the [alternate] patriot

Thursday, September 04, 2003

GOP lining up to steal not just 2004 election, but elections for all time...

The following was posted on a Kucinich for President email list:

September 3, 2003

Office of the Secretary of State
Elections Division
PO Box 40229
Olympia, WA 98504-0299

Dear Messrs. Reed and Logan:

I have downloaded your online publication The Electronic Vote from
your website, and am seriously disturbed by your unwarranted faith in
the security of electronic voting. "Electronic voting improves
security, reduces the number of voter mistakes, and helps insure
every citizen the right to a secret ballot," says Mr. Reed. I
suppose two out of three isn't bad, but many computer experts have
been calling for a paper trail as validation of the voting process
for some time now.

The California report you cite (which dismissed the need for a paper
trail) has had substantial objections raised to its conclusions by a
number of computer security experts. And if you don't set store by
the opinions of the following people, I'd like to ask you if you'd
continue to shop at a store which would not give you a paper tape
listing your purchases, but asked you to trust their computer alone
to arrive at the correct total. I certainly wouldn't, and I don't
think my vote should be treated that cavalierly either.

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/6344554.htm

I believe Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of
Counterpane Internet Security in San Jose, who says he's
``terrified'' about the prospect of voting with the current lineup of
paperless DRE machines. ``Building technology that allows people to
untraceably rig the vote seems like a bad idea,'' he says in the
understatement of the year.

I believe Ed Felten, computer science professor at Princeton
University, who calls these machines ``black boxes'' -- opaque to
scrutiny and potentially subject, as Schneier notes, to tampering.

I believe David Dill, a Stanford University computer science
professor who has worked hard to bring this issue to public
attention. Visit his Verified Voting Web site
(www.verifiedvoting.org) for much more information.

I am particularly concerned by software companies which are privately
owned by political partisans, which also refuse to make their code
public. The worst offender by far is Diebold. You claim that it
would be difficult for outsiders to tamper with the vote. Difficult,
but not impossible. And you completely overlook the possibility that
tampering capacity can be built into the software in the first place.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm

When asked to comment on allegations by Bev Harris that the Diebold
software may have been designed to facilitate fraud, Rubin described
the claim as "ludicrous. "Rubin could dismiss the allegation of
deliberately fraudulent design in Diebold software, because his team
never examined the Diebold software in question. Incredibly, this
software keeps not one, but two Microsoft Access data tables of
voting results. It's like a business keeping two sets of account
books. The two tables are notionally identical copies of the votes
collated from all polling stations. The software uses the first table
for on-demand reports which might uncover alteration of the data --
such as spot checks of results from individual polling stations. The
second of the two tables is the one used to determine the election
result. But the second table can be hacked and altered to produce
fake election totals without affecting spot check reports derived
from the first table."

(over)
Electronic voting, page 2

What might those two sets of Enron-style tables be used for? The
head of a voting machine company has stated that he will deliver
Ohio's votes to his preferred candidate, and his machines have the
capacity to do just that.

http://www.cleveland.com/election/index.ssf?/base/news/106207171078040
.xml

Columbus - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in
Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he
is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold
Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President
Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of
allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential
election.

Diebold has already been caught at electoral hanky-panky in 2002,
with no attempt by anyone to set matters right.

http://www.americanfreepress.net/08_25_03/Concerns_Over/concerns_over.
html

Georgia is perhaps "hardest hit by the growing Diebold scandal," said
Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st
Century. On election night 2002, 67 memory cards with thousands of
votes went missing in Fulton County, Harris reports. The loss of
memory cards is comparable to lost ballot boxes.

Right before the election in Georgia, an unexamined program 'patch'
was hastily installed on the 22,000 Diebold voting machines across
the state. A patch inserts a 'program fix' into the existing code.

One of the folders found on the Diebold ftp site was one named 'rob-
georgia.' This folder contained patch files that instructed the
computer to replace the existing GEMS program with another. AFP has
confirmed that the Diebold code used in Georgia was not inspected
prior to the 2002 election.

As a voter, I demand the following safeguards for any electronic
system that my tax dollars buy:

* random inspection of computer voting machines after the election,
* publication of the software code, and
* paper 'receipts' given to each voter to inspect upon completion of
his voting, to be then deposited in a 'backup' ballot box.

This is not impossible or too expensive. If necessary, we can just
import the Australian system.

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/EVACS.html

Here's Australia's system. The project was run by the government,
with a contractor writing the actual open-source code for the system
in less than six months for under $150,000. They have printers,
audit trails, publicly inspected software and hardware, and the
system is thoroughly tested.

Sincerely,

Now consider the steps the rightwing GOP has taken and will take to wrap up future elections:
1. Taking Florida and Texas by the Bush brothers
2. Ensuring that Texas Bush won the presidential election in the key state of Florida
3. Destabilizing the economy of the key state of California via Texas power companies (run by Bush cronies) price jacking, leading to
4. Ousting the Democratic governor of the key state of California by a recall election just 2 years after he was re-elected 5. Re-drawing the congressional districts in Texas (just 2 years after a court approved redraw, after Repubs gained a majaority in the Legislature) in order to
6. Ensure a veto-proof Republican U.S. House
7. Install voting software in every state that is designed by a committed Bush supporter (dont you imagine the veto-proof Repub Congress will require this? and the Republican-appointed Supsreme Court will back it up)

If you check out the electoral college results from the 2000 electon, you will see how putting a lock on California will ensure easy Republican wins in the future.

Say good bye to Democracy.

Palema 7:07 AM

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