BBV: NYT reports on a new battleground in the vote stealing war

[althecat]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/nyregion/20VOTE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=f0c3ef823127e2a2&ex=1067227200&partner=GOOGLE

Good morning,

There is loads of material in here to chew on.... the final page names the lobbyists in the NY machine race and their paychecks... looks like well over $40k a month is being spent alone on suits with license to spend for favours.

Eloriel, I expect this will raise your hackles given your theory on NY and CA and the grand plan to steal America.

So let the parallel surfing begin.

Al

****

Replacement Near, Old Vote Machines Are New York Issue
By ERIC LIPTON

Published: October 20, 2003


ames Parks, on his knees, struggled to find the one screw amid the 20,000 parts that would unjam the scraped and dented New York City voting machine he was repairing. Ray Crews, another mechanic, had a handful of thin metal straps, which he carefully threaded, one at a time, into the back of the 800-pound behemoth he was servicing nearby. And Jamie Wilkins used a screwdriver to flip back tiny copper switches in the endlessly complex guts of another battleship-gray machine.


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/nyregion/20VOTE.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=f0c3ef823127e2a2&ex=1067227200&partner=GOOGLE

[theivoryqueen]

1. How can we get vote verifications?

Every other transaction a human paticipates in is accompanied by a receipt of some sort - except voting. There has got to be a way to get a paper confirmation from these machines - ATM's do it all the time.

[JohnGideon]

2. kick

n/t

[althecat]

3. Not sure if this is a dupe... New WIRED.COM story from Kim Zetter...

Kim is still catching up on some of the Evil DUer BBV crew's greatest hits here... in this case the leaked ITAA PR strategy... (I am still reading this as I post.. is quite long)

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60864,00.html

E-Vote Firms Seek Voter Approval

In the wake of concerns raised about security flaws in electronic voting systems, a lobbying group is strategizing a public relations and lobbying campaign to help voting companies "repair short-term damage done by negative reports and media coverage."

And in a separate and surprising move companies, according to one vendor, are reversing their long-time opposition to giving voters paper receipts as a way to verify electronic voting results, a change critics have been seeking for months.

According to a draft plan produced by the Information Technology Association of America, a lobbying and trade association for the tech industry, electronic voting machine makers are discussing ways to convince state election officials that their products are the gold standard and worthy of taxpayer money.

The plan calls for a media campaign to "generate positive public perception" of the companies and to "reduce substantially the level and amount of criticism from computer scientists and other security experts about the fallibility of electronic voting systems."

[althecat]

5. The guts of is this is very interesting.... an apparent industry U-Turn

Bill Stotesbery, director of marketing for voting machine vendor Hart InterCivic says the industry is moving towards provide a VVPB...

*****

According to Stotesbery, vendors are already addressing security issues raised by critics.

"Nobody in the industry would argue that security is not a primary objective.... It's not just the right thing to do, it's also increasingly a market imperative."

He also said vendors are moving toward answering one of the biggest requests critics have made to date.

"Every vendor in the industry is moving forward in being able to offer a voter-verifiable paper ballot of some sort," he said. Three companies make voting machines with a verifiable paper ballot, and Hart InterCivic recently demonstrated its own model featuring such a function, he said.

"I have no doubt that all systems will offer a voter-verifiable paper ballot," Stotesbery said. "The capability to deliver that functionality exists and will continue to improve."

Verified Voting's Dill was surprised at the announcement and called it "an enlightened opinion."

"That's how I always hoped companies would respond," Dill said. "It would be a very positive change to have companies try to develop this feature, and if that's the ITAA's approach to restoring trust in the election system, then that's the right approach."

Dill said, however, that the design of a voter-verified paper system is not a trivial undertaking and that the usability and security aspects of such a feature need to be thought through carefully so companies design systems under standards that meet both these criteria.

"There are right ways and wrong ways to do it," he said. "I hope the industry will engage in open discussions with knowledgeable computer scientists about what the best standards for verified voting systems would be."

Seems they have come some way since August when in the conference call David Allen http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0308/S00175.htm">heard this...

Efforts must be made to get academics "on our side".

Working with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is desirable, however, if NIST mandated an oversight committee chaired by David Dill (a respected industry critic), ITAA assumed, "no one would want to play".

ITAA suggested “re-engineering” the certification process to make the industry the “gold standard” so they can eliminate “side attacks you are subject to now from people who are not credible as well as people who are somewhat credible.”

[althecat]

4. And then there is this gem on the Inquirer re Bill Gates exploding emails.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=12227

"Even in the US, destroying emails can be a federal offence. Indeed, just this year brokers Morgan Stanley were fined $1.65m for failing to keep proper e-mail records.

So whose security is Microsoft claiming to be seeking to enhance, we wonder? That of the man in the street? Or that or corporations like itself, or HP, or electronic voting systems maker Diebold in an attempt to allow them to deny that they ever said things they actually said.

Trusted Computing? Yeah, of course we trust you Bill."

[seemslikeadream]

6. From the Times

Resolving each question will be hard enough. But the choices must come amid the charged atmosphere sure to form as lobbyists from the nation's biggest manufactures of voting equipment descend on Albany, trying to grab a piece of what could be one of the largest voting machine contracts in the nation's history.

"This is going to be intense,"said Brian O'Dwyer, a Democratic Party Activist and a lobbyist for Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia, A California company, has also hired a Republican lobbying team, led by Jeff Buley, who was general counsel to Governor Pqataki's re-election campaign last year.

"It is huge," added Dan McGinnis, senior vice president for domestic sales at Election Systems & Software, an Omaha, Neb, company that wants into the New York market.

[althecat]

7. Exactly.... and if this is huge then we need to get involved...

I was particularly interested in Eloriel's view on this as she came up with her grand unified theory on vote fraud in which NY was a key component.

Also...

What resources does the BBV crew have in NY. Someone needs to get mobilised up there...