BBV - Can American Democracy survive computerized votes?

[morgan2]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

...
another good article from the independant

[creativelcro]

1. LOL!!!.. They are desperate

"Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now openly accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution that, as the e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems website in March 2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of the information stolen could have been revised or manipulated."

Wow, they are really desperate... Suing left and right to prevent people from seeing the memos and then insinuating that they may be fake.... -C

[ParanoidPat]

2. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.....

.....Any questions? :shrug: :evilfrown:

[DEMActivist]

3. For those who have been wondering what we Georgians have been up to

That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code. At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on end".

"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the program was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".

Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."

Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience".

[seemslikeadream]

4. How to steal your vote, let us count the ways

Secure Electionic Registration and Voting Experiment

DOD STARTS SECURE INTERNET REGISTRATION AND VOTING DEMONSRTATION FOR 2004 ELECTION

The Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), in conjunction with several states and counties begun conducting a large Internet registration and voting demonstration for the 2004 election.

Thousands of absentee uniformed services personal, their dependents, and overseas U.S. citizens will have the opportunity to register to vote and cast their ballots from any Windows-based computer Internet access, anywhere in the world.

The seven counties in the State of Washington that have been selected are Pierce, Thurston, Spokane, Kitsap, Snohomish, Cowlitz and Yakima. There are ten States who will be participating in this project and they include Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utha and Washington.

The federal Voting Assistance Program is an element of the Dept of Defense.

www.serveusa.gov/public/aca.aspx

VeriSign tapped to secure Internet voting

VeriSign announced Monday that it will provide key components of a system designed to let Americans abroad cast absentee votes over the Internet

The contract was granted by consulting firm Accenture, which is working with the U.S. Department of Defense on a voting system known as the SERVE.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5083772.html

[Eloriel]

5. It's a must read article, and must pass around too

Way to go, DA!!

Eloriel

[AliceWonderland]

6. Thanks for posting

Subject matter turns my stomach, but it's a great introduction to pass around to people unfamiliar with the problem.

[KoKo]

7. Hey DemActivist, did they come an interview you for this, or did they pick

up what you had done from the Atlanta Journal Constitution (I believe there was a big article about you there)

This is great news to be covered by "The Independent!"

:toast:

[KoKo]

8. BTW what's going on in Georgia with this. Are newpapers questioning the

election? Is there anger from the Dems over Cleland? Do you think that Georgia Laws will require an investigation?

[DEMActivist]

10. Answers....

The politicians are all stonewalling us.

Anger over Max? I don't see it, never saw it, don't expect to see it. They are all in "protect the career of Cathy Cox" mode.

No, I don't think Georgia law will require an investigation - but I do believe the citizens of Georgia will.

This is going to be heavily attended, I have no doubt:

The Internet and Public Policy Project (IP3)
of the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy presents:

================================
DEMOCRACY AND TECHNOLOGY:
ELECTRONIC VOTING and GEORGIA

Thursday, October 16
3-4:30 PM
Clary Theater (in Student Success Center)
Georgia Tech
www.IP3.gatech.edu
================================

When the Georgia state government adopted electronic voting, it established itself as a leader in the technology of democracy. Recently, however, questions have emerged over the Diebold voting system used across the state.

Last summer, university researchers published a report claiming that the voting system is "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts." A later Diebold analysis claimed to refute those criticisms, while a report by SAIC drew mixed conclusions. The state of Maryland recently reviewed the Diebold technology and chose to adopt it.

This event offers computer scientists, public officials, and industry representatives an opportunity to present their analyses to the Georgia public. It offers a neutral, academic setting for a fact-based discussion of what has become a contentious issue.


Speakers
=======
** Prof. Dan Wallach, Rice University Dept. of Computer Science, co-author of "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System" (Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute Technical Report TR-2003-19)

** Prof. Douglas Jones, Examiner for Electronic Voting Systems, state of Iowa, and faculty member of the Iowa State University Dept. of Computer Science.

** Moderator: Prof. Hans Klein, Director of IP3 and Associate Professor of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology.

(Speakers have also been invited from Diebold Election Systems and from the Georgia state government.)

[DEMActivist]

9. Telephone interviews

We've (several Georgia activists are quoted in the article) worked with Andrew Gumbel for some time - a couple of months actually.

There's a great deal of interest on this issue from overseas and you'll see more coverage on it soon.

[dusty64]

11. Cool. I REALLY

do not get the power of cox, at best she is an idiot at worst a traitor and a criminal. What gives?

[DEMActivist]

15. None of us can figure it out

It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

For some reason, Cathy Cox has been deemed the rising star in Georgia politics and the Democrats appear to be prepared to do anything they can to protect her.

It has truly become a display of protectionism like I have never seen before.

There was an editorial in the paper last week that might as well have been written by Cathy herself. It was full of errors and a fawning endorsement of these machines.

When we contacted the author to correct some of her errors she said she didn't have to reprint a retraction because she never used my name in the article, just two sentences of errors when discussing my challenge. (She didn't even have the city where I live correct.)

[DEMActivist]

16. Contrast Andrew Gumbel's piece with this one

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/ezzard/

And you'll see what I mean in my post about Cathy Cox.

[creativelcro]

18. Martha is an idiot...

... Sorry... -C


"http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/ezzard/

And you'll see what I mean in my post about Cathy Cox."

[DEMActivist]

20. LOL, if you think the editorial is bad....

you should try talking to her on the phone! I'm sure her picture is in the dictionary next to "clueless."

[KoKo]

12. Kick! This should be read by all DU'ers. Even those who don't get code!

This is a wonderful article with our own DemActivist quoted from a British Newspaper! We need all the help we can get and this article is an easier read for those who don't understand all the technical stuff which has been posted about BBV here on DU.

This one you can understand.....and get the ramifications of what might have been done ALREADY to subvert our elections with Compluter Voting.

[Spazito]

13. Kick for a very important issue!

*

[KoKo]

14. Another Kick! Gotta keep going til the after 5 Crowd logs on!

:kick:

[DEMActivist]

17. Kick

[frank frankly]

19. also at a great site commondreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1013-01.htm

[creativelcro]

23. interesting....

the page:
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=452972&host=3&dir=70
which is the site commondream got the article from, is no longer
available.... -C

[althecat]

25. It's here now.... looks like it has been moved...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972

I was trying to access it earlier today... and could only find a compressed version of it...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=453116

which referred to this... it is back up now...

Who knows?

[DEMActivist]

26. Nothing sinister...

It was supposed to be released on Tuesday. Someone put it up on the wrong day and Common Dreams grabbed it.

Of course, we all get worried because of the cease and desist letters which are floating all over the world.

[4dog]

21. kick, nt

[Eloriel]

22. Don't forget to pass the article around

to everyone who needs to read it.

:kick:

Eloriel

[althecat]

24. Definitely a must read..... kicketyboo....

Here's the link to the independent version of it...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=452972

[Spazito]

27. Kick

:kick:

[Karmadillo]

28. Kick

n/t