E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections Even Without Evidence of Wrongdoing

[kpete]

E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections Even Without Evidence of Wrongdoing
from the conflict-of-interest dept

Are Republican operatives scheming to steal the election in Maryland this fall? Threat Level is reporting that the contract for transporting e-voting machines in the state has been contracted to a company whose president was the head of the state Republican party until 2006. I think the answer is almost certainly "no": while this certainly looks like a conflict of interest, I suspect it's no more than an honest oversight that will be quickly corrected. Still, it's troubling that we even have to worry about who transports voting machines. With ordinary paper ballots, it doesn't matter who transports them because there's nothing a moving company can do to undermine the election. But with e-voting machines, a moving company really could install malicious software that would undermine the election. And once an e-voting machines has been tampered with, there's no reliable mechanism for detecting the problem. Again, there's no evidence anything untoward has occurred in Maryland. But no matter who transports those e-voting machines, the public is being asked to take it on faith that they won't be tampered with. In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080120/07521615.shtml

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. What a negative expenditure of effort ... as if transporting voting

equipment is inherently more hazardous than any other method. Some of us remember the convoy on Florida's turnpike for the recount.

Nothing has changed in this regard. It's just people who no longer have have an issue continuing to flog a dead horse.

[Wilms]

2. This is similar to the reason CA's SoS doesn't want equipment sleepovers.

Make all the excuses you want, Fredda. Most here won't buy it, however.

[kster]

3. Thanks, kpete

the more security you have the better. Evoting puts our elections in the hands of to few people.

Safety and security in numbers. We the people can count and secure our own ballots/elections.

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

K&R

[riqster]

4. Money Quote:

"In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith."

THAT is the point.

[Stevepol]

5. The headline says it all. Transparency is the sine qua non of democracy.

[L. Coyote]

6. WRONGO! I have to contradict this sentence for sure.

"With ordinary paper ballots, it doesn't matter who transports them because there's nothing a moving company can do to undermine the election."

That is a curious misstatement. Why make this claim? This is false in so many ways. Hasn't Timothy Lee heard the term "stuffing the ballot box"?

In the case of Ohio 2004 punch card "ballot chain-of-custody" concerns, preeminent is the fact that ballots without precinct identification counted for a different candidate if moved to a different precinct. To make this as clear as possible, a Kerry vote could be changed to a Bush vote by moving a ballot to a different pile, AND one switched ballot changes the vote by two votes, subtracting from one candidate AND adding to the other.

Is there a "ballot chain-of-custody" discussion for Ohio punch cards in our archive?

Is someone STILL trying to cover up how Ohio was stolen? If it was no doubt they are and, unlike such cover-up conspirators, I'm looking forward to the upcoming hearings.

[Peace Patriot]

7. E-voting is most vulnerable to insider hackers....

...starting at the manufacturer, and including private corporation personnel doing maintenance, patches, and other fixes and repairs, when these machines break down, as they often do. The private corporation designs and installs the "trade secret" proprietary code in the voting machines, tabulators and other components, and thereafter generally has sole access to it. The system is made-to-order for insider corporate fraud. Truckers might have access to one set of machines. The manufacturer has on-going, long term access to them all. And that includes all types of electronic voting machines including touchscreens, optiscans, central tabulators, signature-recognition software (for mail-in ballots), auditory machines for the disabled, and other parts of the system. Of late, electronic voter databases have also become part of this election theft system--they may have a different manufacturer, but someone owns and controls the secret code to that as well. Massive, high-speed, invisible election theft is not only possible, it's easy on the manufacturer side of things.

Virtually all security measures in this egregiously non-transparent voting nightmare are aimed at keeping outsider hackers out. Little or no concern is paid to the "elephant in the room"--private corporate insider election theft, by means of their privately owned and controlled "trade secret" code.

And, to make our bad dreams worse, all three of the major corporate voting machine vendors have very close ties to the Republican Party and rightwing causes--and not just donations, but, say, the CEO being a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (Diebold), the initial funder and a major investor being a rightwing billionaires who gives millions to nutso, witch-burning type extremist 'christian' foundations (ES&S), and the chief sales rep being a former Republican sec of state (Sequoia). They have intense motive and wide-open opportunity. And they have lots of "means"--we've poured billions of our tax dollars into their pockets. They are not only ideologically similar, they have much reason to work in concert, to fix elections, to fix prices, to carve up the states (and the counties in big states) amongst themselves, and drive out or gobble up smaller vendors. They often even control ballot printing (if there is a ballot). See Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net.

King George III couldn't have designed a better counter-revolution. He must be laughing in his grave.