Since the voting machines are distributed throughout the jurisdiction days or weeks before the election, the last two findings put the entire election at risk.
H.R. 811 would provide over a billion dollars to add paper trails to existing electronic voting machines, and to buy new electronic voting machines. Does this make sense given the ease of attack?
Dan Rather Reports on HD.net showed Sequoia intentionally sabotaged the paper ballots sent to Palm Beach County in 2000 (and only to Palm Beach County). This explains the hanging chads. The program also reported on how ES&S has for years ignored the fact that the touch screens in their iVotronic voting machines often don't work properly. These are the machines used in Sarasota County, where there were 18,000 missing votes in a Congressional race. See Dan Rather Reports, Episode 227, " The Trouble with Touch Screens" or, for an indexed transcript of the one hour program, click here.
H.R. 811 originally mandated public disclosure of all the source code used in programming the election system with the vendors retaining proprietary rights. Due to heavy lobbying by Microsoft and others, the public's right was removed. Instead, only "qualified experts" would be able to see it after signing non-disclosure agreements. This would, for the first time, codify in law that our votes may be counted by secret code, code which we can not examine. As Teresa Hommel of WheresThePaper says:
"These paragraphs explicitly sell out American democracy to corporate commercial interests. The EAC and vendors, without other stakeholders such as states, parties, and citizens, will develop a process to protect private interests from public knowledge of how our elections are conducted."
The May 16 amendments also weakened the voter's right to request a paper ballot, if she didn't want to use an electronic voting machine.
The July 27 amendments move the dates back. Many of the other benefits which were to be in force for the 2008 election will only take effect in 2010 or 2012. With the amendments, a jurisdiction with paperless electronic voting machines will be able to buy paper trail printers for their electronic voting machines and use them until 2012.
It also removes the requirement that the paper used in the paper trail be "durable". This will allow flimsy paper which is unsuitable for recounts and audits.
It adds a requirement that voters not be required to handle a paper ballot.
There are no existing systems, either electronic or not, that meet the stated requirements for 2012. The one billion dollars appropriated in this bill may be spent on systems which must be replaced by 2012.
The bill assigns to the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) a host of new powers and responsibilities. This is an agency which has been rocked by scandals this year:
The EAC changed the text and conclusions of their consultant's report on voter fraud (voting twice, voting for dead people, etc.), and would not allow the authors to comment on the changes for months (A Rigged Report on U.S. Voting?).
The EAC suppressed their consultant's report on the effect of voter ID laws, until forced to reveal it.
The EAC refused to accredit Ciber Inc. to continue testing election systems due to lack of proof they did the required tests. However, the EAC did not tell reveal this, so that elections officials continued saying their systems were proven safe due to thorough testing by Ciber, which has certified systems used by about 70-80% of the voters nationally. The problem was revealed six months later in a New York Times article.
The EAC guidelines, against which systems are tested, contains a huge loophole that allows testers to pass a system even if it doesn't meet the EAC guidelines! (See section B.5 of Volume 2 of the Guidelines).
Do we really want to greatly increase the EAC's power and responsibilities?
Jerry Berkman has been active in the Election Integrity movement since the 2004 election. He helped organize the grassroots support for the campaign of Debra Bowen to be California Secretary of State.
Jerry retired in May, 2005 after working for 35 years as a computer programmer, the last 30 at the University of California, Berkeley.
He earned a Computer Security Certification from the SANS Institute in 2003, with a paper on Security Issues in Running an Email Server.
Do the ends justify the means? You decide. E-voting fun...
At the end of this post you can vote, many times, in the MoveOn poll if you are a member or not, though I don't necessarily say that you should. Just as a car gives you the ability to speed over the limit, though nobody say you have to.
I have agreed with much that MoveOn has done in the past. I dislike some of their stances against publishing articles that expose the fact that 9-11 was an inside job. Also the coverage of the widespread (yet mostly unprovable) electronic voter fraud issues in the 2004 elections was very dissappointing. It is my impression that overall, the people behind MoveOn are well-intentioned, but I hope that they follow the links in this article and take the criticisms to heart, because they are making a very serious mistake in supporting and advocating on behalf of this trojan horse that legitimizes secret source code to hide how votes are counted. Additionally the paper is used for recounts only occur when some small margin of victory allows the paper to be used. That condition can be avoided by undetectable vote counting fraud.
Anyway, I expose this simple HTTP URL exploit to help gain attention from Noah Winer and the MoveOn Political Action Committee, so that they can read the opposition arguments for themselves. I am sorry if this ruins any real polling that they want to do to see if members agree or dissagree, but because of the one-sided presentation of HR811, perhaps they don't really care about the informed decisions of their members as much as gaining consent to be a proponent for severely compromised voting "reform". Below is a link that submits a response of "No we should not support HR811, the Holt bill." You can click it repeatedly or perhaps better yet you can change the user ID represented by the seven sixes "6666666" in the URL.
If they get enough votes on the User ID "6666666" from a lot of different IP addresses, then these savvy web masters will easily know that lots of somebodies (or a web virus) are trying to tip the vote scales. If they have slightly more sophisticated controls (probably the other digits following the userID) then they will know that I am a very poor hacker and a bad boy for giving you this web link to abuse.
I am not making you click here or to copy the shortcut and change the "6666666" to other seven digit numbers, but if you do, we can hope that Noah and MoveOn take the time to track this to this web page. Maybe they may even see the errors in their ways.
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