Equal Justice Foundation newsletter 9/10/06
By Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A. / President
All in all electronic voting systems don't exhibit the reliability and trustworthiness of a Game Boy toy. Yet we have been forced to put our most fundamental freedom in the hands of a few opportunistic vendors with no meaningful standards for security, accuracy, reliability, or usability.
This isn't simply my opinion. Either every major newspaper and magazine, columnist, author, and expert who have examined electronic voting in detail are wrong, or our election officials and voting machine manufacturers have perpetrated an incredible fraud upon our most cherished and basic right to a democratically-elected government.
Introduction to voting problems
The waste of $4 billion dollars by the U.S. federal government is hardly noteworthy today. Probably that much was wasted within a month after hurricane Katrina last year, or on Halliburton in Iraq. But it is virtually certain that the $4+ billion federal and state governments have spent under the Help America Vote (for Bush) Act mandating electronic voting and statewide voter registration databases is among the most damaging waste our government has ever financed. A small fraction of the problems generated by electronic voting and statewide voter registration databases is documented on the Equal Justice Foundation (EJF) site Vote Fraud and Election Issues.
Elections have always been gamed and rigged, of which the Chicago Rules of Election Fraud are but one example. However, the forced introduction of electronic voting machines and statewide voter registration databases has made that possible on a scale and with ease previously unimaginable.
For those unfamiliar with elections, Prof. Doug Jones Brief Illustrated History of Voting might serve as a starting point. For more details on Stealing Elections there is John Fund's book. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of election fraud and stealing elections then Bev Harris' Black Box Voting is probably your first choice, though the EJF tabulates many other web sites of interest.
Since its inception the EJF and I, as an individual, and working with other groups have been attempting to insure fair and honest elections utilizing a secret ballot with one, and only one vote for each eligible citizen that is openly and accurately counted.
Essays on voting problems
Electronic voting was introduced with few meaningful standards and virtually no safeguards. Toward correcting that in June 2001 the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) formed a working group dedicated to developing rigid standards for electronic precinct voting. Remarkably, standards for central tabulators, voter registration databases, and other election problems were not considered. I joined that committee in November 2001 and worked on it until it was dissolved in January 2006 because the broad range of experts on the committee could not agree on workable standards for such basic issues as security, among other problems. In fact, I was one of only 6 out of 31 experts to vote to try and continue trying to develop workable standards. Keep in mind that IEEE sets most standards for electrical, electronic, and computer equipment, about 1,300 of them. So today there are only voluntary standards for voting equipment that virtually all experts on the subject have grave concerns about and, in practice, are proving dysfunctional.
I still hear from the uninformed that if ATMs work so reliably, what is the problem with electronic voting. David Jefferson outlines why that idea is a non-starter.
Probably the leading expert on computer voting is Prof. Doug Jones with the University of Iowa. If you are not familiar with his work then Thoughts On Computers In Voting should be required reading. He puts forth this frightening, and all too probable scenario:
"If I wanted to fix an election, not this year, but four years from now, what I might do is quit my job at the University of Iowa and go to work for Microsoft, seeking to insinuate myself into the group that maintains the central elements of the window manager. It sounds like it might be fun, even if the job I'd need would largely involve maintenance of code that's been stable for years.
My goal: I want to modify the code that instantiates a "radio button widget" in a window on the screen. The specific function I want to add is: If the date is the first Tuesday after the first monday in a year divisible by 4, and if the window contains text containing the string "straight party," and if the radio buttons contain, at least, the strings "democrat" and "republican," one time in ten, at random, switch the button label containing the substring "democrat" with any of the other labels, at random.
Of course, I would make every effort to obfuscate my code. Obfuscated coding is a highly developed art! Having done so, what I'd have accomplished is a version of windows that would swing 10 percent of the straight party votes from the Democratic party to the other parties, selected at random. This would be very hard to detect in the election results, it would be unlikely to be detected during testing, and yet, it could swing many elections!"
Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting
Stupidity is an elemental force for which no earthquake is a match.
Karl Kraus Nothing has eroded voter confidence more than touchscreen DRE voting machines. Companies such as Diebold have been caught in Bald Face Lies About Black Box Voting Machines. Most essays about computer voting problems involve Diebold (our index currently list 74). But Diebold is hardly the only one and humorist Dave Barry has satirized problems with ES&S iVotronic machines, for which one suggested use is making artificial reefs (we currently index 29 problem areas).
Many Americans may support the artificial reef idea and we present many articles on why they should. For example, the New York Times compared the security of electronic voting machines to gambling in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, gambling comes out a long way ahead.
Another method of proposed electronic voting was via the Internet. In 2001 I played a major role in stopping passage of a bill to allow Internet voting in Colorado. However, Internet voting is a hydra-headed monster and by 2003 the Department of Defense(DoD) had created the SERVE program ostensibly to make it easier for servicemen and women to vote. Of course, to do this they contracted with an offshore company, Accenture, about which there is more later. Probably to their own surprise, a committee of experts managed to kill this ill-conceived boondoggle. Undeterred by reality, the DoD and several states then began an even more insecure program of voting by electronic mail (email). Despite citizen and expert testimony, in 2006 Colorado passed legislation to allow email voting. And the day after the state election director, Billy Compton, Esq., pushed the legislation through the Colorado House he resigned to head up the state Democratic political committee, leaving the implementation of his folly to others. Launched September 1, 2006, the Federal Voting Alternative Program (FVAP) site now shows you how to hack the vote for any state from anywhere.
The basic reason given for the necessity of DREs was that they would provide unassisted access for handicapped voters. However, when blind voters tried them in an election the machines didn't work any better for them than for the rest of the population despite a $1 million payoff by Diebold to the Federation for the Blind. And the only handicap most current DREs accommodate is vision impairment so major, and costly upgrades will be required in the future again, and again, and again, and again, ad infinitum, at taxpayer expense.
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