Now, let's move on to the exit polls, and why they were so off of the outcome. As you probably know, exit polls are for when voters have finished their voting, and they are asked how they voted; exit polls are very reliable, but not in the 2004 election. However, they are considered so reliable that in November of 2004, exit polling made in the Ukraine, paid for by the Bush Administration, proofed fraud, and Viktor Yushchenko was denied the presidency.
That same month, when exit polls here showed amazing disparities in the US election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the polls treated it's very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their websites. They then substituted them with corrected numbers that had been weighted, retroactively to match the official vote count. "The people who ran the exit polling, and all of those of that are clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed," says Tom Brokaw, who served as an anchor for NBC News for the election. "They were really screwed up- the old models just don't work anymore; I would not go on- air with them again." (6)
The person that we need to worry the most is J. Kenneth Blackwell. He was the co-chair of Bush's re-election Committee, and he was the Secretary of State in Ohio. As Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell had authority to interpret and implement state laws regarding voter registration. In a ruling two weeks before the election, he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. A judge rebuked him for his actions, saying that he was trying to accomplish the same result as in Florida, 2000. Instead of welcoming the citizen's involvement, instead Blackwell permitted officials to purge their voter rolls. If a voter hadn't voted in two years, they were stripped of their registrations!
Those that were stripped of their registrations were sent certified letters. Many didn't respond; some were students that were away from, others didn't want to sign for something they weren't aware of, some were in the military, and people do move from place to place. These voters were to go to court to maintain that they were indeed who they said they were, and they wanted their right to vote back. The problem was that the court appearance time was sent to the previous address, and they were sent out impossibly late in the process.
To further his goal of winning Ohio for Bush, Blackwell incited an arcane law that stated that Ohio would only process registration forms if they were printed on eighty pound unwaxed white paperstock. Amazingly enough, Blackwell's own office didn't have these voter registrations, nor did anyone else, for that matter. Blackwell's directive clearly violated the Voting Rights Act, which states: No one may be denied the right to vote because of a registration error that is NOT material in determining whether such individual is qualified under state law to vote. Blackwell's directive was repealed, but the damage had already been done.
Repeated studies have shown that touch-screen machines, with no paper record of their ballots, are highly susceptible to tampering. The machines are eminently hackable, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. In a demonstration, conducted last year before the Board of Elections in Leon County, Florida, computer expert Herbert Thompson cracked into the voting machine in less than 60 seconds, altering the internal code and changing the vote count. (6)
Recently, Princeton University's study of a Diebold machine found ways to install disastrous viruses that can go undetected, and piggyback onto other machines, thus sabotaging the entire voting system. Even when this machine gave a receipt that stated the correct vote was received, when they went back into the machine with a voting card, the votes had been changed to the other party.
Here is the executive summary from Princeton's findings (7):
.
This paper reports on our study of an AccuVote-TS, which we obtained from a private party. We analyzed the machine's hardware and software, performed experiments on it, and considered whether real election practices would leave it suitably secure. We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.
Computer scientists have generally been skeptical of voting systems of this type, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), which are essentially general-purpose computers running specialized election software. Experience with computer systems of all kinds shows that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure the reliability and security of complex software or to detect and diagnose problems when they do occur. Yet DREs rely fundamentally on the correct and secure operation of complex software programs. Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.
Previous security studies of DREs affirm this skepticism, but to our knowledge, ours is the first public study encompassing the hardware and software of a widely used DRE. The famous paper by Kohno, Stubblefield, Rubin, and Wallach studied a leaked version of the source code for parts of the Diebold AccuVote-TS software and found many design errors and vulnerabilities, which are generally confirmed by our study. Our study extends theirs by including the machine's hardware and operational details, by finding and describing several new and serious vulnerabilities, and by building working demonstrations of several security attacks.
Main Findings
The main findings of our study are:
1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses - computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.
The details of our analysis appear in the full version of this paper [PDF]. One can see the demonstration of this serious problem at: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/videos.html
The only way to counteract this type of fraud, is to go back to paper ballots. The results may take longer, but at least they'll be precise, and what the people of America want. After doing research for this article, I have read of rampant voter fraud; it's everywhere, and it's the Republicans that are doing it. The one thing that really bothered me was the "manual mode" that has a button to push; then, one could "vote" as many times as they want, and the repercussions of that, alone, are enormous! It is time for us, as a nation, to stand up for our voting rights! We should receive a receipt for our votes, in case of yet another miscount, but what's better than just using paper ballots instead? Sure, it might take a week to find out who the winner, but at least we know he's the real winner! With so many crucial issues at stake right now, paper ballots are the only way for VOTERS to feel confident that they're votes have been counted, and not shredded, or given to their opponents.
1 www.onlisareinsradar.com/archives/000896.php
2 www.nightweed.com/usavotefacts
3 http://www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf
4 Popular Science- Online, 08/11/2006, Sorry, Your Vote Has Been: Lost, Hacked, Miscast, Recorded,
5 Congress of the United States- House of Representatives: Committee of the Judiciary. December 15, 2004
6 Rolling Stone Magazine; June 15, 2006
7. http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/summary.html
1 | 2
