BBV: Finally, a real computer guy's take on it. I, Cringely reports!

[SharonAnn]

He's dead on! I've always loved this guy, but now he's really rockin"!

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031204.html

<snip>
Punch card voting was too unreliable, it was decided, so we needed something more complex and expensive because the response to any IT problem is to spend more money making things more complex.
<snip>
And one thing engineers of great big IT systems know is that they are never on time, never on budget, and sometimes don't work at all.

Software development projects fail all the time, no matter what their size.
<snip>
Only 28 percent of software projects could be classed as complete successes while 23 percent failed outright (meaning they were abandoned).
<snip>
if 28 percent of software projects were complete successes ... then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing for your money.
<snip>

[ConsAreLiars]

1. Aviel Rubin was on Democracy Now! today

He criticized the Ohio review as being done by people who had only the vaguest sense of security issues and greatly underplayed the flaws in computerized voting machines: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/05/161214

"So we're at a point where they just say, either we just don't have an election or we use the insecure machines. I think they're going to use the insecure machines. I think the biggest bang for our buck in terms of improving things quickly, would be to add some sort of paper trail that voters could verify to the process. Even if you have an insecure machine, if the output of that machine is a paper ballot that the voter can look at and say, "Yeah, that's how I voted," or "No, that's not how I voted, let me vote again," that would allow at least for manual recounts. One of the bad things about the current crop of machines, despite the fact that they're totally insecure is that once the election is over, there's no way to validate the outcome. If they want to do a recount, they'll have the computer perform the same computation and give the same results. That doesn't provide any opportunity to discover errors that may have happened. There have also been examples recently and stories in the Washington Post and the Indianapolis paper of voting machines coming up with totally ridiculous outcomes. For example, in Indiana, there was a precinct with 19,000 registered voters. At the end of the election the computer said 144,000 people had voted. In reality, about 5,000 people had voted. One thing to take away from that, when you have such a large discrepancy, it's noticed. But what happens if you have a small discrepancy? For example, 5,000 people vote and 15 of the votes accidentally count for the wrong candidate. And these kind of things do happen. That one doesn't make headlines and nobody notices, but it could change the outcome of a small election. And so without any sort of voter verified paper all we have to do is take these machines at their word and we know and we see examples all the time they make mistakes."

[cthrumatrix]

13. this is why "printers" are optional in Florida....they know it's rigged

2000 was a crime with voters purged and 2004 planning is underway.

[ArmchairActivist]

2. Interesting little read...

...and from a bit of a different angle then we've seen. I must admit, I'm quite curious to read next week's installment.

-AA

[TacticalPeek]

3. Late Kick

[politicat]

4. We in the Computer biz all reacted with horror at the idea... Sorry it's

taken so long to get it out to the rest of you.

Every programmer I know (and I know a lot, being married to one and hosting game nights for several more and having a vast assortment of friends and acquaintances in the field) has cringed and vowed to vote absentee ballot so that s/he could be sure that his/her vote would be accurate.

Once guy I know wrote a really secure little program that would allow voting with complete confidence, and give a paper trail.... but would attribute 1 extra vote to the Dem for every 10 Republican votes.... And spit out a piece of paper as a receipt for it. He said if he was doing it professionally, he would have used something more like a Dem vote counts as 1.0001 votes and a Republican vote as .9999 because most of these programs round. The paper trail, the receipt that you and I get, looks right, but every 1000 votes ups the Dems chances. (He also wanted to make it much easier for Mickey Mouse to win....) He does not work for any of the companies that are doing this work; he just could.

Another one remapped a touch screen at his ex girlfriend's restaurant so that nothing was coming out right in the kitchen tags. It's easy to remap the touch screen so that a Dem vote is really a vote for the 12 foot tall Hypergalactic Lizard candidate. The thing is, he wrote another program that would still show the paper trail properly. (My friends can be .... strange.)

As long as this stuff is not open source, it's dangerous as all hell. Personally, I'm much in favor of the French system. Papers in specific boxes. Counting isn't that hard, even for the little old lady election workers in my area.

Though they bring me to another issue - most of them don't know how and are afraid to work on the BBV (or even optical scanner) voting machines. That leaves them in the hands of some young turk from Diebold who is charming and handsome and reassuring and as deadly as a viper.

Not how I want my democracy run....

Politicat

[kiahzero]

15. Um... not to question your personal experience

But it would seem to me that if the paper trail and the electric count didn't match up, you'd have clear evidence of wrongdoing.

[Gin]

17. Bev Harris said she wants random spot checks on voting numbers to

compare the machine to the paper number...that way the randomness would be too hard to fix by some programmer.

[DUreader]

5. kick

[trumad]

6. Good point

that Diebold has paper trails on everything else they build....

[SaddenedDem]

7. Answer to Cringely's question

Question from the article:
So who decided that these voting machines wouldn't create a paper trail and so couldn't be audited? Did the U.S. Elections Commission or some other government agency specifically require that the machines NOT be auditable? Or did the vendors come up with that wrinkle all by themselves? The answer to this question is crucial, so crucial that I am eager for one of my readers to enlighten me. If you know the answer for a fact, please get in touch.

Having the voting machines not be auditable seems to have been a bad move on somebody's part, whoever that somebody is.

Answer:
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Knecht
To: [e-mail]
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2000 2:05 PM
Subject: AVTS - Voter Summary Page

Background: Based on feedback from registrars, we are battling the concept of printing a Voter Record of the voter's choices on a piece of paper. Yes bad idea. I suppose it would lead to some multipart printer that would provide one copy for the Registrar and one for the voter. NONE OF US THINK THIS IS A GOOD IDEA...so we are battling.

Request: It would give us some ammo to have a summary of the voter's choices displayed in summary form on the last page along with the review and cast ballot buttons. This way the voter could review, verify what they voted for, and then press Cast ballot on the same page (or go back and change it). Our competitors (Hart) do this and it is a minimal step necessary to fight this printout idea. We may or may not win this. Apparently the Brazil system does this in some fashion and has gotten some attention.


Steve Knecht Global Election Systems

[trumad]

8. Good going SaddenedDem

I think if the guy wants his questions answered he outta join Bev's forum and DU....

[SaddenedDem]

9. :-) n/t

.

[TahitiNut]

10. Duplicate avoidance kick

(Horses and barn doors.) :shrug:

[CatWoman]

11. Is your name really Sharon Ann?

If so, what a coincidence -- my sister before me is named Sharon Ann!!

:hi:

[SharonAnn]

20. Yes, that's my first and middle name. My original logon was

Shadd_Ann, which I used when I first came here and wasn't sure how trustworthy DU was. Then, when the new version of DU was started, I changed my logon to Sharon Ann. Sort of a way to "open up" and show my trust in DU.

BTW, I'm honored to receive a post/reply from you. I've been watching your postings and responses for a long time and really admire your writing. Also, love your cat pictures and someday I'll figure out how to get the pix of my 3 Siamese and 1 American Shorthair on here.

I'm a computer person, 30+ years in programming and systems work as well as project mgt. Cringely described the BBV stupidity as well as anyone I've read so far. And it's from my profession's perspective so it was a double thrill to read it and then jump over to DU and share it with everyone.

[alfredo]

12. I just sent out 56 e-mails featuring this article.

I hope you will make sure your mailing list knows all about this. Be sure to put
http://www.blackboxvoting.org in there too.

It is time to ratchet up the pressure folks.

[SaddenedDem]

14. Excellent article that shouldn't be missed

This author makes some excellent points.

[Vitruvius]

16. Kick -- because "Cringely" knows his stuff.

:kick:

[RedEagle]

18. First Cringely

Next, Bill Moyers? Please?

[RedEagle]

19. Too good not to

Kick!