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Edited on Mon Oct-27-03 10:58 PM by God_bush_n_cheney
I had my first voting experience at age seven. I remember going to the poll with my mom…watching the curtain closing the levers being pulled and the clanking of the machine as she pulled the lever. I was excited to say the least and when she was finished I asked to have my turn. She chuckled and said I would have to wait…I was adamant that I should vote…that the Democratic Party needed my vote. Well, needless to say I was disenfranchised. But , on my 18th birthday I had a voter registration card filled out and in the mail before the end of the day.
Since that time I have been registered and have voted in every single election. At times it was hard to make it to the polls, but I have always felt it was my duty to vote…Vote to make a difference and to ensure this experiment we call democracy survived and flourished. The right of every American to vote is what separates us from the totalitarian dictatorships that have come and gone since the founding of our country. It is a right that belongs to us all Democrat, Republican, Green, Gay, Straight, Black, White or naturalized Martian. It is the one right we have that can effect profound change on our society without the bloodshed of a revolution.
Today there are some that seek to cheapen that right. They see it merely as a commodity that can be bought and sold for a price or, stolen outright. But it is up to each and every one of us to protect that precious right…we must defend it vigorously from those that would take it. It is the basic freedom from which all of our rights stem. Without the right to a fair ballot we are reduced to mere slaves, without hope and recourse.
I am a simple man…a Subway “sandwich artist”, but I believe in my country. I believe we have the best system of Governance on Earth by of and for the people. But we have become complacent and even now our vote is being surreptitiously snatched from us and handed over to shadowy and secret process. The wrappings are benign enough, who doesn’t like the friendly computer? We have grown accustomed to them they are pervasive…we trust them. Now don’t get me wrong I love my google and yahoo as much as anyone, and rely on them for many things. But the machines that are coming to count our vote scare me. Why, you may ask? When the machines are under lock and key…not open to scrutiny and review, how do we know our votes are being counted as cast?
I am no expert…I am not a programmer and like many, do good to open e-mail and read it. I have to rely on experts. David Dill a computer science professor at Stanford University said "I've tried to find out what kind of testing that goes on in these companies it is something we don't know. They won't tell us a thing about their code or what they do to test it. “A bit about David, David Dill has worked tirelessly on bringing this issue to the front and center. He is worried and rightly so that the machines can be manipulated…heck lets call it what it is…the machines can be rigged.
I know rigged is a harsh word to use and many of you may recoil at its use. But let’s see what Diebold says. Diebold by the way is the maker of a voting system that by luck, we are able to see into. In internal memos that were leaked from the company we hear such things as: “Being able to end-run the database has admittedly got people out of a bind. Though Jane (I think it was Jane) did some fancy footwork on the .mdb file in Gaston recently. I know our dealers do it. King County (WA) is famous for it. That’s why we’ve never put a password on the file before.” This statement worries me on many levels but most importantly why would someone be trying to do an end run around the vote totals? It strikes me as odd that they would even try.
Shortly before the 2002 election in Georgia, Rob Behler, a server technician and Product Deployment manager for Diebold, was instructed to install a patch on the Diebold machines. The file was called “Rob Georgia”. The patch had not been certified, tested or approved. Is Rob Georgia a noun or a verb? An interview with Rob Behler can be found in Black Box Voting, Vote tampering in the 21st century, written by Bev Harris. I would strongly urge each of you to read this book. The information in that book is quite chilling and expounds on this subject in more detail.
So where do we go from here? Australia has an exemplary voting 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. This is not impossible or too expensive. The value received from this system is, in my opinion…priceless.
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