called me for info on this article, as he does frequently. This info has been out for nearly a year, and is in Chapter 6 of Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-6.pdf .
It is important that they are covering it.
At times I have called the
The New York Times on the carpet for basically acting as the personal publicist for three people in the movement, ignoring about 20 other groups who are doing groundbreaking work, and ignoring the experts in the field on HAVA, auditing, investigative reporting, and litigation.
The New York Times has got to get over dealing with this issue in terms of computer programming rather than auditing issues. And even if we get paper ballots, we have achieved nothing without proper auditing, which
isn't even on the table yet.
Many of the computer scientists: a) refuse to deal with the auditing issues at all and have weak expertise in writing legislation, but they do it anyway -- witness, Dr. David Dill attempting to help write legislation, omitting all meaningful audit procedures and calling it a "receipt" or a "trail" instead of a ballot -- though it has been pointed out to him a hundred times that the word "trail" has no legal definition and will therefore be meaningless in legislation; or b) We see computer scientists reinventing the auditing wheel over and over, using flawed models. Here's a concept: Ask people who actually understand auditing.
I recently spoke with Senator Patty Murray about this. I told her that upcoming congressional hearings need to bring in auditors and stop the overreliance on computer scientists, who have yet to get it right.
Why is it auditing, not certification or programming?
You mainly need to know if it is counting right. You could certify until the cows come home, but that still doesn't prove it counts right. Auditing forces you to "show your work" and prove that the count is correct.
You should see my e-mail. Dozens of ill-thought-out computer solutions, taking issue, of course, with the idea that we will argue this issue more effectively by concentrating on auditing, which would in turn give us paper ballots, meaningful USE OF the paper ballots to check the machines, and would give us several more checks and balances not used -- or even proposed by computerheads -- at this time.
We need:
To compare number of voters with votes cast. This will catch most kinds of stuffing or deleting votes from the electronic ballot box. (But it won't catch situations where a negative set of votes is used to balance the books; to catch that, you need a comparison of voter-verified paper ballots with the machine count on machines with stuffed ballot boxes).
To compare polling place tallies with central count tallies. This will catch substitutions or changes in the electronic ballot box done after the polling place closes, and diddling with the highly vulnerable central count tallies.
To compare voter verified paper ballots with the machine counts. This will catch dishonesty in the ballot definition, ie. the Sequoia flaw that allows the person creating the ballots to have the Spanish language and visually impaired ballots vote for someone else than it shows on the screen, and it will catch tampering with the machine tally by any means before or during the election.
To compare absentee ballots received by the post office with absentee ballots counted. This will catch tampering which removes strategic sets of absentee ballots before they reach the counting phase.
End of rant.
Bev