NYT: Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade

Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade
By JAMES FALLOWS
Published: November 28, 2004


....On the available evidence, I don't believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The apparent margins for President Bush were too large, in Ohio and nationwide. But if the race had been any closer, we could not have said for sure that the machines hadn't made the difference. That is because many electronic systems violate the two basic rules of trustworthy computing.

By definition, they have barely been exposed to real-world testing. The kind of thorough workout that Visa's or Google's systems receive every hour happens for voting machines on only a few special days a year. By commercial standards, the systems are necessarily still in "beta version" - theoretically debugged, but not yet vetted by extensive, unpredictable experience - when voters show up to choose a president.

Four years ago, about one-eighth of all votes for president were cast electronically. This year, nearly a third were. How the system would handle that large increase in scale could not have been tested until the presidency was at stake. Worse, most of the electronic systems are not accountable. When I voted this year, I fed my paper ballot through an optical scanner and into a storage box. In a recount, those ballots could have been pulled out and run through the scanner again. If I had used the touch screen, I would have had no tangible evidence that the vote counted or was recountable.

Is that a problem because the chief executive of Diebold, the largest maker of such systems, is a prominent Republican partisan? No. It's a problem because it defies the check-and-balance logic built into every other electronic transaction....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/business/yourmoney/28techno.html

""....On the available evidence, I don't believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The apparent margins for President Bush were too large, in Ohio and nationwide""


Blows his credibility for me immediately.
He doesnt have the scope of mind to grasp that such a feat was even possible let alone to seek indications of it.

You surely will not see what you will not look for.

the mandate is as phony as the vote count.. THAT's where you gotta start...

The polls were never "close"
The votes were never "close"
The mandate is phony..

We have a dictator:(

Saddam shaved his mustache, lost some weight, and is currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

right away he sounds like a PR person for Diebold.... :grr:

there was so much vote shaving/padding in places where it wasn't needed to "win." They wanted to provide precisely that argument to discourage people from thinking "fraud" -- and were obviously successful.

As some DUer pointed out the best places to shave votes were both in Bush strongholds (who'd question an even more solid win) as well as Kerry strongholds (who'd question more than expected Bush votes as long as Kerry still won those areas)?

Further, making sure of a popular vote win also avoided any discussions like happened in 2000 with Gore's popular vote win but electoral vote "loss."

Most readers who are not as informed as we are (because of lack of MSM coverage) still think that election irregularities swinging the election is a tin-foil-hat idea.

And remember that evote hacking is just one of the ballot manipulations used this year, so evoting itself only "stole" part of the vote. Don't forget optical scan problems, defective/old machines in poor precinct, scrubbing the voter registrations, too few machines deployed, losing/misplacing ballots, etc....

We need to fix ALL the problems and unauditable evoting has the potential become the biggest.

The scanners are programmed just like the touchscreens. The only difference is that the scanners DO HAVE A PAPER TRAIL, the ballot that is fed into them to be scanned CAN BE HAND-COUNTED. That's why it's possible to check out New Hampshire, assuming nothing has been done to the paper trail by the reps from Diebold etc. who apparently are allowed to have free access to the voting sites and maybe even the votes themselves. I believe optical scanners have accounted for more changes in elections than the touchscreens have. Do you think Mondale lost MN in '02? He had a 5% pt lead in polls leading up to the election. The problem is that optical scanners are almost never recounted or audited. When the paper trail is mandated, there also needs to be mandated a REQUIRED AUDIT FOR EVERY ELECTION. That would mean maybe 5-10% of the precincts recounted, as chosen by a bi-partisan group and a few precincts randomly chosen. If problems are found, then the audit needs to be expanded, etc. If problems continue to be found, the whole state would be audited. I think CA has a required audit now, and it was used this year, maybe the reason CA showed a strong Kerry victory.

We all know machines w/o paper RIDICULOUS! Can't fathom why Americans are tolerating this bushit!

The key is in the program! The access to all vote machines can be opened with one F____g computer located in some remote hemisphere. Footprints have been located in Florida machines. Of course the VOTE MARGIN IS TOO LARGE! Cheaters are not going to leave room for speculation as to MARGINS!

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly. E-mail: tfiles@nytimes.com.