Moreover the federal government has now admitted (in the NIST report) that even with the most rigorous overhaul of the current DREs "they would not mitigate the threat of malicious code inserted by an insider at the voting machine company," (the so-called Trojan horse).
In addition to the above reports, there are a myriad of reputable studies from prestigious American Universities describing again and again how easily DREs and OS s have and can be rigged. The insecurities and vulnerabilities of the voting machines used by the American public have been exposed repeatedly by computer scientists.
3 Statistical experts from the University of California examined Florida's computer generated 'official' tally and found:
The data show with 99 percent certainty that a county's use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 200 and 2004. The counties with the most discrepancies in Florida were heavily democratic, as was also true across the country.
No matter how many factors and variable we took in to consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained.
– Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
4 Unfortunately the "reform" bill with the greatest support is Rush Holt's legislation which attempts to salvage the billions spent on these DRE-lemons by requiring that those DREs which are currently paperless, add on a "voter-verified audit trail" (VVAPT). Theoretically this paper could be audited, but in a 2005 study by the Caltech-MIT Voting Project which deliberately engineered VVPAT errors (switching votes, missing races) no one reported a VVPAT error. In fact a full third of the participants, when told there were errors planted, insisted there were none. See Bruce O'Dell's, Pull The Plug on E-voting, Parts I and II, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102606L.shtml, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/1027060.shtml .
Even if voters did check the paper receipt , the electronic software employed when the voter presses that touchscreen and the software that produces that paper trail are equally vulnerable to hacking. Researchers at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) recently released a study confirming that the software on these DREs could be programmed so that the electronic and paper records produced by the voting machine would agree--and both be wrong!
6 Robert Amhanson is a multi-millionaire who has used his fortune to promote radical right wing and Christian fundamentalist projects.
7 Chuck Hagel, who valued his investment in the McCarthy Group at up to $ 5 million, became chairman and CEO of AIS (now ES&S) in July 1992. While Hagel was running AIS, the company was building and programming the machines that would later count his senatorial votes. Hagel stepped down as chairman in late March 1995 and a few days laster announced his bid for the US Senate. (Hagel lied about his ownership in ES&S, failing to disclose his relationship and his obvious conflict of interest).
In 1996 the Washington Post said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election". Hagel was the first Republican to win a Senate seat in Nebraska in a quarter of a century. He won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities and Native American communities that had never before voted Republican.
Six years later Hagel ran against Democratic challenger Charlie Matulka and won in a landslide. His website says he "was reelected to his second term in the United States Senate ...with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska." The website failed to mention that about 80% of those votes that put him in office were counted by computer-controlled voting machines, built and programmed by his company.
This is an incredibly complete and very readable article. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to be brought up to date on that debacle which is HAVA.
Nice work, Andi!
Joan Brunwasser, voting integrity editor, OpEdNews
by
Joan Brunwasser (172 articles, 3587 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 674 comments)
on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 at 6:56:14 PM
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