dr. elsewhere here
[UPDATE at end]
Brad Friedman has an exclusive blockbusting piece up on Salon today (but offers his own, fuller version) about how hackable Diebold machines are with a vicious virus that can spread from machine to machine and flip votes.
According to scientists at Princeton, their results show that no "conspiracy" is needed to do the dirty deed. Indeed, just one person could infect the machinery with the virus, which would then spread and flip an entire election.
Sheds a more sinister light on Karl Rove's laptop activity on election nights, does it not?. (See also here and here and here.)
P.S. As it happens, I just learned I'll be out of town next week for my state's primary elections. This afternoon I will walk to my local courthouse and ask for an absentee ballot. I will fill it out and turn it in. Simple as that.
It's occurring to me that, for you folks in states where such niceties as vote protection and integrity are in jeopardy - especially where you're forced to use these damn machines - it might be worthwhile to start looking into absentee ballots, as well as for others in your communities, especially workers and the elderly. I also suggest you take the time and dime to trot over to your local library and photocopy the thing; your own personal receipt.
[UPDATE: Miss P, ever astute, pointed out in her comment that absentee ballots are also subject to scanning, which is then fed into those lovely central tabulators, also imminently hackable. Excellent point, but I should point out that I did not mean absentee ballots to be the ultimate fix, only better than electronic voting machines whether they give a receipt or not. Absentee ballots are also better than standing in line for hours, being pulled for dispute and "provisional" voting, and being given the runaround about your correct precinct, all on election day. The absentee ballot is a tangible ballot that can be "recounted" by hand.
Which leads me to my position on the voting process: Ultimately, it is my opinion that we need to dispense with machinery at the first stage of counting altogether. Period. We have nothing but paper ballots that are used for voting by people who can see what their vote is on that piece of paper. These paper ballots are then counted by nothing but people. People from across the political spectrum in each precinct get together at a table and each one counts the ballots. Their total is listed with their initials by them (but kept from the others), and they pass them to the next guy, until all present have counted. They then compare all totals; if there are any discrepancies, you keep at it until there are not. Great incentive to get it right the first time.
When the totals for each precinct are agreed upon, they can then be submitted to ...well, everyone. A tabulator, the press, the public, the web, the janitor. With that front line hand count in place, by the careful reckoning of each individual there (who of course are trained election officials, etc.), any messing with the totals up the line can be detected. In fact, you and I could tally up the results with pocket calculators.
This is the way things work in Canada and Europe, and guess what? The results consistently come within 1% of the exit polls. Fancy that, eh?
Another advantage to this process is that it highly reduces the need for hand recounts later, which is not trivial in light of what happened with the San Diego replacement of "Duke" Cunningham. Because Hastert swore Bilbray in, the locals have no recourse. We could be seeing a lot of this piece of the scam puzzle in our future.
Of course, this process requires a good bit of participation among the voters with regard to volunteering to count, secure, and administrate. Good; never hurt anyone, and requiring representatives across party lines to work together is also a good thing. In fact, these things are required for a democracy to work!
HANDS ON VOTING. Demand it!
4 comments:
Yikes! Please don't push absentee voting as the work-around:
In Maryland, absentee voters use "a paper-based optical scan voting system (AccuVote-OS or Model ES-2000). With this system, a voter is issued a paper ballot and completes the oval next to the candidate or ballot question response for which the voter wants to vote. At the local board of elections, the ballot is fed into a scanning unit, which reads and tabulates the selections made by the voter." (this from State Elections website).
Now take a look at this from http://www.truevotect.org/ although it's old news (or, just google AccuVote):
“In June 2005, Finnish security expert Harri Hursti demonstrated that the memory card used in the AccuVote OS units can contain executable code, and that furthermore, the scanners will execute the code if it is present. Hursti was able to use this fact to program a memory card so that it (1) contained counters that were not zero and, in fact, had counters with negative vote totals; (2) produced a zero tape nevertheless; and (3) used the negative counter values to subtract votes from candidates and positive counter values to add votes to candidates, which resulted in a complete manipulation of the election. Note that if the sum of the negative and positive counter values are zero, the total number of votes tallied will exactly match the total number cast, and nothing will appear to be amiss. Hursti was able to disguise the behavior so it would not be detected in pre-election or post-election testing. (A manual recount would reveal this.)”
But who ever would ask for a manual recount of absentee ballots? Why would anyone call for a recount? Why would anyone even suspect anything amiss with a mail-in ballot?
Rather than the perfect work-around it could end up being the perfect storm!
Miss P.
miss p, i hear ya, but...
at least there is a paper record.
i was not proposing that this would be the best final fix. in fact, i should update and make clear what i believe the best fix is. but in the meantime, we sure can't hope for the electronic voting machines to be the best. even if they spit out a receipt, there is no guarantee that it records the vote accurately.
at least the absentee ballot is a tangible ballot that can be counted by hand as a true vote if a recount is needed.
...and i'll explain further in my update.
Thanks for the update!
I've been wanting to do absentee myself. But after my nagging intuition let go it's hold on my vocal chords, I realized also that absentee ballot people would never be counted in the EXIT POLLS.
Miss P.
Unless times have changed, I was paid for my "work" working a poll for a federal election in Canada a few years back. I was a poll clerk, there were two of us to a station and all we did were hand out ballots, point people to the correct station and ensure they were placed properly in the box. After the polls closed we all went upstairs in the firehall and proceeded to drink lots of coffee as we counted. Seems so simple, and I actually enjoyed that day, can't think of any way to improve it... fairly, of course.
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