Lawsuit to stop the transmission of votes over telephone lines and/or the Internet.
by Bob Babson
We filed a lawsuit on July 14, 2008, asking the Court to order the Hawaii Chief Elections Officer to stop using telephone lines or the internet for transmitting ballot counts and election results for final tabulation until such time as administrative rules can be legally promulgated in accordance with Hawaii Administrative Law, Chapter 91, HRS, and all other laws can also be legally followed.
Hart InterCivic (Hart) of Austin, Texas, has the contract to conduct elections for the State of Hawaii. They write the software and design the hardware and it is top secret. No one can inspect it because it is "proprietary property." They claim the version they are using has been inspected by an independent testing agency (ITA) on the mainland. But we don't know if what they inspected is the same as what is actually used here in Hawaii. We must blindly trust them to be honest.
Each voting machine at the precincts has a memory card with votes on it. After the polls close on election day, the current procedure is to forward all memory cards to the county count center (8th floor of the Maui County Building for Maui) and hand them to the Hart technician who then "reads" them into the Hart tabulator (a laptop in 2006). The laptop is connected to a telephone line and the vote count files are then supposedly transmitted directly to the State count center using a wide area network (WAN). WAN's use the internet. We believe the transmission method is either by email with files attached or file transfer protocol (FTP).
Not only can outsiders hack into anything on the internet but we believe Hart itself, our election vendor, could actually transmit the files to a bogus remote email address or a remote website where the files could be flipped and immediately transmitted directly onto the State count center. Flipping votes means taking votes from one candidate and giving them to another. Since the total vote count remains the same, no one would know the difference. On top of all of this, the Office of Elections never manually counts the absentee ballots precinct (aka AB-Mail) because it is "too big." So there you have it. Hart could easily flip votes in the AB-Mail precinct and no one would ever know. AB-Mail is the biggest precinct in all four counties.
For the above reasons, we believe it is imperative to ban the use of any telephone or internet connections to any voting machines or tabulators used by any election vendor. Instead, the memory cards could easily be flown to the State Capitol and "read" directly into Hart's tabulator there. The polls close at 6 pm and the memory cards could be at the airport by 8 pm and arrive in Honolulu by 9 pm and driven to the State count center in plenty of time to tabulate the results by 11 pm which is the usual release time for the final votes in Hawaii elections. Memory cards from a few outlying precincts in the State might not get to Honolulu until the next day for the final, final vote results. But I believe the people of Hawaii would readily accept this knowing that it has removed the huge risk of flipping votes by flying them to Honolulu.
This lawsuit could have national implications, because most states do transmit their votes over telephone lines and the internet and are therefore vulnerable to the same vote flipping by election vendors as described above. Eighty percent of the votes counted in America are counted by just four election vendors: Hart InterCivic, Election Systems and Software, Diebold and Sequoia. It is hoped that voters and elected officials in all states will move in the direction of demanding and passing laws to ban the use of telephone lines and the internet for all election vendors in all 50 states.
Donations Needed
Our lawyer, Lance Collins, Esq., is representing us pro bono. However, we, the plaintiffs, have agreed to pay all court costs, sheriff fees, copies, postage, etc. If you would like to help support this worthy cause for Democracy (every vote counted accurately), please consider making a small donation, such as $25.00 or $50.00, to our lawyer to help with the court costs. Please make your check out to Lance D. Collins, Esq., and mail it to 2070 W. Vineyard, Suite 5, Wailuku, HI 96793-1618.
Reposted per Mr. Babson's request, lightly edited email.
As a Hawaii Republican voter, this is intriguing to me, as I'm always suspicious of voter fraud by the Democrats. With the exception of Linda Lingle, who turned out to be pretty much a Democrat anyway, a Republican stands about a snowballs's chance at the beach of getting elected. Could this perhaps be at least part of the reason?
More seriously though, have you ever considered the potential for subterfuge during the physical trip from the polling stations? Someone could have a pack of pre-determined cards ready to quickly substitute for the real thing. If someone really wants to cheat, they'll find a way. Fortunately, post-election fraud seems to be a pretty rare thing. Drumming up unqualified people to vote is another thing however, and that seems to be a practice much more common by the Democrats. (ACORN)
I think Hawaii has a pretty good system, with cards and card scanners. I do think there needs to be a physical record of a person's vote, a paper ballot card that can be used for verification, and touch-screens don't meet that important criteria. If by chance a Republican ever wins in Hawaii, you can always demand a hand recount, as you still have the original cards to work with.
Now, as one who is concerned with election integrity, perhaps you should be a little more concerned about fraudulent registration practices, and actually having to prove who you are before you vote. Hawaii does this, and the Democrats seem to do just fine.
by
Alan Williams (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 858 comments) on Sunday, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:53:14 AM
Yes it is true that the phone line issue is a bother- And that we need paper ballots- but we are off point as usual. The fact is there is no appropriate security when using proprietary code systems. This has been repeated ad nauseam- Now let's move towards solution- Some ( like poster Rady ) think waiting around for the secret machines to disappear is a good strategy. Others, like myself, would applaud that moment but attack on all levels- We say if you are using a computer, it can not be allowed to run on secret software. And of course you must always have a paper ballot- The machines should not store a count.
The fact that activists like Rady work to disempower our efforts for open source is sad and tragic, if not criminal. It raises questions about motivation and " who's behind the curtain ".
We must have a united activist front to break the current cartel. Please support paper ballot / open source systems- They will be demonstrated at LinuxWorld in San Francisco August 5-7th. Perhaps the HI officials can attend- Brent Turner
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Brent Turner (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 94 comments) on Monday, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:08:12 PM
Each scanner should have two or three memory cards that are written at the same time. Two of them could be retained at the local level and the other one sent to the state or where ever the total is tabulated. If there are questions the various copies of the cards and results could be compared.
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Anton Grambihler (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 314 comments [7 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Sunday, Jul 20, 2008 at 11:20:44 PM
The problem comes with the new Dibold touch screen voting machine. The results can be hacked and manipulated leaving no trace, therefore, whether there is one memory card, or 3, it will not matter if the vote count is compromised as it is being recorded...
The simplest solution is to continue using the system that works as opposed to one that does not. While I agree that there should be copies of the results in more than one place for side by side comparison, I disagree that we should be using the already unsecure voting machines being dumped on us through HAVA
Ciao, CZ
by
steve scheetz (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 831 comments [52 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Monday, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:14:24 AM
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