Athan Gibbs had raised and spent in excess of $2 million developing and certifying his TruVote Voter Validation and Verification System, which was dedicated to verified counts and which provided two separate voting receipts. The Microsoft-backed system had been tested and certified by the National Association of State Election Directors, was approved for sale in Mississippi, Arkansas and Ohio, and was under review throughout the country, when Gibbs met an untimely demise. In March 2004, Gibbs was killed when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof.
Even if the big three of Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia, or some other company were to sell electronic voting machines with open code, it would hardly represent a satisfactory answer. While a big improvement over the current situation, open code is still vulnerable to hacking because it is unlikely that investigators could detect a single vote-altering line buried within a million lines of programming code. Even with open code, "Easter eggs" could easily change an election's outcome.
In a voting machine, such code would do nothing until Election Day, when it would change how votes were recorded. Such code could be loaded into a voting machine in many ways: in the voting software itself, in the tools that assemble the software (complier, liner and loader), or in the tools the program depends on (database, operating system scheduler, memory management and graphical-user-interface controller). Easter eggs could be activated by the real time clocks that are curiously mandated by HAVA for all new voting machines.
But the only way to consider election systems on their merits and demerits would be to somehow spur the public to action, a promethean task given a vacuous mass media, the Democrats reluctance to contest questionable election results, and an over-cautious class of professionals easily veered into comfortable, non-controversial pathways.
If massive evidence of a stolen presidential election is insufficient to even elicit barks from these watchdogs, then it's hard to imagine how a technical discussion on voting system merits will somehow do so. In my opinion, the best chance we have of seeing fair elections in this country is for independent journalists and voter activists to continue communicating the outrages of our current system, beginning with what transpired in the 2004 presidential election and carrying through to concerns about the critical elections of 2006 and 2008.
Sakin: If Democrats win big in the 2006 midterms, will voter integrity issues fall off the progressive's radar screen?
Freeman: Given what we have found about shortcomings in election integrity, I would be shocked if the Democrats win big no matter how unpopular the Republicans are.
I cannot say what will be on anyone's radar screen. Indeed, when I embarked on this investigation, I never in a million years would have imagined that massive, compelling evidence of a stolen presidential election could be treated so cavalierly.
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