Voice of the Voters: Transcript of Matt Blaze Interview

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By Mary Ann Gould (about the author) Page 4 of 4 page(s)

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MB: That’s right.

MAG: Okay. Is there anything else that our audience should know, and is there anything Congress should be aware of?

MB: Well, I think one of the things we need to recognize is that these voting machines, the DREs, and the systems that count the votes, and the optical scan systems, these are all computers. They don’t look like personal computers, they don’t have the same keyboard and the same display, but on the inside, they’re computers that run software, and they’re running very complex software that performs a specialized task that only gets tested out a few times a year, and may not be stress-tested in a hostile environment very often in its life at all. Now, writing software that’s correct and that’s secure is a very, very difficult problem. It’s really the fundamental problem that computer science has been grappling with and has not succeeded in solving for its whole history. So, building a secure voting system out of software is already a very difficult problem, because designing software itself is a hard problem. So scrutiny and skepticism are really the only safeguards we have here.

MAG: And what about for Congress? Do you think it is time they re-look at this?

MB: It’s a shame, and again, I’m speaking only for myself here.

MAG: Understood.

MB: It’s a shame that after the 2000 election, with the butterfly ballot and so on, there was a real national consensus that it was important to make voting more reliable. I think everyone agreed with this very important goal that we should modernize elections and make them as reliable as possible. Unfortunately, we really rushed into buying equipment everywhere in the country that really wasn’t ready, and I think the only way we are going to solve this problem is by recognizing that we’ve got to do a careful design. We’re going to be left with whatever equipment we buy, whatever systems are put in place, we’re going to have them for a while, and this is something our democracy vitally depends on, so this is worth doing right.

MAG: Well, I would invite all our listeners, in addition, to play a game. I found that your Vendor Excuse Bingo is absolutely ingenious and fantastic. Where could they find it?

MB: There’s a link to it on my blog. I should say, I don’t want to make light of this, because this is very, very serious; but an unfortunate property of vendors of software, whether it’s voting machines or web servers, who have had their software exposed to scrutiny and discovered that it’s not as secure as it should be is to deny and threaten and so on. So I’ve put together a little bingo game with some of the common vendor responses to these kinds of things that I think we’re likely to hear in the voting machine case, but we often hear in computing in general.

MAG: And that website is?

MB: The website is www.crypto.com/blog.

MAG: Well, I want to thank you.

MB: And I should also say, if I can just interrupt very quickly. Go to the source: the Secretary of State’s website in California has all of our reports. We tried to make them as readable as possible.

MAG: And you did an excellent job and I think you did a tremendous service for this country and thank you very much.

MB: Thank you.

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www.voiceofthevoters.org

Co-Founder of the Coalition for Voting Integrity. Host of "Voice of the Voters! Radio & Internet. Nationally recognized expert in Quality, Process improvement and Change Management. Associate of the late Dr. W, Edwards Deming. Speaker/seminars at (more...)

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