have been widely criticized elsewhere for various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities: that their software is totally closed and proprietary; that the software undergoes insufficient scrutiny during qualification and certification; that they are especially vulnerable to various forms of insider (programmer) attacks; and that DREs have no voter-verified audit trails (paper or otherwise) that could largely circumvent these problems and improve voter confidence. All of these criticisms, which we endorse, apply directly to SERVE as well.
But in addition, because SERVE is an Internet- and PC-based system, it has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks (insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, viral attacks on voter PCs, etc.), any one of which could be catastrophic.
Such attacks could occur on a large scale, and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law. These attacks could result in large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, and/or privacy violation, and/or vote buying and selling, and/or vote switching even to the extent of reversing the outcome of many elections at once, including the presidential election. With care in the design, some of the attacks could succeed and yet go completely undetected. Even if detected and neutralized, such attacks could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections.
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http://servesecurityreport.org/An pdf of those author's bios is available at the link: all the authors have specialized (doctoral level) technical expertise. Note that they consider "lone wolf" attacks might be as damaging as organized attacks.
Here's the BBC coverage of that report:
Pentagon e-voting plan 'flawed'
Thursday, 22 January, 2004, 12:54 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3419775.stm... Computer scientists like David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have warned for the past few years of the dangers of electronic voting. Specifically, Jefferson said software bugs could cause problems that would have no way of being solved without a paper trail ...
http://www.smdailyjournal.org/article.cfm?archiveDate=10-07-03&storyID=25935... an extended, free-wheeling interview .. with three .. Rebecca Mercuri, Barbara Simons, and David Dill
http://truthout.org/docs_03/102003A.shtmlElectronic voting riles League of Women Voters
Friday, June 11, 2004
... Some say the League of Women Voters' support of paperless systems has lulled politicians into thinking the machines are reliable ... Barbara Simons, 63, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery, is running for league president on a paper trail platform. The league's endorsement is out of touch with younger, computer-savvy voters who "know computers are risky," she said ...
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/06/11/league.electronicvoti.ap/Barbara Simons was President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from July 1998 until June 2000 and Secretary of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents in 1999. ACM is the oldest and largest educational and technical computer society in the world, with about 75,000 members internationally. In 1993 Simons founded ACMs US Public Policy Committee (USACM), which she currently co-chairs. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1981; her dissertation solved a major open problem in scheduling theory. In 1980 she became a Research Staff Member at IBM's San Jose Research Center (now Almaden). In 1992 she joined IBM's Applications Development Technology Institute as a Senior Programmer and subsequently served as Senior Technology Advisor for IBM Global Services. Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory. Her work on clock synchronization won an IBM Research Division Award. She holds several patents and has authored or co-authored a book and numerous technical papers. Recently, Simons has been teaching technology policy at Stanford University.
http://www.acm.org/usacm/Committee/Simons.htmStanford Report, Feb. 18, 2004
Electronic voting unreliable without receipt, expert says
BY STEPHANIE CHASTEEN
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Stanford computer science Professor David Dill says that the man behind the curtain should show you the ballot. He uses this metaphor to illustrate his grievance with completely paperless electronic voting machines, such as touch-screen machines.
"If the machine silently loses or changes the vote, the voter has no clue that that has happened," says Dill. He argues that electronic voting machines should print a paper copy of the ballot, which the voter can inspect and which can be used in the event of a recount. Dill made the case for this "voter-verifiable paper audit trail" in a Feb. 15 symposium on voting technology at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
While many, including Dill, think that optically scanned ballots are the cheapest and most reliable method of collecting votes, there has been a rush to invest in electronic voting machines instead.
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http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/february18/aaas-dillsr-218.htmlTestimony by Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D.
Presented to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science
Subcommittee on Environment, Technology, & Standards
Tuesday, May 22, 2001, Room 2318, Rayburn House Office Building
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For the last decade, I have investigated voting systems, with particular emphasis on electronic equipment (hardware and software) used to collect and tabulate ballots. Through this research, I have identified numerous flaws inherent to the application of computer technology to the democratic process of elections. These flaws are both technologically and sociologically based, so a quick (or even long-term) fix is not readily apparent. For example, present and proposed computer-based solutions are not able to resolve (and in some cases even increase) the likelihood of vote-selling, coersion, monitoring, disenfranchisement, and fraud in the election process.
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To date, no electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards (such as the ISO Common Criteria or its predecessor, TCSEC/ITSEC), nor has any been required to comply with such. No voting system vendor has voluntarily complied with these standards (although voluntary compliance occurs within other industries, such as health care and banking), despite the fact that most have been made aware of their existence and utility in secure product development. There are also no required standards for voting displays, so computer ballots can be constructed to give advantage to some candidates over others.
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In conclusion, I would like to remind the Committee that technology can not and does not, at present, provide a solution to the balloting and tabulation problem. Our society has become increasingly enamored with computers, yet we all have experienced, first-hand, their (sometimes catastrophic) failures in products we use every day. The same is true for computer-based voting systems, but here, there are no warranties and insurance provided if we have problems with the results. It is therefore crucial that we continue to maintain and impose human checks and balances throughout our election process. This is the only way to insure that our democracy does not become one that is by the machines, of the machines and for the machines. Thank you.
http://www.house.gov/science/full/may22/mercuri.htmElectronic Voting
Rebecca Mercuri
The contents of this webpage are Copyright ©2000, 2001, 2002 by Rebecca Mercuri.
In the rush to correct problems exposed by the 2000 Presidential election debacle in Florida, many municipalities were pressured or required to procure new voting systems. The most vulnerable of these systems are the fully electronic touch-screen or kiosk (DRE) devices because of their lack of an independent, voter-verified audit trail. The vendors and certifying authorities have taken a "trust us" stance, claiming that the machines are "fail-safe" and that the internal record and tally constitutes an accurate reflection of the ballots cast on the machine. In fact, machines have failed in actual use, not only displaying choices that were not selected by the voters, but also by mis-recording votes (in some cases losing them entirely, or shifting them to other candidates). Some of the machines enter a lock-down mode at the end of the balloting session, where it is impossible to later check that votes could be cast properly for each candidate or issue. Vendors have tied the hands of election officials and independent examiners by protecting their systems under restrictive trade-secret agreements, making it a felony to inspect the operation of the machines without a comprehensive court order. The articles linked below in my writings section provide an illustration of the magnitude of these problems. My analyses are based on computer science and engineering facts, and are not politically motivated. Please read these materials carefully and contact me if you should require further clarification or assistance.
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http://mainline.brynmawr.edu/~rmercuri/notable/evote.html