(Hawaiian) Panel advances paper-ballot measure

[Wilms]

The Honolulu Advertiser

Panel advances paper-ballot measure

Posted on: Wednesday, February 9, 2005

By Gordon Y.K. Pang
Advertiser Capitol Bureau

A measure that requires the state's electronic voting machines to spit out a paper ballot for verification purposes advanced out of the House Judiciary Committee after receiving dozens of letters of support.

-snip-

"If there is a sizable group of voters who distrust the machines, we should take the necessary steps to reassure them," said Jean Aoki, legislative chairwoman for the League of Women Voters of Hawai'i.

-snip-

Dwayne Yoshina, the state's chief elections officer, said his office does not believe a voter-verifiable receipt is necessary to confirm and validate an election. A number of safeguards are already in place, he said, including testing of each machine before the election as well as manual audits and poll-book audits that are conducted on election night. The electronic machines can be audited by printing each voter's "ballot image" that can be reproduced physically at a later point.

-snip/more-

<http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2005/Feb/09/ln/ln09p.html>


And if you'd like to share your thoughts with Dwayne Yoshina, you can email him, here:

mailto:[e-mail]

[Atman]

1. This still doesn't really do much

It makes the voter feel more confident that his vote was properly cast. But perhaps falsely so.

If you've followed any of the e-vote threads, you may have read that the tallying of the votes was where the real scam was. The theory is (and it makes much sense) that BushCo knew the scrutiny was on the machines themselves. Many did have funky problems like defaulting to Bush, but those incidences were relatively few in the grand scheme of things (pardon the pun). Where the fraud is taking place is NOT in the machines. Any two-bit hacker could code the machine to print out a "receipt" reflecting what the voter just saw on the e-screen. But how does anyone know that is what his actual vote was tallied as? The information has to be uploaded and tabulated off-site, by a repubican-owned company, no less.

An good example might lie right on your desktop and your own computer printer. You can calibrate your screen to your printer. You can calibrate your printer to your screen. Sometimes, though, what you see on your screen in not the same as what comes out of your printer. Red is actually burgundy. Perhaps you used CMYK instead of RGB. Further still, if you upload your finished computer file to a service bureau for output (I'm talking publishing and design stuff here), they may get an entirely different output alltogether. Maybe the reds will match perfectly, but now the Verdana typeface has been substituted for Helvetica...they're CLOSE to the same, but have different spacing, and your design may have changed in ways which weren't apparent to you when you "proofed" it on your own screen.

So, my point is, as long as we have computers involved, there is virtually unlimited potential for tampering and fraud. Hiding a short operator in two million lines of proprietary code is child's play. Look at that word again....no, not child's play, PROPRIETARY.

These Diebold and Sequoia and ES&S machines are all run with PROPRIETARY software, and we, the voters, are not allowed to know anything about it. In fact, no one is. Even the regulators themselves are not allowed to review the code because of supposed "trade secrets." Now, add more to this still...republicans own the e-vote companies, and they even control the tabulating. So, a paper receipt will do NOTHING other than to confirm what was on the screen you saw. It would take almost nothing to code the machine to print you a copy of what was on the screen, but then send a different signal to the tabulators. Nothing at all.

The answer is not in much ballyhooed paper ballots. True transparency is required. Independent inspectors must be allowed to analyze the code, verify what it does, then seal and certify the machines. At the very least. Otherwise, e-voting can NEVER be trusted.

[Wilms]

2. Tabulation is an issue. n/t

[tommcintyre]

3. A report on the bill here.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x322909