My letter to Harper's, not likely to be published, about fraudulent elections

After reading an interesting essay by the editor of Harper's (Roger Hodge) about the causes of the diseased body politic we have in America now at the beginning of the 21st century, I wrote the following letter, which I think probably has no chance of being published.


Letters
Harper’s Magazine
666 Broadway
New York NY 10012

Editors:

Roger Hodge in a polemic, “The Naughts,” decries the failure of the “social and political systems” that should have maintained the health of the Republic at the outset of the 21st century. He makes some stabs at finding the causes and raises a stirring call for the primacy of the individual writer’s conscience and a literature of honesty and intelligence. But nowhere does he mention a more mundane cause: the loss of our democracy as a result of the privatization of vote counting.

In case he may have been distracted by some of the throng of consequences resulting from having unelected leaders, let me remind him of something that is surely not difficult to understand: when the vote is counted in total secrecy by private companies without verification, using voting machines that are trivially easy to manipulate, hack, patch, or fraudulently program, especially by insiders, with almost no chance of detection, it is impossible to have a democracy. Impossible.

This loss of democracy should have been blindingly obvious in 02 in GA when Roy Barnes and Max Cleland lost with double-digit discrepancies between the pre-election polls that predicted their victory four days before the election and the alleged results. This was the first election to take place totally in cyberspace—no paper, no possibility of audit or recount. It was the epitome of a faith-based election, all Diebold touchscreens all the time and everywhere. And almost nobody, certainly not the mainstream media, appeared to notice. Mark Shields, I believe on The News Hour, made a glancing reference to Diebold’s counting of the GA vote, hinting it might have played a role in the totally unexpected outcome, but as far as I know he has never even mentioned it again.

The voting machine scam and con game may not be the direct cause Hodge seems to be probing for, but I think it’s safe to say that, until the accuracy of the vote count again becomes the highest priority in our country, none of the symptoms Hodge enumerates stands any chance of long-term improvement.

Stevepol

K&R.

August 18, 2008 in Technology

Planning to E-Vote? Read This First

With less than three months before the presidential election, the hotly contested state, Ohio, along with others, continue to have problems with E-voting technology

By Larry Greenemeier

from the article:

Suspecting problems with all of the e-voting technology that had so far cost Ohio $112 million, Brunner last year commissioned Project EVEREST, a comprehensive security review of the electronic voting technology used throughout Ohio, to identify any problems that might make elections vulnerable to tampering. During the 10-week project, teams of academic researchers from Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pennsylvania and WebWise Security (a security firm formed in 2005 by faculty and students from the University of California, Santa Barbara's security research group) examined DRE touch-screen and optical-scan voting systems from Premier,Election Systems and Software (ES&S) in Omaha, Neb., and Austin, Tex.–based Hart InterCivic as well as the software that manages these systems.

EVEREST researchers found exploitable security weaknesses in all three vendors' systems, Brunner said in a statement when the project concluded in December. "Many of these vulnerabilities represent practical threats to the integrity of elections as they are conducted in Ohio," she said. "We found vulnerabilities in different vendor systems that would, for example, allow voters and poll workers to place multiple votes, to infect the precinct with virus software or to corrupt previously cast votes—sometimes irrevocably."

"None of the systems out there are even remotely adequate given the importance of the data they handle," saysPatrick McDaniel, a Penn State professor of information security who led the EVEREST testing. A lot of the attacks that McDaniel and his team tested could be carried out at a polling place or county elections office in a matter of seconds. An example: when researchers placed a piece of white tape over part of an e-voting system's scanner, they were able to effectively block it from reading the entire ballot. In other words, a person could put the tape in a place that kept the system from counting votes for a particular candidate. The team also found that the keys to unlock Hart's ballot box could also be used to open the ballot boxes on the Premier systems.

-snip

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=electronic-election-day#comments