There seem to be a bunch of DU'ers who signed up for Election Reform Meet-Up's long before this thread, but there were never enough people signed up to actually meet.
I bet there are a bunch of other people who are not on DU who had the same experience.
If we want to utilize this Election Reform Meet-Up vehicle it is up to us to change that.
I am sending the following e-mail to Chicagoans Against War and Injustice, AIDS Foundation of Chicago (both have voter registration drives), The League of Women Voters of Chicago, The Midwest Democracy Center, Rock the Vote - Chicago and any other group I can find that is working on political elections. I suggest other DU'ers do the same with local election/voter oriented groups in their area.
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Subject: Election Reform Meet-Up Wednesday, October 8, 2003
I am writing to invite you to attend the next Election Reform Meet-Up which is scheduled for Wednesday, October 8, 2003 at 7:00pm. Meet-Up's are a relatively new vehicle for people with common interests to come together in person. You can learn more about Meet-Up's at www.MeetUp.com.
The agenda for this month's Election Reform Meet-Up is Black Box Voting. In case you are not familiar with Black Box Voting, here is a beginner's summary, written by Bev Harris, who has been a driving force in the investigation into the problems with electronic voting machines and political affiliations of owners of the companies who make them. Her website is www.blackboxvoting.com She has broken the issue into 4 categories, Secrecy, Ownership, Disabling the Safeguards and Secret Certification and Testing.
1. Secrecy: What has always been a transparent process, subjected to many eyes and belonging to all of us, has very recently become secretive and proprietary. This happened when voting systems, which should be considered part of the "public commons" were turned over to private companies. These companies now assert that the process underlying the vote must be held secret from the voters.
- No voter, no citizens group, not even any academic group of experts is allowed to examine a voting machine.
- Likewise, citizens, academics and voters are not allowed to examine the software that tells the computer how to count and tally the votes.
- In addition, the process of voter registration is now going to private, proprietary and secret software.
2. Ownership: When a system that belongs to the public becomes secret, it becomes doubly important to make sure we can completely trust those who run it. Because voting systems have recently become proprietary secrets, we began to ask whether we can trust those who run these companies.
- Voting machine companies are not required to tell us who owns them.
- Several voting machine companies have been as secretive about ownership as they are about their voting systems.
- Two of the top six firms have been foreign-owned: Election.com, owned by the Saudis until an acquisition by Accenture a few weeks ago, and Sequoia, now owned by DeLaRue (Great Britain) formerly owned by Jefferson Smurfit (Ireland).
- Three of the top six firms have owners and/or directors who represent vested interests:
--- Election Systems & Software, the largest company. Main owner is a company owned by Senator Chuck Hagel's campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy. Hagel has owned shares in both the voting company itself and in the parent company run by his campaign finance director, and Hagel was the CEO and Chairman of the voting machine company while it built the machines that counted his votes.
--- Diebold, the second largest voting machine company. CEO is Wally O'Dell, who recently visited George W. Bush at his Crawford ranch along with an elite group of Bush supporters called the "Rangers" (formerly called the "Pioneers") where they set strategy on how to help him win the next election. Days later, he penned a letter to Ohio Republicans promising to help "deliver the votes" for Bush. O'Dell sponsored a $600,000 fund raiser for Dick Cheney in July. Diebold director W.H. Timken is also a Bush Pioneer/Ranger
--- VoteHere, the company striving to get its cryptography software into all the other companies' machines (already has a contract with Sequoia), has as its Chairman a close Cheney supporter and member of the Defense Policy Board, Admiral Bill Owens. The SAIC, an "independent" firm doing an evaluation of Diebold security for the states of Maryland and Ohio, has Owens as it's Vice Chairman. Former CIA director Robert Gates, who heads the George Bush School of Business, is also a director.
- Voting companies also have a somewhat incestuous group of key players -- Todd Urosevich and Bob Urosevich founded ES&S, but Todd now is an executive with ES&S while Bob is president of Diebold Election Systems. Sequoia and ES&S share software and optical scan machines.
3. Disabling the safeguards: Voting systems have always had people trying to rig them, with varying degrees of success. Here is what has changed:
- The scale of potential vote-rigging has suddenly grown much bigger: Whereas it used to be that one had to run around bribing someone to shave the wheel on each lever machine, or collect up ballot boxes, stuff them in a trunk and do something dastardly, nowadays a programmer can, essentially invisibly, create a back door into the vote system for millions of votes at once. Whereas vote-rigging has always required physical access before, modems and wireless communications devices now open up possibilities for remote vote rigging that no one can observe.
- The audit trail is being taken away: An audit is simply the act of comparing two independent data sets that are supposed to match. Probably the most important understory to the voting issue right now is this: The voting industry is spending literally millions of dollars, and going through amazing feats of contorted logic that can best be described as marketing gymnastics, to convince us that we should discontinue proper auditing. The key words here are INDEPENDENT sources of data which should be compared. Instead, they want us to eliminate the ballot which you verify, and trust the secret system sold to us by manufacturers, without the ability to audit it using any independent means.
Even with the optical scan machines, which retain a paper ballot, states are now passing laws to prevent us from looking at the paper ballot to use it for a proper audit.
- Methods of access are changing: One key to election security is to reduce physical access to the votes. We've done this in various ways before; the typical attack point was always in the transfer of the votes from polling places to the county office. For this reason, the most secure paper ballot systems, in places like Canada, France, and Germany, require counting right there at the polling place. That also gives another security function: the "many eyes" method of security.
Computer technology can allow people to gain access using remote methods. Right now, you are reading this on the Internet. You have remote access to this forum. Imagine if the wrong people can gain remote access to view the votes as they come in. It would be much worse, if remote access allows them to write data into the vote system.
- Programmer access: One thing we've never had until we got electronic vote-counting (which includes touch screens and optical scan machines, and punch card tabulation as well), is software programming errors. A lever machine can be tampered with, but you don't have any software programming errors with it. Incorrect software programming has now been identified in at least 112 elections, often flipping the race to the wrong candidate, even when the election was not close.
No one knows how many elections have actually been misprogrammed, and as we remove the paper ballots, no one will ever know. We do know that incorrect programming producing errors as high as 25 percent is not uncommon, and software programming errors have been documented as high as 100 percent, and in one small Iowa county, a single machine miscounted by 3 million votes.
Incorrect software programming can take two forms: Accidental or deliberate. Either one takes away our right to have our vote counted as we cast it.
4. Secret certification and testing, which gives a passing grade to flaws -- The whole reason we are supposed to accept secret software and secret ownership is that, we're told, these systems go through extensive and rigorous certification and testing. However, this turns out not to be the case.
First of all, the certification officials refuse to say what tests they do, even when sent official questions by the California Task Force on Electronic Voting, which includes Dr. David Dill and other experts. We are told we cannot ask them any questions, and all questions must be asked of R. Doug Lewis.
Second, this person named R. Doug Lewis, who is unelected (no one quite know what his credentials are or who hired him) -- well he refuses to answer questions either.
Third, the testing that supposedly takes place at the state level quickly falls apart. It turns out that the states generally do not look at the secret programs at all; they simply ask some routine questions ("Can you vote more than once? How hard is it to set up?") and the states do a "Logic & Accuracy test" in which they set the machine to "test" mode, put in some test ballots, and if it counts right, they call it good. This will not detect fraud, and has proven to miss huge software programming errors quite often, but everybody feels good when they say "we do an L&A test and you, too, can watch."
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All other issues relating to the 2004 elections whither if the votes cast are not fairly and accurately counted.
Sign up for the October 8 Election Reform Meet-Up and vote for the location at:
http://electionreform.meetup.com/If you cannot or prefer not to register with Meet-Up.com you can contact me to RSVP and for the chosen location.
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I would suggest other DU'ers who are signed up for Election Reform Meet-Up's do the same - and feel free to cut and paste and/or edit my e-mail as you wish.
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